False‐belief understanding in 2.5‐year‐olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous‐response tasks | CU Experts

AbstractRecent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at variousnon‐verbalspontaneous‐response false‐belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed atverbalspontaneous‐response false‐belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5‐year‐olds using two novel tasks: apreferential‐lookingtask in which children listened to a false‐belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non‐matching pictures), and aviolation‐of‐expectationtask in which children watched an adult ‘Subject’ answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false‐belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous‐ and elicited‐response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false‐belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents’ false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false‐belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous‐response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false‐belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.

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