Do young children track other's beliefs, or merely their perceptual access? An interactive, anticipatory measure of early theory of mind.

ABSTRACT: This paper aimed to contribute to answering three questions. First, how robust and reliable are early implicit measures of false belief (FB) understanding? Second, do these measures tap FB understanding rather than simpler processes such as tracking the protagonist's perceptual access? Third, do implicit FB tasks tap an earlier, more basic form of theory of mind (ToM) than standard verbal tasks? We conducted a conceptual replication of Garnham & Perner's task (Garnham and Perner 2001 Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 19, 413-432) simultaneously measuring children's anticipatory looking and interactive behaviours toward an agent with a true or FB (N = 81, M = 40 months). Additionally, we implemented an ignorance condition and a standard FB task. We successfully replicated the

SUBMITTER: Barone P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9533367 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature