ERIC Number: EJ989444
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Mar
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0261-510X
EISSN: N/A
2.5-Year-Olds Succeed at a Verbal Anticipatory-Looking False-Belief Task
He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renee
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, v30 n1 p14-29 Mar 2012
Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of non-elicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behaviour). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible explanation for these findings is that toddlers succeed when they correctly interpret the prompt as a self-addressed utterance (making the task a non-elicited-response task), but fail when they mistakenly interpret the prompt as a direct question (making the task an elicited-response task). Here, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in a verbal anticipatory-looking task that was designed to help them interpret the anticipatory prompt as a self-addressed utterance: the experimenter looked at the ceiling, chin in hand, during and after the prompt. Children gave evidence of false-belief understanding in this task, but failed when the experimenter looked at the child during and after the prompt. These results reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief reasoning and provide additional support for the distinction between non-elicited- and elicited-response false-belief tasks. Three accounts of the discrepant results obtained with these tasks--and of early false-belief understanding more generally--are discussed. (Contains 1 table and 3 footnotes.)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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