Online Testing Yields the Same Results as Lab Testing: A Validation Study With the False Belief Task

Schidelko, Lydia Paulin; Schünemann, Britta; Rakoczy, Hannes; Proft, Marina

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703238

Cited by 35 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The final moderator we consider is participants' age. Online developmental studies have sampled from a wide age range, including infants (e.g., Dillon, Izard, & Spelke, 2020), CONDUCTING DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH ONLINE 6 toddlers (e.g., Lo, Rosslund, Chai, Mayor, & Kartushina, 2021), preschoolers (e.g., Schidelko, Schünemann, Rakoczy, & Proft, 2021), and elementary schoolers (e.g., Chuey, Lockhart, Sheskin, & Keil, 2020;Chuey, McCarthy, et al, 2021). Because online studies are often conducted in the comfort of their own homes, it is possible that children of all ages might benefit from this aspect of online studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conducting developmental research online vs. in-person: A meta-analysis

Chuey¹,

Boyce

Cao³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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An increasing number of psychological experiments with children are being conducted using online platforms, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual replications have compared the findings of particular experiments online and in-person, but the general effect of online data collection on data collected from children is still unknown. Therefore, the current meta-analysis examines how the effect sizes of developmental studies conducted online compare to the same studies conducted in-person. Our pre-registered analysis includes 145 effect sizes calculated from 24 papers with 2440 children, ranging in age from four months to six years. We examined several moderators of the effect of online testing, including the role of dependent measure (looking vs verbal), online study method (moderated vs unmoderated), and age. The mean effect size of studies conducted in-person (d = .68) was slightly larger than the mean effect size of their counterparts conducted online (d = .54), but this difference was not significant. Additionally, we found no significant moderating effect of dependent measure, online study method, or age. Overall, the results of the current meta-analysis suggest developmental data collected online are generally comparable to data collected in-person.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conducting developmental research online vs. in-person: A meta-analysis

Chuey¹,

Boyce

Cao³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The tasks were embedded in a video, which was displayed via the conference platform in the middle of the child’s screen and required the child to give verbal answers. Next to the video, the child was constantly able to see the webcam video of E and herself, so that the child and E were able to communicate via audio and video streaming during the whole test session ( see [ 7 ] for a validation study of this paradigm). Before the beginning of the test session, the caretaker gave verbal consent to the child’s participation in the study and the video and audio recording during the test session.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, however, the TB condition has been administered to a broader age range of children, with quite puzzling results: with age, children get worse in the TB condition. More specifically, children from age four who begin to solve the FB task start to fail the TB task [ 4 – 7 ]. The initial pattern found in younger children–passing the TB condition while failing the FB condition–reverses around this age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do children overcome their pragmatic performance problems in the true belief task? The role of advanced pragmatics and higher-order theory of mind

2022

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The true belief (TB) control condition of the classical location-change task asks children to ascribe a veridical belief to an agent to predict her action (analog to the false belief (FB) condition to test Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities). Studies that administered TB tasks to a broad age range of children yielded surprising findings of a U-shaped performance curve in this seemingly trivial task. Children before age four perform competently in the TB condition. Children who begin to solve the FB condition at age four, however, fail the TB condition and only from around age 10, children succeed again. New evidence suggests that the decline in performance around age four reflects pragmatic confusions caused by the triviality of the task rather than real competence deficits in ToM. Based on these results, it can be hypothesized that the recovery of performance at the end of the U-shaped curve reflects underlying developments in children’s growing pragmatic awareness. The aim of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test whether the developmental change at the end of the U-shaped performance curve can be explained by changes in children’s pragmatic understanding and by more general underlying developmental changes in recursive ToM or recursive thinking in general. Results from Study 1 (N = 81, 6–10 years) suggest that children’s recursive ToM, but not their advanced pragmatic understanding or general recursive thinking abilities predict their TB performance. However, this relationship could not be replicated in Study 2 (N = 87, 6–10 years) and Study 3 (N = 64, 6–10 years) in which neither recursive ToM nor advanced pragmatic understanding or recursive thinking explained children’s performance in the TB task. The studies therefore remain inconclusive regarding explanations for the end of the U-shaped performance curve. Future research needs to investigate potential pragmatic and general cognitive foundations of this developmental change more thoroughly.

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“…Children who begin to solve the FB task suddenly start to fail the TB task. From age 4 to roughly age 10, then, they systematically answer the TB question incorrectly (predicting that Maxi will erroneously look in the old location; Friedman et al, 2003;Fabricius et al, 2010;Oktay-Gür and Rakoczy, 2017;Rakoczy and Oktay-Gür, 2020;Schidelko et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do Children Who Solve False Belief Tasks Begin to Find True Belief Control Tasks Difficult? A Test of Pragmatic Performance Factors in Theory of Mind Tasks

et al. 2022

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The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

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Online Testing Yields the Same Results as Lab Testing: A Validation Study With the False Belief Task

Cited by 35 publications

References 19 publications

Conducting developmental research online vs. in-person: A meta-analysis

Conducting developmental research online vs. in-person: A meta-analysis

How do children overcome their pragmatic performance problems in the true belief task? The role of advanced pragmatics and higher-order theory of mind

Why Do Children Who Solve False Belief Tasks Begin to Find True Belief Control Tasks Difficult? A Test of Pragmatic Performance Factors in Theory of Mind Tasks

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