Effects of Labeling on Preschoolers’ Explicit False Belief Performance: Outcomes of Cognitive...

Effects of Labeling on Preschoolers’ Explicit False Belief Performance:

Outcomes of Cognitive Flexibility or Inhibitory Control?

Jason Low and Samantha SimpsonVictoria University of Wellington

Executive function mechanisms underpinning language-related effects on theory of mind understanding wereexamined in a sample of 165 preschoolers. Verbal labels were manipulated to identify relevant perspectiveson an explicit false belief task. In Experiment 1 with 4-year-olds (N = 74), false belief reasoning was superiorin the fully and protagonist-perspective labeled conditions compared to the child-perspective and nondescriptlabeling conditions. In Experiment 2 with 3-year-olds (N = 53), labeling the nondominant belief only biasedattentional inertia. In Experiment 3 testing generalization in 4-year-olds (N = 38), labeling manipulationstranslated to improved performance on a second label-free explicit false belief task. These outcomes fit a cog-nitive flexibility account whereby age changes in the effects of labeling turn on formulating sophisticated con-ceptual representations.

Executive functioning consists of complex cogni-tive skills that facilitate the engagement of adapt-able goal directed behavior. One such skill iscognitive flexibility—the ability to shift betweenresponses and mental sets and to generate alterna-tive strategies. Alongside cognitive flexibility,other components underpinning controlled goaldirected behavior include inhibition (suppressinginappropriate responses) and working memory(ability to manipulate and act on information heldin mind; Cragg & Chevalier, 2011). Language,however, may also assist in a host of controlmechanisms. Indeed, Jacques and Zelazo (2005a)have argued that labeling relevant stimuli pro-motes cognitive flexibility in different areas ofcognitive development. We tested this theoreticalpossibility by investigating whether there was abeneficial effect of verbal labeling on preschoolers’explicit false belief task performance, and whetherthe effects were tied to cognitive flexibility orinhibitory control.

Cognitive flexibility is challenging when thesame stimuli necessitate different responses depend-ing upon context. A commonly used task to studycognitive flexibility during the preschool years is

the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). In theDCCS, children must sort bivalent cards on thebasis of specific perceptual dimensions (e.g., coloror shape). It is well established that most 3-year-olds succeed in maintaining a specific sortingdimension over the first phase but fail at switchingdimension in the second phase, instead perseverat-ing on the initial criterion (Zelazo, Gao, & Todd,2007). From about 4 years of age, children success-fully switch dimension, thus behaving flexibly.Intriguingly, developmental changes in DCCS per-formance dovetail with age-related changes in falsebelief (theory of mind) performance. False belieftasks assess whether children are able to considerthe information available to an agent when predict-ing the agent’s actions, even if that information isinaccurate and incompatible with one’s own viewof reality. Correlation and transfer of training stud-ies indicate that DCCS performance and false beliefreasoning are interrelated (e.g., Carlson & Moses,2001; Kloo & Perner, 2003; Muller, Zelazo, & Im-risek, 2005).

With the DCCS, one view is that embedded ruleformulation can assist with simultaneous integra-tion of, and selection between, incompatible pairsof rules (Zelazo, Muller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003).For false belief tasks, representing first- and third-person sources of information within a singleintentional schema may support a representational

We are grateful to all the children for their generous participa-tion and thank the Wellington Kindergarten Association for theirsupport throughout. We thank Penny Tok and Bo Wang forassistance with data collection and two anonymous reviewersfor their theoretical and methodological suggestions for improv-ing the article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toJason Low, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Welling-ton, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand. Electronic mailmay be sent to [email protected].

Child Development, May/June 2012, Volume 83, Number 3, Pages 1072–1084

� 2012 The Authors

Child Development � 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2012/8303-0025

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01738.x

judgment of mind that is applied flexibly andequally to the activities of the self and other (Bar-resi & Moore, 1996). According to the CognitiveComplexity and Control Theory Revised (CCC-r),cognitive flexibility on both kinds of tasks partlyrests on the complexity of the rules children canformulate and use so as to coordinate perspectivesand rules into a single schema (Zelazo et al., 2007).On this account, language, labeling in particular,plays an important role in advancing cognitive flex-ibility. First, labeling of a subjective experienceinvites children to discriminate specific instancesand consider their contrastive relations within ahierarchical system, thus aiding the formation ofembedded rule representations (Jacques & Zelazo,2005b; Marcovitch, Jacques, Boseovski, & Zelazo,2008). Second, labeling facilitates psychological dis-tancing between children’s automatic respondingand relevant stimuli, so that representations of tasksets or of the self and the world can be maintainedin working memory and reflected on by the child,making recursive consciousness possible (Jacques &Zelazo, 2005a). Such top-down reprocessing ofstimuli promotes cognitive flexibility insofar aslabeling induces a sophisticated conceptual struc-ture that permits reasoning to roam across stimuliand contexts.

Jacques and Zelazo (2005a) interpreted signifi-cant associations between language measures andchildren’s performance on explicit false belief tasks(see Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007) andalso positive correlations between receptive vocabu-lary and DCCS performance (e.g., Lang & Perner,2002; Muller et al., 2005) as potentially reflectinglanguage servicing cognitive flexibility. However,several qualifications may be raised. First, correla-tional studies cannot speak to causal relations overwhether complex mental state reasoning may berecast as language promoting cognitive flexibility.Second, studies on other components of executivefunctioning have uncovered concurrent as wellas longitudinal associations between conflict inhibi-tion and false belief performance (Carlson, Mandell,& Williams, 2004; Carlson & Moses, 2001).Third, manipulations of inhibitory demand in falsebelief and strategic deception tasks do sometimesimprove performance (especially in older preschool-ers; e.g., Carlson, Moses, & Hix, 1998; Mitchell &Lacohee, 1991). As such, another view—followingan executive expression framework—is that inhibi-tion of attention to salient reality and redirectionof attention to beliefs about reality may be the limit-ing step for preschoolers’ success on false belieftasks.

Kirkham, Cruess, and Diamond (2003) sought totest that labeling specifically helps to inhibit andredirect attention. They created a new label condi-tion of the DCCS whereby they asked children toname the stimulus in terms of the relevant sortingdimension on each of the pre- and postswitch trials.Compared to the standard DCCS condition, 3-year-olds in the label condition significantly passed thepostswitch phase. Kirkham et al. argued that pre-schoolers perseverate on the standard DCCSbecause of attentional inertia, and this inertia isovercome when children develop greater ability toinhibit attending to and acting on the mind-set rele-vant to the previous dimension. To that extent,labels scaffold 3-year-olds’ attention to a new men-tal set. Relatedly, Muller, Zelazo, Hood, Leone, andRohrer (2004) found that 3-year-olds could over-come perceptual conflict to successfully win a col-ored candy when they labeled the mismatchingcolor of the larger card upon which the candy wasplaced. However, 3-year-olds performed just aswell on the colored candy task when the experi-menter simply pointed to the larger card. The point-ing results suggest that the major function oflabeling in the colored candy task—and perhaps atage 3 years—is to control attention.

Other lines of evidence, however, temper theview that 3-year-olds already have a sophisticatedconceptual structure over task sets and labelsstraightforwardly redirect attention. First, Towse,Redbond, Houston-Price, and Cook (2000) foundthat while a majority of 3-year-olds could label theDCCS postswitch dimension accurately when askeddetailed labeling questions, only one third of thechildren proceeded to sort cards correctly by thepostswitch attribute. Second, Muller, Zelazo, Lurye,and Liebermann (2008) found that 3-year-olds in alabeling condition of the DCCS did not performbetter than preschoolers in the standard conditioneither on rapid switching between pre- and post-switch rules after the postswitch phase or on gener-alization to a second DCCS with different stimuli.Third, redirecting attention cannot account for cer-tain labeling effects with 4-year-olds. In the FlexibleItem Selection Task (FIST), for example, childrenare required to induce rules for matching pictureson one dimension (e.g., color) and then on anotherdimension (e.g., size). Jacques (2001) found that4-year-olds’ second dimension selection on the FISTimproved when they labeled the basis of their ini-tial selection. Selection 2 performance of 3-year-oldswas unaffected by labeling. If labels only redirectedattention without changing 4-year-olds’ conceptualrepresentation over task sets, labeling of the basis

Labeling and False Belief Performance 1073

for Selection 1 on the FIST should have made thefirst dimension more salient and difficult to inhibitwhen choosing items for Selection 2. Based on suchfindings, Jacques and Zelazo (2005a, 2005b) arguedthat the effect of labeling inducing a sophisticatedconceptual structure for wide-ranging cognitiveflexibility may be complexly dependent upon thetask and the age of the child.

There have been a few attempts to study theeffects of verbal labels or utterances on children’sfalse belief performance. Zaitchik (1991) found that3-year-olds were more likely to infer a protagonist’sfalse belief when the actual location of the desiredobject was made less salient—by describing itrather than showing it. In Zaitchik’s verbalized-only condition, however, the utterance did not con-tradict an existing belief and so there was no needto consider the protagonist’s original belief at all;verbal labeling of the mistaken location could sim-ply lead children to attribute an alternative—ratherthan a false belief to the protagonist. Astington andBaird (2005) studied the effects of linguistic manip-ulations on a task that required children to explic-itly represent beliefs that are in contradistinction toa true state of affairs. In the standard condition,3- and 4-year-olds watched a video event and hearda corresponding narrative that fully described anunexpected transfer false belief scenario. In theverbal-only condition, children heard the samenarrative but the camera angle obscured the initialobject placement and its subsequent transfer. In thevisual-only condition, children watched a silentvideo of the unexpected transfer event. Astingtonand Baird found a main effect of age in false beliefattribution, but no differences in responding acrossthe three conditions. Their findings are relevant toJacques and Zelazo’s (2005a) suggestion that verballabels might have a positive effect on false beliefreasoning by way of promoting cognitive flexibility,but the results showed no evidence of poor perfor-mance on the visual-only condition. It is conceiv-able that children in the visual-only conditiondeployed inner speech to covertly narrate a story ofthe unfolding events, masking language-relatedeffects.

That said, Wellman, Cross, and Watson’s (2001)meta-analysis suggests that task changes thatdiminish the salience of real-world contents or raisethe salience of mental states may improve olderpreschoolers’ explicit false belief reasoning. Giventhat 4-year-olds tend to succeed on false belief tasksand that experimenters tend to label all relevantinformation, it is important to manipulate labelsthemselves to test whether: (a) labeling generally

leads to cognitive flexibility by providing childrenwith a more sophisticated representation for prob-lem solving; or (b) the outcomes of naming relevantperspectives are specifically related to inhibiting areality informed perspective so as to attend andoperate on beliefs. Experiment 1 investigated howlabeling of different perspectives affected 4-year-olds’ explicit false belief task performance. Experi-ment 2 examined the nature of labeling effects in3-year-olds. Experiment 3 tested whether labelingmanipulations broadly induced a sophisticated con-ceptual representation in 4-year-olds to the extentthat children were able to generalize their under-standing to a novel explicit false belief task whereno labels were provided.

Experiment 1

We take up a methodological suggestion offeredby Jacques and Zelazo (2005a) to unpack theeffects of a labeling manipulation on preschoolers’explicit false belief task performance. In the expli-cit false belief task, children do not have to inferthe protagonist’s false belief but are told it directly(Wellman & Bartsch, 1988). Children are shownpictures of two key locations and told, for exam-ple: ‘‘Sam wants to find his kitten. Sam thinks thekitten is in the flower-pot. The kitten is really in thebag. Where will Sam look for his kitten?’’ Explicitfalse belief task performance is positively associ-ated with performance on the standard un-expected transfer false belief task (Carlson &Moses, 2001), and the former task is also scaledsimilarly to the unexpected contents false belieftask (Wellman & Liu, 2004). Differences between3- and 4-year-olds’ performances on the explicitfalse belief task also map onto age-related patternson classical false belief tasks (Carlson & Moses;Wellman, 1990). Guided by Wellman et al.’s (2001)meta-analysis indicating that task manipulationselevate false belief responding in preschoolersolder than 44 months, and by evidence suggestingthat the effects of labels change qualitatively bychildren’s fourth birthday to hinge on formulatingintegrated representations rather than attentionalredirection (e.g., Jacques, 2001; Jacques & Zelazo,2005b; Muller et al., 2004), we concentrated on4-year-olds for this first experiment.

Following Jacques and Zelazo (2005a), we cre-ated different versions of the explicit false belieftask by manipulating whether labels were used torefer to both the protagonist’s (false) and child’s(true) perspectives (‘‘the flower-pot’’ and ‘‘the

1074 Low and Simpson

bag’’), to just the child’s perspective (‘‘here’’ vs.‘‘the bag’’), to just the protagonist’s perspective(‘‘the flower-pot’’ vs. ‘‘here’’), or to nondescriptive-ly tag both locations (‘‘here’’ vs. ‘‘here’’). Jacquesand Zelazo argued that labeling invites far-reachingconceptual changes by encouraging reflection, andon this basis, we would predict that compared toperformance on the nondescript version, labelingthe child’s perspective should help task perfor-mance as much as labeling the protagonist’s per-spective or both. Jacques and Zelazo (2005b) alsoargued that, aside from promoting reflection, dis-tinct labels can accentuate contrastive relations thushelping children induce complex representations.Contrastive labels spotlighting the different hidinglocations (i.e., both perspectives fully labeled) mayinvite a comparison of people’s behaviors acrossdifferent action scenarios, fostering a systematicintegration of first- and third-person perspectives(see also Baldwin & Saylor, 2005). In contrast, basedon an inhibitory control account, the main chal-lenge in preschoolers’ online false belief expressionis the inhibition of a prepotent mind-set to reportreality (and fulfill the protagonist’s discovery of thedesired object) when predicting others’ belief-basedaction (Kirkham et al., 2003). On this view, perfor-mance should be the worst in the child-perspectivecondition (and best in the protagonist-perspectivecondition where executive demand is minimized).Labeling preschoolers’ view of reality in the child-perspective condition should lead to the defaultreality mind-set being even more salient and diffi-cult to inhibit when attempting to redirect attentionto the protagonist’s false belief. An inhibitory con-trol account would also predict that performance inboth the fully labeled and nondescript conditionsshould be equivalent—labels are either present orabsent for both perspectives, making them equallysalient—children should show the same bias for anegocentric interpretation in both conditions.

Method

Participants.. The study composed of seventy-four4-year-olds (39 boys and 35 girls; M = 53 months,SD = 3.16, range = 48–59). Children were testedindividually at their kindergarten. A total of 77 chil-dren were interviewed, but 3 did not complete theexplicit false belief task. Seventy-one participantswere New Zealand European and 3 were New Zea-land Maori. All children spoke English.

Procedure.. Children were randomly assigned toone of four labeling conditions: fully labeled(n = 20), protagonist-perspective labeled (n = 18),

child-perspective labeled (n = 18) and nondescript(n = 18).

Explicit false belief task.. This measure (adaptedfrom Wellman & Bartsch, 1988) consisted of sixtrials. Within each trial, a protagonist was drawncentrally below two target locations. An example ofa fully labeled condition trial was as follows. Theexperimenter (E) pointed to the protagonist andsaid: ‘‘This is Sam. Sam wants to find his kitten.Sam thinks the kitten is in the flower-pot [E simulta-neously pointed to the flower-pot]. The kitten isreally in the bag [E simultaneously pointed to thebag].’’ The experimenter then asked children twoquestions: a false belief question (‘‘Where will Samlook for his kitten?’’) and a reality question(‘‘Where is the kitten really?’’). All children pointedtheir answers. The remaining five trials comprisednarratives about: a girl thinking that her sister is inthe tree or box; a boy thinking that his mouse is inthe kitchen or bathroom; a girl thinking that herbrother is in the tree-house or garage; a boy think-ing that his rabbit is in the basket or cupboard; anda girl thinking that her sister is in the car or bushes.The order of the belief and reality information ineach narrative was counterbalanced across trials, aswas the order of the belief and reality questions.The believed and real locations of the target itemswere counterbalanced across children. For the pro-tagonist-perspective labeled condition, the experi-menter only named the location of the protagonist’serroneous belief about the object’s whereabouts.For the example trial involving Sam and the cat,the experimenter said: ‘‘Sam wants to find hiskitten. Sam thinks the kitten is in the flower-pot. Thekitten is really in here.’’ For the child-perspectivelabeled condition, the experimenter only named thelocation of the participant’s true belief about theobject’s whereabouts: ‘‘Sam wants to find his kitten.Sam thinks the kitten is in here. The kitten is reallyin the bag.’’ Finally, for the nondescript condition,the experimenter pointed and referred to the loca-tions only by noninformative labels: ‘‘Sam wants tofind his kitten. Sam thinks the kitten is in here. Thekitten is really in here.’’ Of course, not all contras-tive information may be removed as such (e.g.,pointing to each location may be quite powerful inthis respect). Nonetheless, we used the same word‘‘here’’ to refer to both locations in the nondescriptcontrol condition to at least minimize the presenceof contrastive information. The experimenter didnot provide children with any feedback about theirresponses. Children who correctly answered boththe belief and reality questions found within a storyitem were considered to pass that trial. Children in


each condition received representational false beliefjudgment scores out of 6.

Results and Discussion

Preliminary analyses revealed that there wereno main effects or interactions associated with gen-der; therefore, this variable was not consideredfurther (for Experiments 1–3). Preliminary checksalso indicated no significant order effects or evi-dence of changes in scores across trials (for Experi-ments 1–3). The means of the representational falsebelief judgment scores (i.e., belief and realityquestions correctly answered) for each labelingcondition are summarized in Table 1 (top panel).A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA; fourlevels: fully labeled, child-perspective labeled,protagonist-perspective labeled, and nondescript)revealed a significant main effect of labeling onrepresentational false belief judgments, F(3,70) = 7.73, p < .001, gp

2 = .25. Pairwise compari-sons with Bonferroni corrections revealed that: (a)false belief judgment scores were significantlyhigher in the fully labeled condition compared toscores in the child-perspective condition (p < .01)and nondescript condition (p < .05), and (b) falsebelief judgment scores in the protagonist-perspec-tive condition were also significantly higher com-pared to scores in the child-perspective andnondescript conditions (ps < .01). Four-year-oldswere also well above chance in making correctfalse belief judgments on the first trial in the fullylabeled and protagonist-perspective labeled condi-tions (80% and 89% accuracy, respectively; bino-mial tests, ps < .05) compared to the first trialresponses of children in the child-perspective and

nondescript labeling conditions (both 33% accu-racy; binomial tests, ps > .05).

Experiment 1 revealed that 4-year-olds exhibitedaccurate representational false belief judgments inthe condition where the protagonist’s perspectivealone or both perspectives were labeled than com-pared with conditions in which the protagonist’sperspective was not labeled at all. Given this pat-tern of findings, it seems more likely that labelingaffected general cognitive flexibility and not specificinhibitory control. Jacques and Zelazo (2005a) wereincorrect, though, to predict that labeling either per-spective would facilitate 4-year-olds’ performance.It appears that the nondominant (protagonist) pointof view must be labeled explicitly for it to influence4-year-olds’ false belief representation. Despite thiscaveat, Jacques and Zelazo’s cognitive flexibilityaccount seems to better explain the differential pat-tern of results found between the condition inwhich both perspectives were labeled and the con-dition in which neither were labeled. The condi-tions where both perspectives were labeled orabsent, making them equally salient, should haveled children to exhibit the same egocentric bias inboth conditions, following an inhibition account.The finding that 4-year-olds performed well in thecondition in which both perspectives were labeledbut poorly in the one they were not labeled doesnot fit with an inhibitory control account. Instead,better performance by 4-year-olds in the fullylabeled condition fits with Jacques and Zelazo’s(2005b) additional expectation that specific labelsjuxtaposing both perspective hiding locations canalso invite inferences on how different actionschemas (searching on the basis of first-person knowl-edge vs. third-person knowledge) share nonobvious

Table 1

Mean [and Percentage] Response Strategy Scores in Explicit False Belief Task Performance by Labeling Condition (Standard Deviations and Ranges

in Parentheses)

Fully labeled Child perspective Protagonist perspective Nondescript

Experiment 1 (4-year-olds, N = 74)

BC&RC 3.95 [66%] (1.79) (0–6) 2.11 [35%] (1.49) (0–6) 4.17 [69%] (1.58) (1–6) 2.17 [36%] (1.95) (0–6)

BC&RX 0.00 [0%] (0.00) (0–0) 0.28 [5%] (0.57) (0–2) 0.11 [2%] (0.32) (0–1) 0.11 [2%] (0.32) (0–1)

BX&RC 1.80 [30%] (1.88) (0–6) 3.39 [56%] (1.69) (0–6) 1.56 [26%] (1.42) (0–5) 3.50 [58%] (2.09) (0–6)

BX&RX 0.25 [4%] (0.44) (0–1) 0.22 [4%] (0.43) (0–1) 0.17 [3%] (0.38) (0–1) 0.22 [4%] (0.43) (0–1)

Experiment 2 (3-year-olds, N = 53)

BC&RC 0.54 [9%] (0.78) (0–2) 0.36 [6%] (0.63) (0–2) 0.57 [9%] (1.16) (0–4) 0.50 [8%] (0.80) (0–2)

BC&RX 1.38 [23%] (1.89) (0–6) 0.93 [15%] (1.07) (0–3) 3.57 [60%] (1.99) (0–6) 1.00 [17%] (1.04) (0–3)

BX&RC 3.77 [63%] (1.92) (0–6) 4.50 [75%] (1.02) (3–6) 1.79 [30%] (1.31) (0–4) 4.25 [71%] (1.42) (2–6)

BX&RX 0.31 [5%] (0.63) (0–2) 0.21 [4%] (0.43) (0–1) 0.07 [1%] (0.27) (0–1) 0.25 [4%] (0.62) (0–2)

Note. BC&RC = report belief and reality correctly; BC&RX = report belief correctly but reality incorrectly; BX&RC = report beliefincorrectly but reality correctly; BX&RX = report belief and reality incorrectly.


relations, inducing the formulation a sophisticatedrepresentation of belief.

There may be an effect of labeling on responseerror patterns depending on how else the falsebelief and reality control questions are answered:(a) state reality correctly but belief incorrectly(report belief to fit with reality), (b) state belief cor-rectly but reality incorrectly (report reality to fitwith belief), or (c) state both belief and realityincorrectly (mix up reality and belief). Each partici-pant was allocated scores to indicate the number oftimes each of these other response patterns werefound on the explicit false belief task (range = 0–6;Table 1 top panel). Separate one-way ANOVAsrevealed only a main effect of labeling conditionfor the ‘‘report reality correctly but belief incor-rectly’’ response, F(3, 70) = 6.03, p < .01, gp

2 = .21.Pairwise comparisons indicated that reality-biasedresponding was higher in the child-perspectiveand nondescript labeling conditions compared tothe protagonist-perspective and fully labeledconditions (ps < .05). Four-year-olds infrequentlyadopted the ‘‘correct belief but incorrect reality’’strategy in the protagonist-perspective condition,suggesting that inhibitory control effects are unli-kely to account for their errors on the explicit falsebelief task. Cognitive flexibility stemming fromlabels inducing reflection and formulation of asophisticated conceptual representation couldexplain why 4-year-olds in the protagonist-perspec-tive labeled condition did not show attentional iner-tia to the noncanonical perspective when answeringreality questions. Indeed, 4-year-olds who erred inthe protagonist-perspective condition predominantlyadopted the ‘‘belief incorrect and reality correct’’strategy (as they did in the other conditions)—dovetailing to suggest that representational prob-lems are at stake.

Experiment 2

It is possible that young preschoolers have a latentconception of false belief that is masked by theirdifficulties with inhibitory control, and a labelingmanipulation might operate differently in 3-year-olds compared to 4-year-olds. Indeed, a theoreticalleverage offered by an inhibitory control account oflabeling is its prediction that young preschoolersunderstand everything they need to know aboutrepresentations in order to perform correctly onconflict control tasks. With respect to the DCCS, forexample, Kirkham et al. (2003) argued that ‘‘beforethe stimulus appears [3-year-olds] are all set to per-

form correctly. They have activated the appropriaterules: their mental reconfiguration is complete’’ (p.461). Similarly, one could maintain that 3-year-oldshave already represented how true and false per-spectives are integrated and are set to answer real-ity and belief questions correctly—it is just thesalient reality informed mind-set that must beinhibited. For Jacques and Zelazo (2005a, 2005b),however, there is genuine growth in self-reflectionand representational integration, and understand-ing the nature of these age-related changes canilluminate when and how labels support actioncontrol. Based on findings from different para-digms, they argued that labels influence 3-year-olds’ performance on cognitive tasks as a result oftheir attention-getting properties but influence4-year-olds’ performance at a more conceptuallevel. As indicated earlier, a labeling manipulationproved to be effective for 3-year-olds in the ColoredCandy task (Muller et al., 2004), but less so in theDCCS and the FIST (Jacques, 2001; Muller et al.,2008). Labeling, however, helped 4-year-olds togenerate new inferences in the FIST (Jacques, 2001).As such, labels do not automatically improve per-formance; the effects are complex, dependent ontask parameters as well as the child’s age.

Overall, following an inhibitory control accountof labeling, 3-year-olds across the different labelingconditions should accurately report reality (truebelief being a prepotent impulse), but children inthe protagonist-perspective labeled condition wouldhave the benefit of having attention disengagedand refocused to false beliefs (Kirkham et al., 2003).In contrast, Jacques and Zelazo’s (2005a, 2005b)account of labeling and cognitive flexibility predictsthat 3-year-olds in the protagonist-perspective con-dition, although helped to redirect attention awayfrom reality, may have yet to form a complex inte-grated representation of perspectives. If so, thisshould result in 3-year-olds in the protagonist-perspective condition showing only a change inbias in the explicit false belief task: correctlyanswering the belief question but incorrectly report-ing the reality location as being consistent with thebelief location.

Method

Participants.. The study composed of 53 3-year-olds (28 boys and 25 girls; M = 42 months,SD = 3.51, range = 36–47). Children were testedindividually. A total of 56 children were tested,but 3 were not included in the analysis as theydid not complete the explicit false belief task. All


participants were New Zealand European andspoke English.

Procedure.. We administered the same explicitfalse belief task as outlined in Experiment 1. Chil-dren were randomly assigned to one of four condi-tions: fully labeled (n = 13), protagonist-perspectivelabeled (n = 14), child-perspective labeled (n = 14),and nondescript (n = 12). Responses were scored inthe same way as outlined in Experiment 1.


The mean scores for each of the various types ofresponse strategies by condition are indicated inTable 1 (bottom panel). A one-way ANOVA (fourlabeling levels) revealed no significant main effectof labeling condition for making representationalfalse belief judgments (i.e., the belief-and-realitycorrect response strategy), F(3, 49) = 0.17, p > .05,gp

2 = .01. Our finding that labeling did not auto-matically improve 3-year-olds’ performance on theexplicit false belief task is consistent with otherresearch revealing negative effects of labeling withthis age group in the DCCS and FIST (e.g., Jacques,2001; Muller et al., 2008). Our finding also fits withresearch indicating that 3-year-olds do not do betteron false belief tasks when belief cues are madestronger because they do not yet fully understandthe representational nature of belief (e.g., Moses &Flavell, 1990).

Importantly, though, our data fit with Jacquesand Zelazo’s (2005a, 2005b) view that labels influ-ence 3-year-olds’ performance only as a result oftheir attention-getting properties. As such, ourfindings with respect to 3-year-olds’ performancevis-a-vis the other response strategies are particu-larly illuminating. There was only a main effect ofcondition for two other response strategies. A one-way ANOVA (four labeling levels) revealed a signif-icant main effect of condition for adopting the‘‘belief correct but reality incorrect’’ response strat-egy, F(3, 49) = 8.66, p < .001, gp

2 = .35. Pairwisecomparisons indicated that this change in bias scorewas highest in the protagonist-perspective conditioncompared to all other conditions (ps < .01). Thisfinding does not fit with an inhibitory controlaccount emphasizing that while children know bothperspectives, there is an exaggerated bias to focuson a reality informed view and that labels helpto redirect attention away from the salience ofreality. Theorized in such a fashion, an inhibitorycontrol account would not have anticipated 3-year-olds to incorrectly answer about the dominant real-ity-informed perspective. Instead, Experiment 2

showed that when asked about reality, 3-year-oldsin the protagonist-perspective labeled conditiondisplayed attentional inertia on the believed-inlocation. This suggests that relevant labeling ofthe protagonist’s erroneous perspective seemed toonly change 3-year-olds’ response bias. A one-wayANOVA (four labeling levels) also revealed a signif-icant main effect of condition for adopting the ‘‘real-ity correct but belief incorrect’’ response strategy,F(3, 49) = 10.00, p < .001, gp

2 = .38. The true beliefdefault strategy score was lowest in the protagonist-perspective condition compared to all otherconditions (ps < .01). We can thus eliminate thepossibility that 3-year-olds in the protagonist-per-spective condition got stuck on the nonveridicalpoint of view because children did not view realitytargets in the explicit false belief task as beingsalient per se. It appears that at around 4 years ofage (Experiment 1), labeling additionally inducesintegrated representational reflection over perspec-tives. The changing role of language for false beliefperformance maps onto older preschoolers’ successin going beyond being pushed and pulled by labels.If labeling promotes the development of cognitiveflexibility by inviting 4-year-olds to relate informa-tion in complex ways and to consciously reflecton information, their performance should alsogeneralize across tasks. We took up this issue inExperiment 3.

Experiment 3

Jacques and Zelazo (2005a, 2005b) contend thatlabeling of subjective experience helps provide chil-dren with a more complex conceptual structure tooperate from. An important implication is that theprovision of a more complex conceptual structureassists with performance generalization. Eventhough Kirkham et al. (2003) emphasized that label-ing helped 3-year-olds to refocus their attention inthe DCCS, they did not examine whether labelinghelped to generalize action control. While Mulleret al. (2008) were not able to replicate the immedi-ate beneficial effect of having 3-year-olds label testcards on the DCCS, they uncovered that labelingmanipulations in younger preschoolers did nottranslate to improved performance on a secondDCCS task with different stimuli. Jacques (2001),however, found that labeling one pair of matcheson the first dimension of the FIST helped 4-year-olds to spontaneously generate a second pair ofmatches based on a novel dimension. These find-ings, overall, suggest that around 4 years of age


labels go beyond attentional redirection by invitingchanges to the complexity of the representationchildren are formulating. If labels induced richerconceptual structures, then one would expect4-year-olds to display accurate judgments on thelabeling false belief task in the protagonist-perspec-tive and fully labeled conditions and, further,performance should generalize to a second explicitfalse belief task where no labels are provided. Iflabeling is tied to correct explicit false belief taskperformance by working only to bias attention, per-formance should be tied to specific labeling condi-tions and task stimuli. Based on an inhibitorycontrol account of labeling, 4-year-olds in the pro-tagonist-perspective labeled condition should dem-onstrate superior performance on the explicit falsebelief labeling task compared to participants in theother conditions, but children across conditionsshould exhibit poorer performance on the secondexplicit false belief task where no labels are pro-vided to direct attention.

Method

Participants.. The study composed of 38 4-year-olds (20 boys and 18 girls) (M = 55 months,SD = 3.29, range = 48–59). Children were testedindividually at their kindergarten. A further 6 chil-dren were tested but were not included in the anal-ysis as they did not complete the explicit falsebelief tasks. Thirty-seven children were New Zea-land European and 1 child was New Zealand Chi-nese. All participants spoke English.

Procedure.. Two explicit false belief task formswere presented. The first (labeling) form consistedof the same six story items that were used in Exper-iments 1 and 2. The second (label-free) form con-sisted of six new story items. These six new itemscomposed of events surrounding: a girl thinkingthat her brother is in the cupboard or box, a girlthinking that her kitten is in the postbox or trash-can, a girl thinking that her sister is in the shed orcart, a boy thinking that his toy is in the bagor mug, a boy thinking that his sister is in the tentor basket, and a girl thinking that her frog is in thewell or tree. As per Experiments 1 and 2, for bothexplicit false belief task forms, we ensured that theorder of the belief and reality information in eachnarrative was counterbalanced across trials, as wasthe order of the belief and reality questions. Thebelieved and real locations of the target items werecounterbalanced across children. In order to testwhether labels induced a complex conceptual struc-ture that afforded generalization in reasoning, all

children completed the label-free (nondescript)false belief task immediately after completing therespective labeling manipulated false belief task.For the labeling task, children were randomlyassigned to one of three conditions: fully labeled(n = 12), protagonist-perspective labeled (n = 13),and child-perspective labeled (n = 13). Everyonethen went on to complete the label-free task whereall perspectives were only referred to in a non-descript fashion (i.e., the experimenter pointed andreferred to the reality and belief locations only bythe noninformative label ‘‘here’’). Having non-descript trials form the basis of the label-free falsebelief task allowed us to get at reflection wherebychildren—after completing particular labeling trialsfor the first false belief task—received generaliza-tion trials with new stimuli and without labeling.Responses to both task forms were scored in thesame way as in Experiment 1.


The mean scores for each of the various responsestrategies in the labeling and label-free task con-texts are presented in Table 2 (top and bottom pan-els, respectively). Two separate one-way ANOVAs(each having three levels: fully labeled, protagonist-perspective labeled, and child-perspective labeled)revealed a significant main effect of condition onaccurate representational false belief judgments(i.e., belief and reality answered correctly) in thelabeling task context, F(2, 35) = 8.61, p < .01,gp

2 = .33, and further, the effect was generalized tothe label-free task context, F(2, 35) = 6.20, p < .01,gp

2 = .26.Pairwise comparisons indicated that representa-

tional false belief scores of children in the fullylabeled and protagonist-perspective labeled condi-tions were significantly higher in both task contextscompared to the scores of participants in the child-perspective labeled condition (ps < .05). Four-year-olds in the full- and protagonist-perspectiveconditions were also well above chance in makingcorrect representational judgments on the first trialin the false belief labeling task (92% and 83% accu-racy, respectively; binomial tests, ps < .05) and inthe nondescript false belief generalization task(both 92% accuracy; binomial tests, ps < .05). Partic-ipants in the child-perspective condition werebelow chance in making correct representationaljudgments in the false belief labeling task and inthe nondescript false belief generalization task (15%and 38% accuracy, respectively; binomial tests,ps > .05). Overall, if labels led to correct performance


by simply guiding attention in 4-year-olds, perfor-mance should have been task specific, and falsebelief attribution should have been relativelypoorer when there were no labels of any sort toguide responding. Our results instead fit withJacques and Zelazo’s (2005a, 2005b) view that label-ing can invite the formulation of a sophisticatedconceptual structure that qualitatively changes how4-year-olds represent information. To the extentthat labeling of the nondominant perspectiveinduces reflection of how perspective settings canbe systematically integrated, 4-year-olds’ cognitiveflexibility appeared to transfer from one false belieftask context to another.

Two separate one-way ANOVAs also indicatedmain effects of condition for adopting the responsestrategy of extending a default true belief mentalstate to the protagonist in the labeling task context,F(2, 35) = 4.39, p < .05, gp

2 = .20, and the label-freetask context, F(2, 35) = 4.38, p < .05, gp

2 = .20. Pair-wise comparisons indicated that in both task con-texts, 4-year-olds in the child-perspective labeledcondition adopted more ‘‘reality correct and beliefincorrect’’ strategies than compared to children inthe protagonist-perspective labeled condition (ps <.05). Dovetailing to suggest representational prob-lems, 4-year-olds who erred in the protagonist-perspective (and fully labeled) condition(s) alsopredominantly adopted ‘‘belief incorrect and realitycorrect’’ strategies in both task contexts.

General Discussion

Jacques and Zelazo (2005a, 2005b) asserted thatlabeling generally invites abstract representational

reflection; performance across different labelingmanipulations (i.e., child perspective vs. protago-nist perspective vs. child and protagonist perspec-tives labeled) should not differ in supportingaccurate false belief judgments. The assertion dove-tails with CCC-r emphasis that children with bettercognitive flexibility skills also use more abstractconceptual representations. In contrast, an atten-tional inertia and inhibition account contends thatpreschoolers would benefit from the labeling of theprotagonist’s nondominant perspective because thecritical cognitive challenge in expressing false beliefjudgments is to inhibit a salient reality-informedmind-set. Experiment 1 revealed that labeling ofthe protagonist’s perspective led to better perfor-mance than labeling of just the child’s perspective,necessitating some qualification to the view thatlabeling generally invites cognitive flexibility.Nonetheless, 4-year-olds performed better whenboth perspectives were labeled and poorly when nolabels were provided. Following an inhibitory con-trol account, children should have shown the samebias in both those two conditions given that thechild’s (true) and protagonist’s (false) perspectiveswere made equally salient by the presence orabsence of labels. On balance, superior perfor-mances in the fully labeled and protagonist-perspective labeled conditions fit with Jacques andZelazo’s (2005a, 2005b) cognitive flexibility accountthat labeling leads to a qualitative change in how4-year-olds represent information. Given poorerperformance in the child-perspective labeling con-dition, we would emphasize that the nondominantfalse perspective must be labeled explicitly in orderfor it to influence 4-year-olds’ cognitive flexibility.This view fits with other literature in two ways.

Table 2

Four-Year-Olds’ Mean [and Percentage] Response Strategy Scores in the Labeling and Label-Free False Belief Task Contexts by Condition (Standard

Deviations and Ranges in Parentheses)

Fully labeled (n = 12) Child perspective (n = 13) Protagonist perspective (n = 13)

Labeling task

BC&RC 4.33 [73%] (1.78) (0–6) 1.85 [31%] (1.91) (0–6) 4.46 [74%] (1.71) (0–6)

BC&RX 0.08 [1%] (0.29) (0–1) 0.38 [6%] (0.87) (0–3) 0.23 [4%] (0.60) (0–2)

BX&RC 1.50 [25%] (1.78) (0–6) 3.23 [54%] (2.31) (0–6) 1.08 [18%] (1.71) (0–6)

BX&RX 0.08 [1%] (0.29) (0–1) 0.54 [9%] (0.97) (0–3) 0.23 [4%] (0.60) (0–2)

Label-free task (nondescript generalization trials)

BC&RC 4.08 [68%] (1.73) (0–6) 2.00 [34%] (2.52) (0–6) 4.69 [78%] (1.75) (0–6)

BC&RX 0.00 [0%] (0.00) (0–0) 0.08 [1%] (0.28) (0–1) 0.08 [1%] (0.28) (0–1)

BX&RC 1.67 [28%] (1.78) (0–6) 3.23 [54%] (2.52) (0–6) 0.92 [15%] (1.66) (0–6)

BX&RX 0.25 [4%] (0.45) (0–1) 0.69 [11%] (1.11) (0–3) 0.31 [5%] (0.63) (0–2)

Note. BC&RC = report belief and reality correctly; BC&RX = report belief correctly but reality incorrectly; BX&RC = report beliefincorrectly but reality correctly; BX&RX = report belief and reality incorrectly.


First, Lohmann and Tomasello’s (2003) trainingstudy found that experiencing different nouns indi-cating nondominant possible perspectives partlyhelped children progress in false belief understand-ing (i.e., their discourse only training condition).Second, adults also showed cognitive flexibility onDuncker’s candle problem when the relevant non-dominant perspective is labeled (the ‘‘box’’ contain-ing tacks; Glucksberg & Weisberg, 1966).

Jacques and Zelazo (2005a) wrongly predictedthat labeling either perspective would lead toimproved performance on the false belief task.However, they did so partly based on the generalfinding that labeling on Selection 1 of the FISTimproves Selection 2. In the FIST context, labelingthe prior perspective (i.e., the Selection 1 dimen-sion) helped Selection 2 performance. Clearly, label-ing the dominant perspective did not help childrenon the false belief task. Perhaps one reason for thedifferences in performance between the two para-digms comes from the fact that the FIST may notinvolve an inherently dominant perspective,whereas the explicit false belief task involves a pre-potent reality-based perspective. Indeed, in all butone condition where the protagonist’s perspectiveis labeled, 3-year-olds were able to answer realitybut not belief questions correctly. In Experiment 1,when 4-year-olds erred on the explicit false belieftask (to a lesser extent than 3-year-olds), they alsoexhibited a reality bias, suggesting representationalproblems. These patterns intersect with Leslie’s(1994) point that there is a conceptual basis to adefault reality assumption when inferring beliefcontents—beliefs are normatively true, usefullytrue, and ought to be true.

It is tempting to argue that labeling the protago-nist’s perspective serves only to scaffold age-relatedchanges in inhibitory control so as to offset theasymmetrical effect of attentional inertia on prepo-tent reality-based mental states interfering withfalse belief expression. Such an inhibitory controlaccount, however, has difficulty explaining why 3-year-olds in our study would also show a reverseeffect in the protagonist-perspective labelingcondition. In Experiment 2, although labeling thatspotlighted the protagonist’s naıve viewpointhelped 3-year-olds answer the false belief questionspecifically, the children were not able to step backfrom the label when answering the reality ques-tion—they mistakenly reported the true state ofaffairs as being the false belief of the other person.In other words, 3-year-olds showed a belief bias inthe protagonist-perspective labeled condition and areality bias in the other labeling conditions. The

4-year-olds in Experiment 1 did not show a beliefbias in the protagonist-perspective labeled condi-tion. Three-year-olds seemed to be swayed by theattentional dynamics of labels without necessarilyunderstanding how true and false beliefs are inte-grated at a deeper level (see also Moses & Flavell,1990; Prencipe & Zelazo, 2005). Our findings thatlabels simply changed the response bias of 3-year-olds on the explicit false belief task in a bottom-upfashion are also consistent with other labeling stud-ies using different paradigms (e.g., Muller et al.,2004; Muller et al. 2008). The results of Experiment2, then, qualify Kirkham et al.’s (2003) emphasisthat the mental reconfiguration of relevant settingsin the minds of 3-year-olds is complete and thatage-related changes in inhibition help childrenovercome a pull of attention to a salient or previ-ously relevant dimension in complex reasoningparadigms such as the false belief and DCCS tasks.Overall, our findings map onto Jacques and Ze-lazo’s (2005a, 2005b) view that labels influence 3-year-olds’ performance as a result of attention-lur-ing dynamics, but labels betoken the emergence ofcognitive flexibility by influencing 4-year-olds’ rea-soning at a conceptual level.

One reason why 3-year-olds in the protagonist-perspective labeled condition got stuck on thebelieved-in target location might be due to diffi-culty in disinhibiting the dominant perspective. Inthe protagonist-perspective condition, labeling onlythe believed-in location may have strengthened theactivation of false beliefs but, in addition, sup-pressed activation of true belief values. As a result,those latter values may be too low to be selectedwhen they become relevant for answering aboutreality. This form of negative priming experiencedby 3-year-olds in the protagonist-perspectivelabeled condition suggests that overly strong inhibi-tion of a default mental state may be a problem toovercome in the course of development. Notice,though, that this interpretation suggests that 3-year-olds are partly swayed by the push and pullof labels because of too much inhibition (see Muller,Dick, Gela, Overton, & Zelazo, 2006). FollowingJacques and Zelazo’s (2005a, 2005b) account of cog-nitive flexibility, however, it is precisely becausethere are age-related changes in how labels facili-tate an explicit and sophisticated conceptualizationof the representational nature of belief that 4-year-olds’ task performance is unbounded and lessswayed by relative activation levels between thereality- and belief-based perspectives.

Nonetheless, 4-year-olds could have simplyattributed a false belief to the protagonist’s action


in a manner that was consistent with what waslabeled. If 4-year-olds do go beyond being depen-dent upon the localized attentional dynamics oflanguage, the labeling induced qualitative changesin representation and reflection should lead themto generalize their cognitive flexibility to new mate-rials without any labeling support (Jacques &Zelazo, 2005b; Muller et al., 2008). Instead of label-ing working in a bottom-up fashion, Experiment 3revealed that 4-year-olds in the fully labeled andprotagonist-perspective labeled conditions wereable to generalize their successful performancefrom the labeling false belief task context to thelabel-free context. Hence, there appears to be a gen-uine changing role of language on false beliefunderstanding that is partly age dependent. Fromabout 4 years of age, labels scaffold preschoolers’cognitive flexibility over explicit false belief taskvariants by inducing changes to the nature of therepresentations that they are using. As such, ourfindings complement research using different meth-odologies indicating that children with better cogni-tive flexibility skills also use more abstractconceptual representations (e.g., Blaye & Jacques,2009; Jacques, 2001; Muller et al., 2008; Synder &Munakata, 2010).

Our findings challenge the expression basedview that labeling improves performance by offset-ting the requirement of executive inhibition in falsebelief tasks. However, our results do not do generaldamage to inhibitory control accounts. First, thereare potentially many different sources of inhibitorydifficulty other than labeling (e.g., the child’s ownknowledge of the true state of affairs, the physicalsalience of objects or containers, pointing accuratelyto where objects actually are) (Carlson et al., 1998).Second, false belief understanding may be morethan just a matter of expression; a certain level ofinhibitory control (and working memory) may benecessary, at least in part, for the emergence of expli-cit representational knowledge of belief (Carlson &Moses, 2001; Low, 2010; Moses, 2001; Perner, Lang,& Kloo, 2002).

Overall, there seems to be different ways inwhich labeling operates to produce age-relatedchanges in false belief theory of mind understand-ing. Labeling only the protagonist’s perspectivepushed 3-year-olds to disengage from reality andattend to reality-incongruent informational statesbut did not lead to an integrated representationalunderstanding of mind on the explicit false belieftask. Attention to the content of a protagonist’snoncanonical perspective may still be importantinsofar as it provides data input to the cognitive

system so that top-down representations integrat-ing true and false beliefs may be subsequentlyemergent (Berthiaume, Onishi, & Shultz, 2008).Maturity in the lateral areas of the prefrontal cortexthat are involved in handing representations ofvarying complexity, around 4 years, may thenallow children to cash in on labels encouraging theformulation of explicit and sophisticated conceptu-alizations of belief (Bunge & Zelazo, 2006). In thisway, sophisticated conceptual representations mayalso make flexible inhibition and refocusing possi-ble from a top-down level. Jacques and Zelazo’s(2005a, 2005b) account of cognitive flexibility byincorporating elements of inhibition and attentionalinertia and growth of complex and conscious repre-sentations captures the breadth of our findingsbearing on the ages and circumstances by whichlabeling affects explicit false belief judgments.

We are mindful that Jacques, Zelazo, and col-leagues view language to play an important role ininducing, specifically, if–if–then rule representa-tions to assist with cognitive flexibility. Our find-ings cannot speak directly to whether labeling onthe explicit false belief task mediated the formula-tion of rules per se that captured the intentionalactivities of the self and other in a single represen-tational system. Our findings do, however, maponto Jacques and Zelazo (2005a, 2005b) macro pre-dictions of how labels are typically operative inproducing age-related changes; labeling bringsabout the adoption of a reflective reconceptualiza-tion of perspective settings at about 4 years of ageso that thought becomes less rigid and more flexi-ble. Insofar as labeling the nondominant perspec-tive makes children’s problem solving on theexplicit false belief task become increasingly repre-sentational and subjective, and this differs withdevelopmental level, our findings complementother levels of analyses suggesting that 4-year-oldsalso start to show cognitive flexibility when theyunderstand perspective or acquire a theory ofbelief-desire psychology (e.g., Perner, Stummer,Sprung, & Doherty, 2002; Wellman et al., 2001). Tothat extent, our context generalization findings sug-gesting that labels did not lead to older children’scorrect false belief judgments by only biasing atten-tion but also helped with information explicitationand reflection are consistent with the broader litera-ture pointing to important transitions in conceptualunderstanding occurring at about 4 years.

However, studies measuring infants and youngpreschoolers’ looking fixations or anticipatory look-ing in spontaneous response tasks suggest thatearly false belief understanding may be present in


some rudimentary and implicit (unconscious) formas early as 13 months to 2 years of age (Baillargeon,Scott, & He, 2010). Our labeling findings may befavorable to the view that while implicit knowledgemay be a foundational cornerstone for explicit (con-scious) false belief reasoning, a certain level of exec-utive function and language abilities may bridgethe emergence of explicit understanding (Low,2010). Given that simple semantic descriptors iden-tifying the content of relevant perspectivesappeared to scaffold complex conceptual reconfigu-rations in 4-year-olds’ false belief reasoning, lin-guistic structures varying in complexity andspecificity may be involved in conscious flexibilityin shifting from one response perspective toanother (Milligan et al., 2007). To the extent that theemergence of explicit false belief understanding isopen to input from multifaceted language and exec-utive function components, the current labelingfindings have significant empirical and theoretic fitwith different levels of analysis interested in howgrowth in reflection makes possible significant cog-nitive advances.

In conclusion, the effects of labeling on explicitfalse belief task performance appear to be complexand dependent on the child’s developmental level.Labeling of reality-incongruent informational stateshelps 3-year-olds inhibit prepotent reality biasesand redirect attention to the nonveridical content ofpeople’s minds without necessarily providing asophisticated conceptual structure. However, label-ing of reality-incongruent informational statesinduces a sophisticated conceptual structure in theminds of 4-year-olds to the extent that false beliefdecision making is flexible and generalizable. Falsebelief understanding is more than just a matter ofexpression: Our results suggest that language andexecutive functioning may interact to help childrendevelop a deeper conceptualization of the represen-tational nature of belief.

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