Children's theory of mind: Fodor's heuristics examined

Abstract

The study reported in this manuscript examined Fodor's (1992) argument that standard false belief tasks used in developmental research seriously underestimate young children's understanding of false belief. The problem of these tasks according to Fodor is that always a unique, actual state of affairs (e.g., chocolate is now in cupboard B) is contrasted with a believed state of affairs (e.g., chocolate is still in cupboard A). Fodor argued that this uniqueness feature may be critical because young children with limited computational resources have to trade reliability of behavioral prediction for computational simplicity and, therefore, may rely on simple heuristics such as “Predict that the agent will act in a way that will satisfy his desires”. In the standard false belief task such a heuristic will result in a unique, but incorrect (reality-based) prediction. Fodor's expectation is that when young children are not misled into applying such heuristics by the possibility of unique, reality-based prediction, then their true competence for belief-based reasoning will become evident. The present study contrasted for two different belief tasks a traditional unique version with a non-unique version, but found no support for Fodor's expectation as both 3- and 4-year-old children did not improve in the non-unique version.