Guessing versus choosing – and seeing versus believing – in false belief tasks

Lohmann, Heidemarie; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep

doi:10.1348/026151005x26877

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…One study (Lohmann et al, 2005 ) included one object‐movement condition in the no‐highlight/look‐first/return cell, but there were no other conditions in that cell for a comparison.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

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An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false‐belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false‐belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false‐belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false‐belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true‐belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true‐ and false‐belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true‐belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true‐belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English‐speakers. Children were recruited from university‐sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. ...

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“…One study (Lohmann et al, 2005 ) included one object‐movement condition in the no‐highlight/look‐first/return cell, but there were no other conditions in that cell for a comparison.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Average scores were compared to the proportion of trials expected to be correct by chance (.50). However, we considered that the proportion of incorrect true belief trials might provide a more meaningful comparison for false belief performance than .50 chance in our task (see Carpenter et al , 2002, and Lohmann, Carpenter & Call, 2005, for a similar argument regarding other tasks). That is, because of the high salience of the competitor's reaching cue, if participants had no understanding of false beliefs they would be likely to choose the container the competitor reached for in both conditions rather than choosing randomly (i.e.…”

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confidence: 99%

A competitive nonverbal false belief task for children and apes

Krachun

Carpenter

Call

et al. 2009

Developmental Science

135

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A nonverbal false belief task was administered to children (mean age 5 years) and two great ape species: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Because apes typically perform poorly in cooperative contexts, our task was competitive. Two versions were run: in both, a human competitor witnessed an experimenter hide a reward in one of two containers. When the competitor then left the room (version A) or turned around (version B), the experimenter switched the locations of the containers. The competitor returned and reached with effort, but unsuccessfully, towards the incorrect container. Children displayed an understanding of the competitor's false belief by correctly choosing the other container to find the reward. Apes did not. However, in version A (but not version B), apes looked more often at the unchosen container in false belief trials than in true belief control trials, possibly indicating some implicit or uncertain understanding that needs to be investigated further.

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“…Average scores were compared to the proportion of trials expected to be correct by chance (0.50). However, I considered that a more meaningful comparison for False belief performance in this task might be the proportion of incorrect True belief trials, rather than chance (see Carpenter et al, 2002;Lohmann, Carpenter, & Call, 2005 for a similar argument regarding other tasks). That is, because of the high salience of the competitor's reaching cue, if participants had no understanding of false beliefs they would be likely to choose the container the competitor reached for in both conditions rather than choosing randomly (i.e., at chance levels as a group).…”

Section: Coding and Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mentalizing capacities in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Krachun¹

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NOTICE: The author has granted a nonexclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. AVIS: L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou autres formats. Canada Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. Mentalizing capacities in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

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Guessing versus choosing – and seeing versus believing – in false belief tasks

Cited by 12 publications

References 44 publications

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

A competitive nonverbal false belief task for children and apes

Mentalizing capacities in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

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