Doesn’t see, doesn’t know: is anticipatory looking really related to understanding or belief?

Abstract

Clements and Perner (Cognitive Development, 9 (1994), 377±397) reported that children show understanding of a story character's belief in their anticipatory looking responses before they show this in their answers to test questions. According to Clements and Perner the anticipatory looking responses provide evidence of implicit understanding of belief. This paper examines the possibility that the anticipatory looking measure is indicative of (a) children using a seeing = knowing rule, i.e. children linking not seeing with ignorance rather than a sensitivity to belief, or (b) a tendency to associate the protagonist with the left-hand container. Thirty-two children aged between 2 years 11 months and 4 years were told a false belief story similar to that used in Clements and Perner (1994) except that three containers were used instead of two. The protagonist first looks inside the middle box but then puts the object in the left-hand box. In his absence, a second character moves the object unexpectedly to the right-hand box. If children's anticipatory looking was based on sensitivity to belief then they should have looked clearly to the left-hand box. If it was based on an association bias or sensitivity to the character not knowing then they should have looked equally to the left-hand and middle boxes. The results were consistent with the former prediction suggesting that children's anticipatory looking responses may indeed be governed by an implicit sensitivity to belief.

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

“…There is still scope to make a closer inspection of how children respond during traditional tests of false belief. For example, an interesting source of evidence of an early form of understanding comes from within the theory-theory and is referred to as "implicit knowledge" of false belief (Clements & Perner 1994;Clements et al 2000;Garnham & Ruffman 2001). This work seems to demonstrate that young children, even slightly before their third birthday, respond to a prompt in a false belief test by looking in the direction of the correct container, even though these same children then go on to fail a more standard verbal question.…”

“…Yet differences in information-processing demands or in the concept actually tapped in different tasks weaken such arguments . A stronger case for gradualism might be made on the basis of within-task discrepancies (Clements & Perner 1994;Garnham & Perner 2001Garnham & Ruffman 2001Ruffman et al 2001b). For instance, we found that children who passed an eyegaze measure of a false belief task (looking correctly when anticipating a story character's return), but gave an incorrect verbal prediction, could be split into two groups (Ruffman et al 2001a).…”

Evidentiality in language and cognition

“…In the area of theory of mind, we know that 3-to 4-year-olds correctly evaluate who they should believe when two sources of information conflict but may be unable to explicitly justify their preference (Robinson & Whitcombe, 2003;Whitcombe & Robinson, 2000). And in false belief tasks, 3-year-old children may correctly look to the location where a character thinks an object is after the object has been secretly moved; however, children give the wrong answer if asked where the character will look for the object (Clements & Perner, 1994;Garnham & Ruffman, 2001). …”

Belief Is Prior to Knowledge

“…Specifically, let three years of age be the age at which children understand knowledge but not belief. Fixing three years of age as the standard, one can easily find studies where children are capable of passing versions of the false belief task at this age (e.g., Clements and Perner, 1994;Garnham and Ruffman, 2001;Siegal & Beattie, 1991;Sullivan & Winner, 1993). To take just one example, Roth and Leslie (1991) found that 3 year old children attribute false beliefs to a target character when that character makes a deceptive statement.…”