Integrating Relationship Constructs and Emotional Experience into False Belief Tasks in Preschool Children

Japanese Children's Difficulty With False Belief Understanding: Is It Real or Apparent?

“…Indeed, Naito and Koyama (2006) pointed out the difference in false belief understanding between Japanese children and Western children. Western children showed a specific difficulty in one condition of false belief tasks, where children were asked to predict where a protagonist search for a person transferred through his/her intention, as compared with the conditions where an object or a person was transferred externally (Symons, McLaughlin, Moore, & Morine, 1997). However, Japanese children did not show the differences of performances between conditions (Naito & Koyama, 2006, Experiment 2).…”

Five-year-old children's difficulty with false belief when the sought entity is a person

“…Therefore, it might be necessary to deviate from the form of a traditional task to reveal lingering difficulties. However, a study by Symons, McLaughlin, Moore, and Morine (1997) demonstrated difficulty on a test of false belief that had similar form to a traditional test, albeit with different content. In these authors' ''animate'' task, the sought entity was not an object that transferred from Location 1 to Location 2 but rather a person.…”

Learning to control ethnic intergroup bias in childhood

“…This second-order false belief understanding is known to develop well into middle childhood (Baron-Cohen, O'Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999). From around 6-7 years of age children can understand false beliefs about social, not just physical, stimuli (e.g., Nguyen & Frye, 1999;Symons, McLaughlin, Moore, & Morine, 1997), and begin to understand about false emotions as well as false beliefs (Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews, & Cooke, 1989).…”