Removing shared information improves 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance on a change-of-location explicit false belief task

Abstract

The classic change-of-location explicit false belief task ends with a test question of the form “Where will the [agent] look for the [object]?” It has been proposed that by including mention of the target object, the question creates unwanted attention to the actual object location. A standard explanation is that children are biased to answer according to their own knowledge of reality. We proposed that mention of the target object brings attention to the reality location via memory-based processes that are biased to retrieve previous shared information. We manipulated whether the experimenter who asked the test question had witnessed the change of location with the children. For the experimental group (age range = 3.00–4.17 years, Mage = 3.61 years, SD = 0.36), a second experimenter took the place of the first after the object location was changed. Performance was compared with a control group (age range = 3.00–4.25 years, Mage = 3.66 years, SD = 0.34) in which one experimenter conducted the whole procedure. Participants also undertook the Bear/Dragon task, a test of conflict inhibitory control. In the control group, 6 of 19 children (32%) passed, similar to previous results. In the experimental group, 12 of 19 (63%) passed. The groups did not differ significantly on their inhibitory control scores, and a logistic regression analysis revealed that only condition significantly predicted performance. We conclude that a bias toward shared information is a relevant factor in understanding children’s difficulty with the standard test question used in the change-of-location explicit false belief task.