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When children come to grasp the concept of intention is a central question in theory of mind research. Existing studies, however, present a puzzling picture. On the one hand, infants distinguish between intentional and accidental actions. On the other hand, previous work suggests that until 8 years of age children do not yet understand an essential property of intentions—their aspectuality. Intentions are aspectual in the sense that they refer to objects and actions only under specific aspects. For example, Oedipus married Jocasta without knowing that she was his mother. Thus, he intentionally married Jocasta but did not intentionally marry his mother. However, the negative findings from these studies may indicate performance limitations rather than competence limitations. The rationale of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test children’s understanding of the aspectuality of intentions in a simplified, cognitively less demanding design. The participants, 5- and 6-year-olds (Study 1) and 4-year-olds (Study 2), were involved in simple games where they (or another agent) intentionally acted on objects that had an obvious first identity and a hidden second identity. Children either did or did not know about the toy’s second identity at the moment of acting. After their actions, children were asked about their intentions regarding the toys’ different identities. Results revealed that the 5- and 6-year-olds, but not the 4-year-olds, systematically considered how they (or another agent) represented the objects when making intentionality judgments. Thus, an understanding of aspectual intentions seems to develop at around the late preschool years—much earlier than previously assumed.
The current study tested the reliability and generalizability of a narrative act-out false belief task held to reveal Theory of Mind (ToM) competence at 3 years of age, before children pass verbal standard false belief tasks (the “Duplo task”; Rubio-Fernández & Geurts, 2013, Psychological Science). We conducted the task across two labs with methodologically improved matched control conditions. Further, we administered an analogue intensionality version to assess the scope of ToM competence in the Duplo task. 72 3-year-olds participated in a Duplo change-of-location task, a Duplo intensionality task, and half of them in a matched verbal standard change-of-location task, receiving either false belief or matched true belief scenarios. Children performed at chance in the false belief Duplo location change and intensionality tasks as well as in the standard false belief task. There were no differences to the standard task, and performance correlated across all three false belief tasks, revealing a rather unified competence and no task advantage. In the true belief conditions of both Duplo tasks, children performed at ceiling and significantly different from the false belief conditions, while they were at chance in the true belief condition of the standard task. The latter indicates that a pragmatic advantage of the Duplo task compared to the standard task holds only for the true belief scenarios. Our study shows that the Duplo task measures the same ToM competence as the standard task and rejects a notion of earlier false belief understanding on the group level in 3-year-old children.
ABSTRACTTheory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to agents, has usually been measured with explicit verbal tasks and found to develop slowly during the preschool years. New implicit ToM measures have lately revolutionized the field by suggesting that ToM may be present much earlier in development. However, recent replication studies of implicit ToM present a complex pattern of failed, partial and successful attempts. The big challenge is to identify an underlying system to this pattern that can explain why some tasks replicate while others do not. The rationale of the present study was to address this challenge by investigating one potential factor that may explain patterns of (non-)replications of implicit measures, namely elements of verbal narration in anticipatory looking tasks. Sixty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children completed modified versions of two different anticipatory looking implicit false belief tasks which recently proved difficult to replicate. The main modification was that verbal narration was added to the original stimulus videos. Results revealed that original looking patterns could still not be replicated. There was no improvement in one task, while a slight improvement was observed in the other task. In conclusion, adding verbal narration does not necessarily improve the replicability of anticipatory ToM tasks, suggesting either that these measures might not be sufficiently sensitive to tap implicit ToM, or that other factors are crucial for successful replications.