Saltmarsh Mitchell Robinson 1995

8/8/2019 Saltmarsh Mitchell Robinson 1995

1/32

ELSEVIER Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325COGNITIONRealism and children's early grasp of mentalrepresentation: belief-based judgements in the statechange taskRebecca Saltmarsh a Peter Mitchell b*, Elizabeth Robinson b"Department of Psychology, University College of Swansea, Singleton Park,

Swansea SA2 8PP, UKbSchool of Psychology, University of Birmingham, PO Box 363, Birmingham BI5 2TT,UKReceived January 10, 1994, final version accepted April 26, 1995AbstractIn a standard deceptive box procedure, children aged around 3 years typically failto acknowledge their own prior false beliefs. For example, they judge incorrectlythat they had initially thought a Smarties tube contained pencils after discoveringthese to be the actual content. Wimmer and Hart (1991) showed that children were

more likely to answer correctly in a variant of this task known as a "state change",procedure. In this task, they saw that a container held its expected content (sotheinitial belief was true) before this was exchanged for something atypical. Thisappears to offer powerful evidence suggesting that children who fail the standardtask do not understand about belief. However, we argue against this view. In a seriesof 4 experiments, we show that when children see the expected contents before theseare swapped for something atypical, this not only makes it easier to report thei

r ownand a puppet's initial true belief but also a puppet's current false belief. Theresultsare consistent with the "reality masking hypothesis", according to which facilitationis due to the belief option being linked with a physical counterpart in the statechange procedure.1. IntroductionThe results of a great deal of research into early conceptual developmentsuggest that a radical shift occurs around the time of the child's fourthbirthday, culminating in the acquisition of the concept of belief as distinct

* Corresponding author.0010-0277/95/$09.50 . 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reservedSSD1 0010-0277(95)00675-3


2/32

298 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325from reality (e.g, Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner & Davies, 1991;Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987; Sullivan & Winner, 1991; Wimmer &Perner, 1983). This small yet profound insight we are told the childexperiences, supposedly heralds a giant step into the metarepresentationaldomain sufficient to credit the child thereafter with a theory of mind similar

in form if not content to that of an adult (e.g., Perner, 1988, 1991).A number of researchers oppose this view by attempting to show that,young children can succeed in acknowledging false belief in certain favour-able contexts (see below). The ensuing controversy has now assumed acentral position in research into the child's early theory of mind. If we showthat young children can acknowledge false belief in favourable contexts,prior to passing a standard test (e.g., the deceptive box task devised byPerner et al., 1987), then perhaps the view that the development of a theoryof mind involves a radical conceptual shift need no longer stand. Converse-ly, if it turned out that demonstrations of early understanding of false beliefwere artifactual, then the radical shift suggestion would remain the bestaccount of development.

Some attempts to demonstrate early understanding of false belief havebeen subjected to apparently valid criticism. Research by Chandler andcolleagues (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Hala, Chandler, & Fritz, 1991)appeared to reveal understanding of deception (implanting a false belief inanother's mind) well before children pass standard false belief tasks.However, other research has suggested that those results were over-inter-preted, and that genuine understanding of deception does not precedesuccess on standard false belief tasks (Ruffman, Olson, Ash, & Keenan,1993; Sodian, 1991; Sodian, Taylor, Harris, & Perner, 1991). Anotherattempt to demonstrate early acknowledgement of false belief was made byBartsch and Wellman (1989). They reported that children were better ableto explain wrong search behaviour in a protagonist by reference to falsebelief than they were to predict wrong search in a protagonist who they

could infer held a false belief. However, this research has been criticized(e.g., Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990), and the results were only weaklysupported by those of Moses and Flavell (1990; Moses, 1993). In particular,Perner argued that children may have been acknowledging that theprotagonist was thinking of the desired item (akin to daydreaming) whilstvisiting an empty location, but not appreciating that the protagonist thoughtthat (i.e., a false belief) the item was there.A further attempt to demonstrate early acknowledgement of false beliefhas been to show that children simply misconstrue the test question to referto what they or a protagonist thought once the current reality had beenrevealed. For example, in the deceptive box task, perhaps children assumedthat the experimenter was asking what the next child would think was in theSmarties tube once he or she had looked inside and seen the pencils.Similarly, in the unexpected transfer test, perhaps children assumed that theexperimenter was asking where Maxi would look eventually, having found


3/32

-


4/32

300 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325belief had been deleted. What remains then is reference to reality. Hence,when asked about belief the child, would not respond randomly, but wouldshow a positive preference to report current reality. This explanation ofchildren's errors obviates the need to cite a reality bias to account for theirdistinctive judgements.

Generally, then, any attempt to reveal early competence, and therebychallenge the radical shift view (e.g., Perner, 1988, 1991; Wimmer & Hartl,1991), would not be fully adequate if it only seemed to show that childrencan pass a given task earlier than a standard test of false belief. What is alsorequired is an alternative explanation of how children pass a state changetask, while failing a standard task.Superficially, it seems in particular that the state change results pose aserious problem for our, "reality masking hypothesis" (e.g., Mitchell, 1994;Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Robinson, 1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994,1995). This hypothesis posits that young children prefer to base judgementsof belief on reality, a preference which masks any early insight into mind

that the child might have (Fodor, 1992; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992; Mitchell,1994; Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Mitchell & Saltmarsh, 1994; Robinson,1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994, 1995; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, &Tidswell, 1991). For example, Russell et al. (1991) argue that when beliefand assumed reality are in conflict, reality wins because it is more salient tothe young child. According to Fodor (1992), this is so because making aninference about a belief according to assumed reality makes fewer process-ing demands on the young child. A related point is that since simple factualbeliefs would normally be true, a short cut to judging belief is to reportreality (Leslie, 1994; Mitchell, 1994). Moreover, Mitchell (1994) suggeststhat children are born with a higher value-weighting for assumed reality thanbelief as a useful heuristic that allows them efficiently to come to terms withthe characteristics of their physical environment. The assumption is that it is

more important to understand the physical world before we apply ourlimited information processing resources to the psychological environment.Hence, reality can be described as assuming a physical salience for the childthat would mask any fledgling understanding of belief; beliefs would be lesssalient than reality by virtue of their lack of a physical existence.Leslie (1994; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) distinguishes between errors due tofailure to understand about belief (which arise from abnormality in a"Theory of Mind Module", ToMM) and errors due to focusing attention onan inappropriate feature of the task such as the current content in adeceptive box task (which arise from an undeveloped "Selection Processor"module, SP). Clinically normal preschoolers, according to Leslie, have awell/developed ToMM but as yet an undeveloped SP. As a consequence oftheir undeveloped SP, they fail false photo tests as well as false belief tests.The false photo test requires the child to anticipate that a scene in adeveloping photo will be as it was at the time the film was exposed ratherthan as it is currently, but requires no understanding of belief (Zaitchik,


5/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 3011990; also, Robinson, Nye, & Thomas, 1994). In contrast, older childrenwith autism fail false belief tests but pass false photo tests (Charman &Baron-Cohen, 1992; Leekam & Perner, 1991; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992),suggesting they have an intact SP but an abnormal ToMM. This account isfortified by the reality masking hypothesis, which may begin to provide an

account of why the SP fails to select the correct information for the child'sinference machine when beliefs are being inferred.Evidence to support the masking hypothesis arises from Mitchell andLacohee's (1991) "posting procedure", in which children posted a picture ofwhat they thought a deceptive box contained when they first saw it. Childrenwere better able to recall their initial false belief under this condition thanina standard non-posting procedure or in a procedure involving the posting ofirrelevant pictures. We argued that the initial belief was given a physicalsalience matching that of the true content of the deceptive box, because ithad a physical counterpart in the form of the posted picture. In contrast,verbal (Riggs & Robinson, 1995) or other non-physical clues (Robinson &

Goold, 1992) to initial belief did not yield facilitation, suggesting specificallythat it is the physical salience of current reality and lack of physical salienceof initial belief that features heavily in children's realist errors.Another physical token of false belief is the behaviour an actor displayswhen searching in the wrong place for an item due to a misapprehension.This situation was investigated by Bartsch and Wellman (1989) and byMoses and Flavell (1990) but their results were equivocal, as mentionedearlier. However, we (Robinson & Mitchell, 1995) have used a differentprocedure following a similar theme that has yielded results consistent withthe reality masking hypothesis-results that are not susceptible to thecriticisms of the earlier work. In our research, children heard a story about

identical and visually indistinguishable twins, one of whom was absent whentheir ball was moved from one drawer to another. Children who failed astandard test of false belief nonetheless frequently judged that the twin wholater searched for the ball where it used to be, was the one who had beenabsent when it was moved. We argued that this twin's wrong search servedas a physical counterpart to his false belief, and was responsible for theobserved facilitation. This interpretation is not susceptible to Perner'scriticism of Bartsch and Wellman (1989) that young children are only willingto acknowledge that someone searching in an empty place is merely thinkingof the desired item, akin to daydreaming. Children succeeded in linking aprotagonist with prior absence at an epistemically critical moment, whichreveals their understanding that the protagonist held a false belief. This isbecause absence of access to an earlier critical event is relevant to falsebelief but not relevant to daydreaming: One can daydream about (think of)an item in a place where in fact it is not, but there is no reason to link thisdaydreaming to an earlier event of epistemic relevance. Since children didmake the link, it seems they were genuinely acknowledging false belief.Despite the evidence supporting the reality masking hypothesis, it begins


6/32

302 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325to appear implausible given the state change results. As suggested above, ifcurrent reality is salient to the child, as the hypothesis posits, perhaps theyshould refer to this in the state change procedure just as much as in thestandard deceptive box task. Moreover, just as Leslie and Thaiss (1992)hypothesize that a faulty SP would lead the child wrongly to attend to the

current situation in making judgements in Zaitchik's (1990) false photo test,so we should expect the same in the state change task. Given that childrenvery often give a correct judgement in the state change task, this couldseriously undermine the masking hypothesis (but see below). For this andother reasons mentioned above, the state change procedure is an impressivecontrol supporting the idea that a concept of belief (and thus perhaps thebasis of a representational theory of mind) is not available to children untilthey are shown to pass a standard test of false belief. A corollary is that agrasp of belief and indeed a theory of mind, seems to emerge in a stage-likeradical conceptual shift.However, we now consider the possibility that correct judgements in statechange actually offer powerful support for the reality masking hypothesis

rather than being inconsistent with it. There is a clear parallel between thestate change procedure and the posting procedure devised by Mitchell andLacohee (1991). In both, the initial belief, based on the picture on the box,is subsequently given a physical counterpart: the picture posted in theposting procedure, and the expected contents in the state change procedure.If then, the picture helps children resist the attentional magnetism af currentreality in the posting procedure, we might expect that seeing the expectedcontents would serve the same purpose in the state change procedure.According to this suggestion, children find it easier to report their initialbelief in the state change procedure than in the standard deceptive box taskbecause the belief has a physical counterpart in the former but not thelatter.In sum, Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) state change procedure confuses a

test of acknowledging true belief with a test in which that belief is endowedwith a physical counterpart. We aimed to devise a kind of state changeprocedure which incorporated a test of false belief in order to dissociate thetruth of the belief being judged from its physical basis. If facilitationremained, then the critical component of state change would appear not tobe the truth of the belief, but that the belief has a reality counterpart. Wecreated a "false belief state change": as in the Wimmer and Hartl statechange task, children formed an expectation about the contents of a box,had that confirmed, and then saw the expected content being changed forsomething atypical. In contrast to Wimmer and Hartl's version, however, weasked children to infer the belief of another person who had not seen eitherof the box's contents and who therefore held a false belief based on theexternal appearance of the container. Hence, children still had the supportof a physical counterpart when they were asked to infer the other's falsebelief because initially they saw a physical counterpart of what would later


7/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 303become the other's false belief. Consequently, if the masking account iscorrect, there should be an increase in correct judgements compared with astandard test of false belief.In order to test the validity of this argument we went through thefollowing stages:

(1) We checked the replicability of Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) findingthat acknowledging own prior belief is easier in a true belief state changethan in a standard deceptive box task. The children were asked "When youfirst saw the box, before we opened it, what did you think was inside?"Were there more correct answers when children saw the expected contentsbeing swapped for something atypical, compared with when they saw onlythe atypical contents?(2) Next we asked children to judge the initial belief of a puppet who satalongside them when the unopened box was first shown, and so shared theirexpectations. This was to check that the state change procedure helpedchildren to judge what the puppet, as well as they themselves, had thoughtinitially. There is no obvious reason why any state change facilitation should

not generalize from self to other, whether we accept Wimmer and Hartl's(1991) account or that arising from the reality masking hypothesis. In the"other's initial belief" version the child judged "When (puppet) first sawthe box, before we opened it, what did he think was inside?" Again, ouraim was to check whether there were more correct answers when childrensaw the expected contents being swapped for something atypical, ratherthan just seeing the atypical contents.(3) Next, we introduced a condition (false belief state change, describedabove) in which the child was asked not about the puppet's initial truebelief, but about the puppet's current false belief. The puppet was absentwhen the box's expected contents were shown to the child and thenswapped, so by the end of the trial the puppet held a false belief about thecontents of the box. Children were asked "What does (puppet) think is

inside the box now?" Would children find it easier to infer the puppet'scurrent false belief, than in a standard deceptive box procedure in which theexpected contents had not been seen and so had no physical counterpart?The standard task was procedurally identical to false belief state changeexcept that the child did not see the expected content initially because thebox contained something atypical right from the beginning.If correct judgements were more common in the false belief state changetask than in a standard deceptive box task, it would be consistent with thereality masking hypothesis. Conversely, such a result would be inconsistentwith the views of Wimmer and Hartl (1991), and other radical shift theorists(e.g., Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, 1988, 1991; Sullivan & Winner,1991), who would predict that our false belief state change task wouldprovoke just as many realist errors as a standard deceptive box task. Theywould predict this since if the child lacked a concept of belief he or she


8/32

304 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325would interpret the test question "What does (puppet) think is inside thebox now?" as "What is inside the box now?", and so would report the box'scurrent content.(4) Finally, we checked directly on Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) assump-tion that children answer correctly about their own prior belief in the true

belief state change task not by referring to their prior belief, but rather byreferring to the initial reality. Children without a concept of belief, it isargued, must gloss the question "What did you think was in there?" as"What was in there?" In our final experiment we tested this using avariation of the state change procedure in which prior belief differed frominitial reality, so we could tell which of these children were referring to inanswer to the test question. Children formed an expectation about what wasinside the box, and saw that the box contained something unexpected thatwas then swapped for another atypical content as the child watched. Finallywe asked children "When I first showed you the box, what did you thinkwas inside?" If they answer by referring to the prior reality, as argued byWimmer and Hartl, they should report the first content they saw, rather

than either their initial belief before they saw inside the box (i.e., the ex-pected content) or the current content. In contrast, the reality masking hypo-thesis predicts that children would answer by reference to current contentas much under this condition as under a standard deceptive box procedure,since their initial belief has no physical counterpart to help them recall it.A summary of conditions and questions presented to children in thevarious experiments is shown in Table 1.EXPERIMENT 1In the first study we checked on the replicability of Wimmer and Hartl's(1991) finding that children answered correctly more frequently in a truebelief state change task than in a standard false belief deceptive box task. Inthe former, the child's (and the puppet's) initial belief was confirmed truewhen the experimenter opened the container to reveal the expected content.

This was then exchanged for something atypical as the child watched.Finally the child was asked what he or she had thought was in the containerat the beginning. We ventured beyond Wimmer and Hartl's procedure toexamine whether state change facilitation occurred when children judgedthe initial belief of another (a puppet) who saw the unopened container atthe same time as the child, so both child and puppet had the same initialbelief. There is no obvious reason why this should not be the case,whichever interpretation of state change facilitation is correct. However, weneeded to check on this before trying a condition in which the puppet has afalse belief.


9/32

-

-

-


10/32

-


11/32

=


12/32

=


13/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 3095. ResultsOnly one child judged the current content of the box by reporting itsinitial content in the state change trial. All reported the current contentcorrectly in the deceptive box trial. Because of children's lack of confusionbetween initial and current content, this cannot account for the facilitation

in correct belief attributions following the state change rigmarole that wewitnessed in the first experiment. This sample was comparable to those ofthe previous experiment, as indicated by the prevalence of realist errors onthe deceptive box trial in which we asked a question about the puppet'scurrent false belief (trial 3). Nineteen of the 22 children tested gave a realistresponse by reporting the current content of the box, when it would havebeen correct to respond with the stereotypical content.EXPERIMENT 2In the second study, as in trial (3) of the subsidiary study, we askedchildren what the puppet thinks now, but this time we used a state changeprocedure. In other words, the child saw the box's expected content initially

and also saw this exchanged for something atypical. After the box wasclosed once again, the puppet appeared and the child was asked what thepuppet thinks is inside the box now. Hence while a past tense question, asused in Experiment 1, gives rise to true (past) belief state change, wordingthe question in the present transforms the same task into false (current)belief state change. To amplify, since the puppet was absent when theexpected contents were revealed and then exchanged, the puppet (but notthe child) holds a false belief at the time the child is asked the present tensequestion about the puppet's belief. The only difference between this and thedeceptive box task was that in the latter the box contained somethingatypical all along, so it was a closely matched test of false belief in allrespects but one.

From Wimmer and Hartl's (1991; also Perner, 1988, 1991) account, wecan predict that shifting the tense of the test question from past to present inthe false belief state change procedure would be sufficient to increase theincidence of realist errors. This is because if the child ignored the word,"think", and glossed the question as "What is in the box now?", as Wimmerand Hartl suggest they do, they would report the current content andthereby commit a realist error. In contrast, the reality masking hypothesispredicts continued facilitation with the present tense question in false beliefstate change, because what is to become the puppet's false belief (e.g.,toothpaste) has previously been endorsed with a physical counterpart, somaking it more accessible to the child as a response option when judging thepuppet's current false belief. This element was absent from the deceptivebox task, which was identical to false belief state change otherwise. Hence,


14/32

--=


15/32

R. Saltrnarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 311Table 3Numbers and percentages(in parentheses)of childrengivingcorrect and incorrectjudgementson false belief state change and deceptivebox trials in Experiment 2False belief state change

Deceptive box Correct Incorrectcorrect 8 (19) 2 (5)incorrect 12 (29) 2(I (48)generate a level of facilitation comparable with the true belief state changeprocedure investigated in Experiment 1. We made a direct comparison in thenext study.EXPERIMENT 3Children who answer correctly in the false belief state change procedurewith a present tense test question must do so by referring to the puppet'scurrent false belief rather than to current reality. Our aim in Experiment 3was to check whether the frequency of correct judgements in this equalledthat for a true belief state change task with a past tense question. To achieve

this, we presented identical tasks to two different groups of children, butphrased the test question differently-either in present or past tense. Thetask was that employed in Experiments 1 and 2, in which the child saw thebox's expected content initially and also saw this subsequently exchanged forsomething atypical. After the box was closed once again, the puppetappeared and the child was asked either what the puppet thinks is inside thebox now or what he thought was in it when he first saw it. According toWimmer and Hartl (1991), children gloss these questions as "What is in thebox now?" and "When the puppet first saw the box, what was inside it?" Ifthey are right, then children would report the first content when asked aboutthe puppet's past belief and the final content when asked about the puppet'scurrent belief. Since the puppet's belief matches reality regarding the pasttense question, Wimmer and Hartl would predict correct judgements, but

since there is a mismatch between the puppet's current belief and currentreality regarding the present tense question, they would predict incorrectrealist judgements. At the very least, they would predict more correctjudgements for the past than present tense question wording. Effectively,Wimmer and Hartl's prediction would be that a judgement of true beliefwould be easier for children than a judgement of false belief.In contrast, the reality masking hypothesis predicts a distinctly differentpattern of results. For both question wordings, the correct judgement is toreport the stereotypical content of the box (e.g., toothpaste). In both cases,this potential response option has been supported by a reality counterpart asfar as the child is concerned: she initially saw toothpaste in the box which


16/32

=

=

-


17/32

==

=

=

= = =


18/32

=

=


19/32

= = = =


20/32

--

--

= = =


21/32

= = =

=


22/32

318 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325An incidental feature of the results was that unlike most publishedstudies, we found no age trend; older children were just as likely as youngerones to commit realist errors. In this respect, our results more stronglyresemble those reported by Wimmer and Perner (1983), who concluded thatchildren specifically below 5 years of age have difficulty acknowledging false

belief. Evidently, the age at which children acknowledge false belief in astandard test is not so rigid as some authors have suggested (e.g., Sullivan &Winner, 1991). A moral we can draw from this is that it is likely to be morefruitful to focus on the theoretical significance of contrasts in children'sperformance between tasks rather than focusing exclusively on the discreteage of acquisition of a concept of false beliefGENERAL DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONSWe have replicated Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) finding that some childrenwho fail a standard deceptive box test of false belief are nonetheless able togive a correct judgment in a true belief state change task. However,contrary to Wimmer and Hartl's claim, it seems that children do not treatthe test question in the state change procedure ("What did you think was in

here . . . ?") as a question about prior reality ("What was in here . . . ?")rather than prior belief. If they did, in Experiment 4 they would haveanswered the question "What did you think was inside?" by referring to thefirst of the two unexpected contents of the deceptive box. In fact, childrendid this much less frequently than when they were asked "What wasinside?", and the most common error was to refer to the current content,which is a typical realist error.Furthermore, in Experiment 2, children who saw the expected contentbefore this was swapped for something atypical were more likely to give acorrect judgment of a puppet's current false belief (when asked a presenttense question) than children who had seen only the atypical content in astandard false belief task. This facilitation was just as potent as when theywere asked about the puppet's prior true belief (Experiment 3) in a standard

state change task (with a past tense question). The present tense questioncannot be glossed as a question about past reality, so Wimmer and Hartl(1991) must be wrong in their reasoning that the true belief state changequestion (past tense) is easy because correct answers are based on priorreality.Furthermore, this result from Experiment 3 suggests that children have nomore difficulty acknowledging false belief than true belief contrary toWellman's (1990) suggestion. According to Wellman young children dopossess an early grasp of the concept of mind, but the case of false beliefposes a special problem for them. In other words, he argued (contrary toWimmer a Hartl, 1991) that young children do understand true beliefs asrepresentations of reality rather than reality itself. Wellman supposed that


23/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 319children's difficulty specifically with false belief stemmed from their adher-ence to what he calls a "copy theory". This idea is that children do notexpect any beliefs to be false because they do not take into consideration therole of sensory interpretation as an interface between mind and reality.Instead, so Wellman claims, children assume reality copies itself faithfully

into the mind. Our results speak against this argument: the truth of thebelief in question was irrelevant to the incidence of correct judgements inExperiment 3.More positively, our findings offer further support for the reality maskinghypothesis. We suggest that success at inferring beliefs (true or false)emerges gradually over the preschool years, at least partly as a function ofthe waning of an excessive reality orientation. Tasks that offer the child areality-based support in making judgements of belief ought to reveal anearly competence in understanding mind. This condition is satisfied byMitchell and Lachohee's (1991) posting procedure and Robinson andMitchell's (1995) development of Bartsch and Wellman's (1989) task. In thelatter, a protagonist's search in an empty location provides physical support

in the form of a behavioural counterpart to the protagonist's false belief.In the Introduction we drew a parallel between the physical embodimentof an initial belief supplied by the posting procedure (Mitchell & Lacohee,1991) and that supplied by the test box initially holding its expected contentin a state change, thereby providing a physical counterpart to that initialbelief. We suggest that state change owes its facilitating effect to the fact thatthe belief being judged has a physical embodiment.However, a follow-up to the posting study, carried out by Freeman andLacohee (cited in Freeman, 1994) offers data that superficially seemanomalous with this view. They contrasted a condition in which childrenposted a picture of their initial belief (e.g., a picture of Smarties) with onein

which they posted a sample (e.g., they posted an actual Smartie). Althoughboth procedures yielded significantly more correct belief judgements than astandard test of false belief, the facilitation was significantly greater forchildren's picture posting than sample posting. If children are helped toacknowledge false belief when there is a physical counterpart (our suggestedexplanation for the facilitating effect of the state change procedure over thestandard task), why was performance not as good if not better in the sampleposting than picture posting?We suggest the following: when children posted a picture, they wereposting a token of what they believed the Smarties tube contained. Whenthey posted a sample, they did so perhaps with the assumption that this wasnot a Smartie from the tube that was the target of attention, since that tubewas apparently new and unopened, so the sample Smartie could not be frominside. Hence although children assumed the sample was similar to what wasin the tube that was the target of attention, perhaps they did not regard it asa token of what was in the tube. If the children did not regard the sample asa token of the content of the target tube, physical or otherwise, then it is not


24/32

320 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325surprising that there was a relative lack of facilitation in children's acknowl-edgement of false belief. A similar point is made by Perner et al. (1994). Incontrast, the presence of the expected content in the state change task didserve as a physical counterpart of the child's belief about the content of thatparticular box.

The results from our state change tasks allow us to discard a factor thatcould have been responsible for success in the posting task, namely aconcern to maintain cognitive consistency. In the posting procedure,children actively committed themselves physically to their initial belief byselecting and then posting a picture of what they (wrongly) thought the boxcontained (e.g., Smarties). A possibility raised by Mitchell and Lacohee(and also more generally by Moses, 1993, and Moses & Flavell, 1990) is thatchildren are motivated to maintain a cognitive consistency. In the postingprocedure, given that they recall having posted a picture of Smarties,presumably they would feel compelled to judge that they had believed thetube contained Smarties. It would be inconsistent to have posted a picture ofSmarties, only then to claim to have believed the tube contained pencils all

along.Of course, in a standard deceptive box procedure, it is also inconsistent tosay initially that the tube contains Smarties but then judge that they hadbelieved it contained pencils all along. However, in this case there is noremaining evidence to remind the child of his or her inconsistency. Indeed,children deny that they even said "Smarties" initially, and instead make arealist error just as frequently as when asked what they had thought (e.g.,Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991; Mitchell & Isaacs, 1994; Riggs & Robinson,1995; Wimmer & Hartl, 1991). A similar denial did not occur in the postingprocedure; children had little difficulty acknowledging that they had posteda picture of Smarties.This consistency account cannot explain why children perform better inthe false belief state change task than in a standard deceptive box task. In

the false belief state change task children did not even report the puppet'sinitial belief so there was no opportunity for experiencing an inconsistencywhen the puppet's current false belief was inferred. It seems that having thecorrect belief based option supported by a reality counterpart in the statechange procedure is in itself sufficient to promote correct attributions offalse belief. The present findings, then, offer support for the version of themasking hypothesis proposed by Mitchell and Robinson (Mitchell, 1994;Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Robinson, 1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994).Conversely, they offer no support for the version advocated most stronglyby Moses (1993; Moses & Flavell, 1990), which focuses on the possibilitythat children are motivated to maintain a cognitive and behaviouralconsistency.Specifying the locus of facilitation in this way leads us to predict that anunexpected transfer test of false belief (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) should beeasier for children than a deceptive box test (Perner et al. 1987). In the


25/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 321former, Maxi's false belief that the chocolate is stored in the red cupboardshould be easier for children to acknowledge because this had previouslybeen supported with a reality counterpart in that the chocolate really used tobe there (but now it is in the blue cupboard). There is no systematiccomparison between these two procedures reported in the published

literature, but note that for a fair comparison the deceptive box task wouldhave to be presented within a playpeople narrative. This is because the extraprocessing demands of following a narrative with playpeople in an un-expected transfer test might cancel out any advantage this procedure wouldotherwise have over a standard deceptive box procedure which gets the childinvolved directly.Indeed, Lewis (1994) reports data suggesting that if children are helped toovercome their difficulties in following a narrative, then they approachceiling performance in their correct attributions of false belief in anunexpected transfer test. Lewis argues that the only important impedimentto young children's acknowledgement of false belief is their difficulty withnarratives. That argument seems implausible to us because children display

difficulty with false belief in a deceptive box procedure that does not involvea narrative. The possibility that an unexpected transfer test of false belief iseasier for children when they are assisted to overcome their difficulties withnarrative is consistent with the reality masking hypothesis. Contrary toLewis, however, we focus on the protagonist's false belief having had acounterpart in reality (the chocolate was previously seen in the location thatforms the content of the protagonist's subsequent false belief) as the criticalfeature, rather than narrative per se.As children becomes less susceptible to a realist bias with increasing age,so they will eventually come to solve most tests of false belief unaided.However, if realism has the importance we assign to it, then we mightexpect to find vestiges of realism well beyond early childhood. We might

even expect subtle manifestations of realism in adult's judgements of falsebelief. Such effects are reported by Mitchell, Robinson, Isaacs, and Nye(1995). In a series of studies, adults watched videos in which a personreceived contradictory information. For example, he saw that a jug con-tained orange juice, but was later told that it contained milk. The adultsjudged what the person now believed the jug contained. We found that theirjudgements were biased in the direction of the information they themselvesassumed to be true: if they were told that the contents of the jug had beenchanged so the utterance was now true, then they tended to judge that theperson in the video would believe the utterance. In contrast, if the adultjudges themselves assumed that what had been seen in the jug was stillthere, they tended to judge that the person would disbelieve what he hadbeen told. That is, adults' judgements of whether or not a listener wouldbelieve an utterance were influenced by what they themselves assumed to betrue on the basis of information that was not available to the listener.Other evidence of a realist bias in adults has existed for some time under


26/32

-


27/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 323conceptual shift at approximately 4 years of age, provides an excessivelyrestrictive and limited perspective. The limitations are due both to atendency to focus rather rigidly on the age at which success is achieved, andalso to focus on a single underlying change, namely coming to understandabout beliefs in particular or about representations more broadly. In our

view, and according to the evidence summarized and presented here,acknowledging false belief owes at least as much to shedding a realist bias asit does to acquiring an understanding that people hold beliefs that can befalse.On the basis of the evidence currently available, we cannot decidewhether the strong claim can be made, that acknowledgement of false beliefis due only to a shedding of a realist bias, with little or no growth inunderstanding about beliefs during the preschool years (as presented byMitchell, 1994). This strong view would be largely consistent with Leslie'saccount (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) according to which ToMM is substan-tially developed in normal children by around 24 months of age. The realitymasking account helps to provide an explanation for why Leslie's SP fails to

select the correct information to feed into the child's inference machinewhen beliefs are inferred.The difficulty with making this strong claim is that although we haveshown that young children's correct judgements of false belief in anotherperson are promoted by initially subjecting the child to state change,nonetheless realist errors were common. We did not achieve anything likeceiling performance with the state change procedure. This might have beenbecause providing a physical counterpart to belief was insufficient to distractsome children away from current reality at the time they answered the testquestion. If so, the strong version of the masking hypothesis can bemaintained.Alternatively, it could be that providing a reality counterpart for thebelief-based option can only ever promote correct judgements in a subset of

children: those who have developed a sufficiently strong grasp of belief. Ifthis is correct, the masking account should be presented in a weaker form,according to which development consists not only negatively in a diminutionof the salience reality holds for the child, but also positively in a firmer graspof the concept of belief. A challenge for future work is to determinewhether the strong or the weaker version of the masking hypothesisprovides a more accurate account of the development of a theory of mind.AcknowledgementsThis research forms part of a PhD thesis (University of Wales) by the firstauthor. We are grateful to Ted Ruffman for making a suggestion which ledus to conduct Experiment 4.


28/32

324 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325ReferencesBartsch, K., & Wellman, H. (1989). Young children's attribution of action to beliefs anddesires. Child Development, 60, 946-964.Chandler, M., Fritz, A.S., & Hala, S. (1989). Small-scale deceit: deception as a

marker oftwo-, three-, and four-year-olds' early theories of mind. Child Development, 60,1263-1277.Charman, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1992). Understanding drawings and beliefs: A further testof the metarepresentation theory of autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33,1105-1112.Fischhoff, B., (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: the effect of outcome knowledge onjudgement under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and

Performance, 1, 288-299.Flavell, J.H., Green, F.L., & Flavell, E.R. (1986). Development of knowledge about theappearance-reality distinction. Monographs of the Society for Research in ChildDevelop-ment, Serial No. 212, 51(1).Fodor, J.A. (1992). A theory of the child's theory of mind. Cognition, 44, 283-296.Freeman, N.H. (1994). Associations and dissociations in theories of mind. In C.Lewis & P.Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind: Origins and development, (pp.95-111). Hove: Erlbaum.

Gopnik, A., & Astington, J.W. (1988). Children's understanding of representational changeand its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-realitydistinction.Child Development, 59, 26-37Gopnik, A. & Slaughter, V. (1991) Young children's understanding of changes in their mentalstates. Child Development, 62, 98-110.Hala, S., Chandler, M., & Fritz, A. (1991). Fledgling theories of mind: deception as a markerof 3-year-olds' understanding of false belief. Child Development, 62, 83-97.Leekam, S.R., & Perner, J. (1991). Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit?Cognition, 40, 203-218.Leslie, A.M. (1994). Pretending and believing: Issues in the theory of ToMM. Cognition, 50,211-238.Leslie, A.M., & Thaiss, L. (1992). Domain specificity in conceptual development:neuro-psychological evidence from autism. Cognition, 43, 225-251.Lewis, C. (1994). Episodes, events and narratives in the child's understanding of mind. In C.Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind: Origins anddevelopment(pp. 457-480). Hove: Erlbaum.

Lewis, C., & Osborne, A. (1990). Three-year-olds' problems with false belief: conceptualdeficit or linguistic artefact? Child Development, 61, 1514-1519.


29/32

Mitchell, P. (1994). Realism and early conception of mind: a synthesis of phylogenetic andontogenetic issues. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind:Origins and development. Hove: Erlbaum.Mitchell, P, & Isaacs, J.E. (1994). Understanding of verbal representation in children, with

autism: the case of referential opacity. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12,439-454.Mitchell, P., & Lacohee, H. (1991). Children's early understanding of false belief. Cognition,39, 107-127.Mitchell, P., Robinson, E.J., Isaacs, J.E., & Nye, RM. (1995) Contamination in reasoningabout false belief: an instance of realist bias in adults but not children. Cognition (in press).Mitchell, P., & Saltmarsh, R. (1994). Communicating, reading one's own mind andresisting

reality. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 13, 652-660.Moses, L.J. (1993). Young children's understanding of belief constraints on intention. CognitiveDevelopment, 8, 1-25.Moses, L.J., & Flavell, J.H. (1990). Inferring false beliefs from actions and reactions. ChildDevelopment, 61, 929-945.


30/32

R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 325Perner, J. (1988). Developing semantics for theories of mind: from propositionalattitudes tomental representation. In J.W. Astington, P.L. Harris, & D.R. Olson (Eds.), Developingtheories of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. London: MIT Press.Perner, J., & Davies, G. (1991). Understanding the mind as an active informationprocessor:Do young children have a "copy theory of mind"? Cognition, 39, 51-69.Perner, J., Baker, S., & Hutton, D. (1994). Prelief: the conceptual origins of belief andpretence. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind: Originsand development (pp. 261-286). Hove: Erlbaum.Perner, J., Leekam, S.R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds difficulty with false belief:the case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,

5, 125-137.Riggs, K., & Robinson, E.J. (1995) Making links between what people say and whattheythink. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, (in press).Robinson, E.J. (1994). What people say, what they think, and what is really thecase: children'sunderstanding of utterances as sources of knowledge. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.),Children's early understanding of mind: Origins and Development. Hove: Erlbaum.Robinson, E.J., & Goold, J. (1992). Young children's ability to report their ownsupersededbeliefs: Facilitation via physical embodiment. Unpublished manuscript, University of Bir-

mingham, UK.Robinson, E.J. & Mitchell, P. (1994). Young children's false belief reasoning: interpretation ofmessages is no easier than the classic task. Developmental Psychology, 30, 67-72.Robinson, E.J., & Mitchell, P. (1995). Masking of children's early understandingof therepresentational mind: backwards explanation versus prediction. Child Development 66,1022-1039.Robinson, E.J., Nye, R., & Thomas, G.V. (1994). Children's conceptions of the relationshipbetween pictures and their referents. Cognitive Development, 9, 165-191.Ruffman, T., Olson, D.R, Ash, T., & Keenan, T. (1993). The ABC's of deception: do youngchildren understand deception in the same way as adults? Developmental Psychology, 29,74-87.Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S. & TidsweU, T. (1991). The 'windows task' as a measureof strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. British Journal ofDevelopmentalPsychology, 9, 331-350.Siegal, M., & Beattie, K (1991). Where to look first for children's knowledge offalse beliefs.

Cognition, 38, 1-12.Sodian, B. (1991). The development of deception in young children. British Journal of


31/32

Developmental Psychology, 9, 173-188.Sodian, B., Taylor, C., Harris, P., & Perner, J. (1991). Early deception and thechild's theoryof mind: false trails and genuine markers. Child Development, 62, 468-483.Sullivan, K., & Winner, E. (1991). When 3-year-olds understand ignorance, falsebelief andrepresentational change. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 159-172

.Thouless, R.H. (1931). Phenomenal regression to the real object, II. British Journal afDevelopmental Psychology, 22, 1-30.Wellman, H.M. (1990). The child's theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Wimmer, H., & Hartl, M. (1991). Against the Cartesian view on mind: young children'sdifficulty with own false beliefs. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,9, 125-138.Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constrainingfunction of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognit

ion, 13,103-128.Zaitchik, D. (1990). When representation conflicts with reality: the preschooler's problem withfalse beliefs and "false" photographs. Cognition, 35, 41-68.


32/32

Saltmarsh Mitchell Robinson 1995

Documents

Transcript of Saltmarsh Mitchell Robinson 1995