2.5-year-olds succeed in identity and location elicited-response false-belief tasks with adequate response practice

Abstract

Researchers have argued that traditional elicited-response false-belief tasks involve considerable processing demands and hence underestimate children's false-belief understanding. Consistent with this claim, Setoh et al. (2016) recently found that when processing demands were sufficiently reduced, children could succeed in an elicited-response task as early as 2.5 years of age. Here we examined whether 2.5-year-olds could also succeed in a low-demand elicitedresponse task involving false beliefs about identity, which have been argued to provide a critical test of whether children truly represent beliefs, while also clarifying how the practice trials in Setoh et al.'s task facilitated children's elicited-response performance. 2.5-year-olds were tested in a version of Setoh et al.'s elicited-response task in which they heard a location or identity false-belief story. We varied whether the practice trials had the same type of wh-question as the test trial. Children who heard the same type of wh-question on all trials succeeded regardless of which story they heard (location or identity) and performance did not differ across belief type. This replicates Setoh et al.'s positive results and demonstrates that when processing demands are sufficiently reduced, children can succeed in elicited-response tasks involving false beliefs about object location or identity. This suggests that children are capable of attributing genuine false beliefs prior to age 4. However, children performed at chance if the practice trials involved a different type of wh-question than the test trials, suggesting that at this age, practice with the whquestion used in the test trial is essential to children's success.

Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Can Attribute False Beliefs in a Spontaneous-Response Preferential-Looking Task

“…Our results suggest that children with ASD can understand others' false beliefs when cognitive demands are sufficiently reduced, but their false-belief processing unfolds more slowly than in TD children. Our findings are thus broadly consistent with recent evidence demonstrating that task demands impact false-belief performance (Rubio-Fernández and Geurts, 2013;Chevallier et al, 2014;Setoh et al, 2016;Carlsson et al, 2018;Bialecka-Pikul et al, 2019;Psouni et al, 2019;Salter and Breheny, 2019;Scott et al, 2020). More generally, this study offers a promising new paradigm exploring social cognitive processing in children with ASD.…”

“…First, reducing the demands of elicited-response tasks enables TD children to pass at younger ages (e.g., Chandler et al, 1989;Lewis and Osborne, 1990;Bartsch, 1996;Rubio-Fernández and Geurts, 2013;Bialecka-Pikul et al, 2019;Psouni et al, 2019;Salter and Breheny, 2019). In particular, several recent studies have found that even 2.5-years-olds can pass elicited-response tasks when both the response-generation and response-inhibition demands are sufficiently reduced (Setoh et al, 2016;Grosso et al, 2019;Scott et al, 2020).…”

A new rationalist account of the development of false-belief understanding

“…This proved enough to raise two-and-a-half-year-olds above-chance, an unprecedented result at the time. Importantly, this finding has since been replicated (Grosso et al, 2019;Kaltefleiter et al, 2021) and extended (Scott et al, 2020).…”

“…What about response-generation practice trials? These are likely to have helped by facilitating, through either priming or automatization, response-generation processes, including both processing the test question and selecting a response (Scott et al, 2020). Notably, although priming and automatization may result in lower processing-demands, they are also known to result in faster processing.…”