Preschoolers' explanations of actions based on past realities and false beliefs

Abstract

We explored preschoolers' ability to explain actions that were motivated by two different phenomena: false beliefs and past realities. While both contexts were identical with respect to their explanatory requirements, only the falsebelief context required children to understand that a mis-representation was the basis of the action. Results revealed that children were significantly more competent at explaining actions in the past-reality context than the false-belief context. Even so, 3-year-olds experienced some difficulty with the past-reality context signalling a more fundamental limitation generating explanations in light of an unexpected change. These findings have implications for the debate surrounding children's false-belief-based predictions versus explanations, and explanatory capacity more broadly during the preschool years.

Young children’s causal explanations are biased by post-action associative information.

“…Finally, using a paradigm aimed at assessing children’s ability to explain actions that were based on a past false belief, Atance and O’Neill (2004; see also, Atance, Metcalf, & Zuijdwijk, 2012; Bartsch, Campbell, & Troseth, 2007) showed children a crayon box and asked them to state what was inside. Once children responded “crayons,” they were asked to get some paper (that had been placed nearby) to draw on with the crayons.…”