Sally returns, and the child is asked what Sally thinks is in the box. Children younger than 3 say “pencils”, children older than 4 say “candy”.
I really hope the test is not merely to ask such a question, since that mixes in a test of language mastery with the fundamental test. Better that it be a test that elicits behavior that reveals the child’s belief about the other person’s belief, such as a game where the successful strategy happens to involve fooling the other person or taking opportunistic advantage of a false belief. Better still that there be different tests that test for the belief in different ways.
After making the above point I decided to Google the issue. I located a study that purports to show:
Results from these experiments seem to demonstrate that 3-year-old children may not understand the relevant sense of the word “think,” and therefore, that the common version of the paradigm of the familiar container and the unexpected object is not suitable for assessing their understanding of false belief.
This “common version” is as follows:
The children are then asked what they originally thought the container held, and what another container will hold.
So the “common version” involves asking them questions, i.e. testing using language, which is what I was criticizing above.
(This is about past-self-belief-attribution rather than other-person-belief-attribution, but the study has the same implication for both.)
By the way, those referred-to results about past-self-belief-attribution suggests that the fundamental change, if any, that occurs in children is not other-mind-belief-attribution, but self-or-other-mind-belief-attribution—that is, belief attribution per se, rather than merely other-minds belief attribution. As a result, I would take slight issue with:
Our ability to visualize other minds is imperfect.
This statement implies a contrast between visualizing self-mind and visualizing other-minds, whereas the experimental results seem to show (if they show anything—the language issue needs to be dealt with) that our skill at visualizing own-mind and other-mind matures in parallel, with the same significant advance between 3 and 4. It seems likely that these are at bottom the same skill.
(What I suspect is that nonverbal tests will show the same maturation from 3 to 4.)
Sally returns, and the child is asked what Sally thinks is in the box. Children younger than 3 say “pencils”, children older than 4 say “candy”.
I really hope the test is not merely to ask such a question, since that mixes in a test of language mastery with the fundamental test. Better that it be a test that elicits behavior that reveals the child’s belief about the other person’s belief, such as a game where the successful strategy happens to involve fooling the other person or taking opportunistic advantage of a false belief. Better still that there be different tests that test for the belief in different ways.
After making the above point I decided to Google the issue. I located a study that purports to show:
This “common version” is as follows:
So the “common version” involves asking them questions, i.e. testing using language, which is what I was criticizing above.
(This is about past-self-belief-attribution rather than other-person-belief-attribution, but the study has the same implication for both.)
By the way, those referred-to results about past-self-belief-attribution suggests that the fundamental change, if any, that occurs in children is not other-mind-belief-attribution, but self-or-other-mind-belief-attribution—that is, belief attribution per se, rather than merely other-minds belief attribution. As a result, I would take slight issue with:
Our ability to visualize other minds is imperfect.
This statement implies a contrast between visualizing self-mind and visualizing other-minds, whereas the experimental results seem to show (if they show anything—the language issue needs to be dealt with) that our skill at visualizing own-mind and other-mind matures in parallel, with the same significant advance between 3 and 4. It seems likely that these are at bottom the same skill.
(What I suspect is that nonverbal tests will show the same maturation from 3 to 4.)