Gesture as a window on children's beginning understanding of false belief.
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.
Carlson
Stephanie M
SM
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-1525, USA. carlsons@u.washington.edu
Wong
Antoinette
A
Lemke
Margaret
M
Cosser
Caron
C
D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D003469:Culture; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014743:Videotape Recording