An Associationist Bias Explains Different Processing Demands for Toddlers in Different Traditional False-Belief Tasks

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

“… Baillargeon et al (2010 , p. 110) concluded that “false-belief understanding provides evidence for a sophisticated (and possibly uniquely human) ability to consider the information available to an agent when interpreting and predicting the agent’s actions – even if this information is inaccurate and incompatible with one’s own.” According to this rich view, infants and young children fail the traditional explicit ToM tasks because these tasks are heavily based on language abilities and executive functions, rather than due to an undeveloped ToM ( Baillargeon et al, 2010 ; Setoh et al, 2016 ; Scott, 2017 ). This “processing-demands” account argues that, in explicit tasks, children must first select the correct response (response-selection process), inhibit the response of the actual location of the object (response-inhibition process), as well as remembering the agent’s false belief (working memory; but see Rubio-Fernández et al, 2017 and Fenici and Garofoli, 2020 for arguments challenging this view). Others have suggested that a verbal false-belief task involves a complex interplay between executive decision-making, the language faculty, and mind reading ( Carruthers, 2013 ), whereas others argue that such task requires well-developed pragmatic skills because there will generally be three interpretations of the question that are activated, competing to control the answer.…”