Normal and autistic children's understanding of their own and others' false belief: A study from Japan

Abstract

Autistic children and normal Japanese 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds were tested on their understanding of changes in their own belief and that of others' false belief using three kinds of deceptive appearance tasks. In each task, an object was shown to children in its deceptive appearance form, and then they found the true nature of the object by either seeing, lifting, or tasting it. Children were asked to remember their own misled expectation about the object and to predict another person's false belief. Regardless of the difference in task materials, normal children showed substantial improvement in the understanding of their own and others' false belief between ages 3 and 5. In contrast, most autistic children failed to predict another person's false belief, while they succeeded in remembering their own previous false belief. These results suggest that autistic children have specific difficulty in understanding other people's false belief. The implications of the findings for developmental processes involved in belief understanding are also discussed from a cross‐cultural perspective.