Abstract
Appearance-reality (AR) distinction understanding in preschoolers is worth of further consideration. This also goes for its relationship with false-belief (FB) understanding. This study helped fill these gaps by assessing 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children’s performances on an appearance-reality distinction task and by investigating relationships with unexpected location, deceptive content, and deception comprehension task performances. 91 preschoolers participated in this study divided into 3 groups: (1) 37 children, M-age 3.4 years; (2) 23 children, M-age 4.5 years; (3) 31 children, M-age 5.4 years. A developmental trend was found where appearance-reality distinction understanding was significantly influenced by age. If wrong answers were particularly high by 3-year-old children, they greatly decreased by 4- and 5-year-old children. 3-year-old children also tended to fail in FB tasks; instead 4- and 5-year-old children performed AR tasks better than FB tasks. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.
Highlights
Appearance-reality (AR) distinction understanding in preschoolers is worth of further consideration
If wrong answers were high by 3-year-old children, they greatly decreased by 4- and 5-year-old children. 3-year-old children tended to fail in FB tasks; instead 4- and 5-year-old children performed AR tasks better than FB tasks
Our first hypothesis was confirmed, since children’s answers are distributed in a significantly different way in relation to age: there is a tendency for which the wrong answers, high at 3 years, greatly decrease towards 4 years
Summary
Appearance-reality (AR) distinction understanding in preschoolers is worth of further consideration. Children’s ToM defines both awareness of their own mental states (i.e., thought, decision, knowledge, and belief) and the fact that people may have different representations of the world and act on the basis of them [1] This ability allows one to explain and predict people’s behavior [5,6,7]. An experimental paradigm to investigate children’s appearance-reality understanding was introduced and developed by Flavell et al [14] In this experiment, the researcher shows the participant a sponge that looks like a stone. Children who understand the distinction between appearance and reality have an awareness of the real nature of the object; they distinguish their representation of reality from that held by others, and they predict that others could be deceived by it This implies the comprehension of the existence of false belief [18]
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