The relationship between parental mental-state language and 2.5-year-olds’ performance on a nontraditional false-belief task

Abstract

A growing body of evidence suggests that children succeed in nontraditional false-belief tasks in the first years of life. However, few studies have examined individual differences in infants' and toddlers' performance on these tasks. Here we investigated whether parental use of mental-state language (i.e. think, understand), which predicts children's performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks at older ages, also predicts toddlers' performance on a nontraditional task. We tested 2.5-year-old children in a verbal nontraditional false-belief task that included two looking time measures, anticipatory looking and preferential looking, and measured parents' use of mental-state language during a picture-book task. Parents' use of mental-state language positively predicted children's performance on the anticipatory-looking measure of the nontraditional task. These results provide the first evidence that social factors relate to children's false-belief understanding prior to age 3 and that this association extends to performance on nontraditional tasks. These findings add to a growing number of studies suggesting that mental-state language supports mental-state understanding across the lifespan.

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

“…We think it more likely that the mixed pattern of findings obtained with anticipatory-looking tasks indicates that the rapid, anticipatory responses measured in these tasks are more sensitive to variation in properties of the task (Baillargeon et al, 2018) as well as properties of the participants themselves (Roby & Scott, 2018;Scott et al, in press). In particular, some evidence suggests that predictive or anticipatory responses are correlated with individual differences in social experience and social motivation (e.g., Ferguson et al, 2015a;Ferguson., 2015b;Burnside et al, 2018b;Roby & Scott, 2018). For instance, belief-based anticipation is correlated with children's preference for social over non-social stimuli (Burnside et al, 2018a) and with adults' empathy scores (Ferguson et al, 2015a).…”

“…Although a considerable number of studies using anticipatory-looking tasks have produced positive findings with TD children and neurotypical adults (for reviews see Scott & Baillargeon, 2017;Scott et al, in press), there have also been several recent failures to replicate these findings (e.g., Burnside et al, 2018a;Dörrenberg et al, 2018;Kulke et al, 2018;Schuwerk et al, 2018). We know of no such failures to replicate the results from preferential-looking tasks (for successful replications, see Barrett et al, 2013;Roby & Scott, 2018). These negative results have led some to question whether anticipatory-looking tasks truly assess false-belief understanding.…”

Financial concern reduces child directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample

“…This study drew on two existing corpora of parent–child interactions that were part of larger lab-based studies on children’s social-cognitive development 74 , 75 . These corpora were selected because (a) the same lab-based parent–child activity was used and (b) both samples were socioeconomically diverse.…”

The Situational Mental File Account of the False Belief Tasks: A New Solution of the Paradox of False Belief Understanding

“…Concerns have recently been raised about the replicability of implicit FBTs (Dörrenberg et al 2018;Kammermeier and Paulus 2018;Kulke et al 2017. Nonetheless, there are also responses to these challenges (Baillargeon et al 2018;Roby and Scott 2018;Rubio-Fernández 2018). In addition, there is also evidence of implicit false belief understanding in animals using the anticipatory looking (Kano et al 2017) as well as the helping behaviour paradigm (Buttelmann et al 2017).…”