From infants’ to children's appreciation of belief

Abstract

Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to people's false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding. We defend the view that early sensitivity to false beliefs shown in ‘online tasks’ (where engagement with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will happen without a judgement that it will happen) reflects implicit/unconscious social knowledge of lawful regularities. The traditional false belief task requires explicit consideration of the agent's subjective perspective on his reasons for action. This requires an intentional switch of perspectives not possible before 4 years of age as evidenced by correlations between the false belief task and many different perspective-taking tasks.

Preschoolers understand the normativity of cooperatively structured competition

“…When facing a rule-breaking opponent, 3-year-olds focused on the rule breach more for an irrational versus rational opponent. This suggests that very young children might not be able to focus on more than one aspect of competitive games at a time and, thus, do not experience the joint activity as a coherent whole, which might be due to their limited ability to coordinate different perspectives regarding the same state of affairs or their deficiency in executive function skills (Garon et al, 2008;Perner & Roessler, 2012;Perner et al, 2005;Priewasser et al, 2013). The lack of protest against rule breaches of a rational opponent is somewhat surprising given evidence that young children enforce constitutive rules in a variety of contexts (e.g., ; however, in these purely cooperative game contexts, children need only focus on one perspective (the rules) and not on multiple perspectives as in the current experiment.…”

“…That is why we introduced two towers, a communal tower and the puppet's tower, from which the child could take disks (in contrast to a bowl vs. a tower as in Priewasser et al's game), and we included a warm-up session in which children could take disks from the puppet's tower in a cooperative game context. Given Priewasser and colleagues' finding that false belief task performance was positively correlated with children's tendency to make strategic moves, we expected 5-year-olds (who typically pass false belief tasks; Perner & Roessler, 2012) to profit more from these procedural modifications than 3-year-olds, thereby predominantly acting strategically.…”

“…Priewasser and colleagues (2013) argued, however, that children in these tasks do not need to simultaneously represent opposing (subjective) goals in interrelated ways (e.g., that someone's goal pursuit is at the same time detrimental to another's goal accomplishment) but might merely understand another's goal as different from, but unrelated to, their own goal. More generally, on the ''symmetry account" (Perner & Roessler, 2012;Perner, Zauner, & Sprung, 2005), understanding subjective conative and epistemic states requires the (domain-) general capacity to understand conflicting perspectives regarding the same state of affairs, which is not present in children under 4 years of age (who, thus, are thought to be unable to understand why two players in a competitive game act the way they do when pursuing opposing goals; Perner & Esken, in press;Perner & Roessler, 2010). On the ''asymmetry account" (Rakoczy, 2010;Rakoczy et al, 2007;Wellman, 1990), however, children come to understand subjective conative states earlier (at around 3 years of age) than subjective epistemic states.…”

“…Because children's executive function skills improve considerably between 3 and 5 years of age (Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008;Zelazo & Müller, 2002), and because competitive games require vigilance about both constitutive rules and the opponent's game-playing strategy at the same time, it is plausible to assume that 5-year-olds might show a fuller understanding of competitive games than 3-year-olds who often have difficulty in coordinating different perspectives regarding the same state of affairs (Perner & Roessler, 2012;Perner et al, 2005;Priewasser et al, 2013). Therefore, a comparison of 3-and 5-year-olds' understanding of the normative aspects of competitive games would be instructive.…”

Children’s understanding of the costs and rewards underlying rational action

“…Such non-mentalist inferences may indeed underlie some successes at social cognition very early in infancy (e.g., Skerry, Carey, & Spelke, 2013;Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005). Researchers have similarly proposed that early studies of theory of mind (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Southgate, Senju & Csibra, 2007;Southgate, Chevallier & Csibra, 2010) rely on implicit knowledge distinct from the explicit representations that emerge later in development (e.g., Perner & Roessler, 2012. ) However, some aspects of the naïve utility calculus might require representations more sophisticated even than many tasks that clearly do require explicit theory of mind.…”