title: Gesture as a window on children's beginning understanding of false belief.
abstract: Given that gestures may provide access to transitions in cognitive development, preschoolers' performance on standard tasks was compared with their performance on a new gesture false belief task. Experiment 1 confirmed that children (N=45, M age=54 months) responded consistently on two gesture tasks and that there is dramatic improvement on both the gesture false belief task and a standard task from ages 3 to 5. In 2 subsequent experiments focusing on children in transition with respect to understanding false beliefs (Ns=34 and 70, M age=48 months), there was a significant advantage of gesture over standard and novel verbal-response tasks. Iconic gesture may facilitate reasoning about opaque mental states in children who are rapidly developing concepts of mind.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-1525, USA. carlsons@u.washington.edu
authors.forename: Stephanie M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Carlson
authors.forename: Antoinette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Margaret
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lemke
authors.forename: Caron
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cosser
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D003469:Culture; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014743:Videotape Recording