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

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Roshan Rai, Peter Mitchell

Abstract

A total of 153 children (excluding those who erred on control questions), mainly 5 and 7 years of age, participated in two experiments that involved tests of false belief. In the task, the sought entity was first at Location 1 and then, unknown to the searching protagonist, it moved to Location 2. In Experiment 1, performance was well below ceiling in 5-year-olds when the sought entity was a person, and this contrasted with a task in which the sought entity was a physical object. Performance was especially inaccurate when the sought person moved of his or her own volition rather than when the sought person was requested to move by a third party. Interestingly, 5-year-olds were more likely to nominate Location 1 when asked where the searching protagonist would look first than when asked what he or she would do next. In Experiment 2, however, 5-year-olds also tended to nominate Location 1 following a question that included the word "first" even in a test of true belief--a patently incorrect response. Altogether, the results suggest that 5-year-old children have considerable difficulty with a test of false belief when the sought entity is a person acting under his or her own volition. This suggests that 5-year-olds' handle on stat...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 16, 2011·Journal of Experimental Child Psychology·Ruth M FordLynsey M Herdman
Jan 21, 2010·Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines·Nurit Yirmiya, Tony Charman
Sep 13, 2020·Cognitive Science·Christian HoyosDedre Gentner
Mar 5, 2015·Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica·A NazarovM C McKinnon
Mar 28, 2017·Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders·Célia RasgaRuth M J Byrne
Sep 29, 2021·Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development·William V FabriciusTracy L Spinrad

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