Development Of False Belief Understanding Research Articles

The development of false belief understanding in Indian Children: A preliminary report

Background: Development of false belief understanding is considered a universal phenomenon. However cross-cultural research on Theory of Mind is relatively recent and raises doubt on its universal development. There is paucity of empirical research on false belief understanding from India. The aim of the present study was to examine false belief understanding in Indian children. Method: The study sample consisted of 77 typically developing children between the age range of 3 and 7 years (mean age of 5 years). Tools consisted of semi-structured interview schedule, Binet Kamat Test of Intelligence and Theory of Mind task (false belief task). Results: Findings of the present study indicated that none of the 3-year-old children could pass the first order false belief task and only 12% of 4 years old could pass first order false belief task. Fifty percent of 5 years old, 73% of 6 years old and all of the 7 years old passed the false belief task. Results in our study have suggested delayed developmental trajectory in false belief understanding. Conclusion: We found that Indian children attained understanding of first order false belief relatively late in comparison to their peer as reported from other studies. Our study showed that mastery in the understanding of false belief develops at 6 to 7 years. Lower performance on false belief task may not necessarily imply neurocognitive impairment. Our findings support the view that both cultural as well as individual factors play an important role in the development of Theory of Mind.

The missing explanation of the false-belief advantage in bilingual children: a longitudinal study.

Bilingual preschoolers often perform better than monolingual children on false-belief understanding. It has been hypothesized that this is due to their enhanced executive function skills, although this relationship has rarely been tested or supported. The current longitudinal study tested whether metalinguistic awareness was responsible for this advantage. Further, we examined the contributions of both executive functioning and language ability to false-belief understanding by including multiple measures of both. Seventy-eight children (n = 40 Spanish-English bilingual; age M = 49.29, SD = 7.38 and, n = 38 English monolingual; age M = 47.75, SD = 6.86) were tested. A year later the children were tested again (n = 22 bilingual, n = 25 monolingual). The results indicated that language and executive function (inhibitory control) at time 1 were related to false belief in monolinguals at time 2. In contrast, bilinguals' metalinguistic performance at time 1 was the sole predictor of false belief at time 2. The different linguistic and cognitive profiles of monolinguals and bilinguals may create different pathways for their development of false-belief understanding. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/vILn2gKjFxw.

Family Correlates of False Belief Understanding in Early Childhood: A Meta-Analysis.

This meta-analysis seeks to integrate findings from 25years of research on family correlates of young children's false belief understanding (FBU). Using data from 93 studies of 3- to 7-year-old children, we examined the correlations between FBU and four of the most widely studied family factors: parental socioeconomic status, number of siblings, parental mental-state talk, and mind-mindedness. FBU exhibited modest associations with each family variable and these associations held even when individual differences in verbal ability were taken into account. Moderator analyses revealed key child-related factors (e.g., age, gender) as well as methodological factors that amplified or attenuated the relations between FBU and each family variable. Crucially, available longitudinal data highlight the importance of family factors in the development of FBU.

Narratives, culture, and folk psychology

In this paper, I aim to determine to what extent contemporary cross-cultural and developmental research can shed light on the role that narrative practices might play in the development of folk psychology. In particular, I focus on the role of narrative practices in the development of false belief understanding, which has been regarded as a milestone in the development of folk psychology. Second, I aim to discuss possible cognitive procedures that may underlie successful performance in false belief tasks. Methodologically, I distinguish between two kinds of narrative practices: ‘mentalistic narrative practice’ (which involves an explicit reference to another person’s mental states), and ‘behavioral-contextual narrative practice’ (which involves an explicit reference to the (normative) behavior of another person in a specific socio-situational context). Whereas the former is more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures, the latter is predominantly used by members of Eastern cultures. Mentalistic narrative practices correlate with cultural divergences in the development of false belief understanding throughout ontogeny but do not seem to play the key role. The analysis shows that (i) conceptual change and the acquisition of mental state terms is essential for passing the false belief task, and that (ii) theory is likely to be the cognitive mechanism involved here such as proposed by Theory Theory. However, Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis trumps over Theory Theory to account for the varieties and ambiguities people typically meet when understanding each other in everyday life.

Fostering theory of mind development. Short- and medium-term effects of training false belief understanding / Favorecer el desarrollo de la teoría de la mente. Efectos a corto y medio plazo de un entrenamiento en comprensión de la falsa creencia

This study examines the temporal effect of different trainings designed to favour the development of false belief understanding. A sample of 78 pre-school children aged between three years, five months and three years, 11 months was divided into three training conditions. After three training sessions, they were immediately evaluated in post-test 1 and again a month and a half later in post-test 2. The results showed that the efficiency of the training conditions depended both on the type of linguistic communication and on the use of deceptive objects. Also, the effect of the training was maintained for at least a month and a half after post-test 1 and it was transferred from the trained task to other false belief tasks. The results are commented according to the possibility of using language-based trainings to foster children’s theory of mind understanding in educational contexts.

Labelling Improves False Belief Understanding. A Training Study

A total of 104 children aged between 41 and 47 months were selected to study the relationship between language and false belief understanding. Participants were assigned to four different training conditions: discourse, labelling, control (all with deceptive objects), and sentential complements (involving non-deceptive objects). Post-test results showed an improvement in children's false belief understanding in the discourse and the labelling conditions, but not in the sentential complements with non-deceptive objects or the control group. Furthermore, the most remarkable improvement in false belief understanding occurred in the labelling group. These results suggest that some types of linguistic experience promote the development of false belief understanding, provided that differing perspectives are confronted.

Synchrony in the onset of mental state understanding across cultures? A study among children in Samoa

The development of false belief understanding in Samoa was investigated in two studies testing more than 300 children. Children’s understanding was assessed with a change of location task. The results of study 1 suggest that Samoan children improve gradually and slowly, with no succeeding majority before 8 years of age. One third of the 10–13-year-olds still failed. Study 2 used a different translation among 55 children from 4–8 years of age and supports the former results. These findings speak for the cultural variability of theory of mind development and provide the first cross-cultural continuous survey on false belief understanding of children older than 5 years of age with a large sample in a place where mental states are no suitable object for conjecture.

An association account of false belief understanding

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young infants already understand false belief, then why do they fail the elicited-response false belief task? We postulate two systems to account for the development of false belief understanding: an association module, which provides infants with the capacity to register congruent associations between agents and objects, and an operating system, which allows them to transform these associations into incongruent associations through a process of inhibition, selection and representation. The interaction between the association module and the operating system enables infants to register increasingly complex associations on the basis of another agent’s movements, visual perspective and propositional attitudes. This allows us account for the full range of findings on false belief understanding.

The Development of Theory of Mind Reasoning in Micronesian Children

AbstractIn this study, the development of false-belief understanding was investigated among 3–5-year-old Yapese and Fais children in Micronesia. Sixty-nine children took part in an experiment investigating their understanding of false belief with a culturally adjusted surprise content task, which has been widely used in Theory of Mind (ToM) research and was first introduced by Hogrefe, Wimmer and Perner (1986). The results show that as in western cultures, 3-year-old Micronesian preschoolers do not display understanding of false belief measured with classical false-belief tasks, while 5-year-olds do. These findings contribute to research on the universality and cultural variability of cognitive development in preschool age children.

The development of false-belief understanding in Japanese children: Delay and difference?

Three experiments investigated the development of Japanese children’s false-belief understanding. In Experiment 1, children’s mastery of two standard false-belief tasks was considerably later and slower than typically reported, with the full development between 6 and 7 years. Experiments 2 and 3 tested Japanese 6-to 8-year-olds on interpersonal transfer tasks where a relocated item was a person who changed locations with and without their own intention. Children’s judgments on the main character’s belief about this person’s whereabouts were not influenced by the protagonists’ different mental states included in the tasks; children’s justifications referred not to the people’s belief or desire but primarily to their behaviors and social rules. Results suggest that Japanese children show not only a delay in false-belief understanding but a cultural difference in reasoning about human action as attributing it to behavioral and situational cues, rather than to individuals’ mental states.

Case Studies of Sentence Complement Training and False Belief Performance

It has been hypothesized that sentence complement comprehension is a prerequisite for the development of false belief understanding in young children. Previous research has suggested that training on sentence complements leads to improved false belief performance. This study used a case study design to investigate the effect of sentence complement training on false belief for 2 children. One was a 3-year-old twin girl with typical language development; her twin sister was included, without training, for comparison. The second child was a 3-year-old girl with an expressive language delay. The twins demonstrated sentence complement mastery from the outset of the study, but did not display full competence with false belief. The child with a language delay improved markedly in comprehen- sion of sentence complements but consistently failed false belief tasks. The results suggest that although sentence complement comprehension may play a role in false belief development, the relationship between the two may not be as close as has been suggested.

The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: a training study.

The current study used a training methodology to determine whether different kinds of linguistic interaction play a causal role in children's development of false belief understanding. After 3 training sessions, 3-year-old children improved their false belief understanding both in a training condition involving perspective-shifting discourse about deceptive objects (without mental state terms) and in a condition in which sentential complement syntax was used (without deceptive objects). Children did not improve in a condition in which they were exposed to deceptive objects without accompanying language. Children showed most improvement in a condition using both perspective-shifting discourse and sentential complement syntax, suggesting that each of these types of linguistic experience plays an independent role in the ontogeny of false belief understanding.

A Longitudinal Study of Mother‐Child Relationships and Theory of Mind in the Preschool Period

To investigate individual differences in theory of mind acquisition, this study examined whether different aspects of early mother‐child relationships contributed to the development of false belief understanding at the close of the preschool period. Forty‐six mother and child pairs were seen when children were two and again at five years of age. At age two, home‐based Q‐sort observations of attachment security and maternal sensitivity were made, and mothers completed a number of self‐report measures to create an aggregate of maternal emotional distress. At age five, attachment security and maternal distress were reassessed, and false belief tasks were administered that were based on unexpected identities and locations of objects. In addition, attachment‐relevant false belief tasks involving separation from caregivers were also used, which children found significantly more difficult than tasks involving objects. Age five security predicted object location task performance. Maternal sensitivity and emotional distress at age two predicted later caregiver location task performance, even controlling for age five measures. These results support a growing literature on the importance of relationship processes and parenting context to theory of mind acquisition.

Working memory and children's developing understanding of mind

Recent work on the mechanisms underlying children's developing theories of mind have identified information-processing capacity as a factor that contributes to children's developing understanding of false belief (Davis & Pratt, 1995). One hundred children 3 to 5 years of age were given a set of false belief tasks and a measure of working memory. A major goal of the study was to replicate the findings of Davis and Pratt using a wider set of false belief tasks and a different measure of working memory. The present study tested the hypothesis that working memory would predict children's performance on the false belief tasks. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, when the effects of age were controlled for, working memory accounted for 7.4% of the variance in children's false belief scores. The findings support those of Davis and Pratt, and extend them through the use of another measure of working memory. It is concluded that, while the findings indicate a role for working memory in the development of false belief understanding, it is the case that working memory is only one of a number of factors that underlie the development of children's theories of mind.

Computers and ‘The Mind’: An Intervention Study

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between computer use and the development of social metacognition in young children by using an intervention design. Fifty-nine preschool children were given three false-belief tasks, and the results showed a significant and positive correlation between computer use and false-belief understanding. The children were then put into one of three groups. Those who did not have a computer at home and failed the false-belief tasks were matched on birth-order and number of siblings and put into either an intervention or control group. All of the other children formed an age-comparison group. Children in the intervention group were provided with a home computer for a period of two and one-half months and then both this group and the controls were re-tested on the false-belief tasks. The controls then received the computers for a period of six weeks, and both groups were again re-tested. Children in the intervention group did not make greater gains on false-belief tasks when compared with the controls. Analysis of the computer time-interval data showed that gains for both groups were associated with the average interaction time, which probably represents interactive quality. This suggests that it is the communicational requirements of computer interaction that may foster the development of false-belief understanding in young children.