title: Executive functioning and preschoolers' understanding of false beliefs, false photographs, and false signs.
abstract: Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 (N=54) replicated the finding from Study 1 and showed that performance on the executive functioning task also predicted 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on false sign tasks. These findings show that executive functioning is required to reason only about representations that are intended to reflect a true state of affairs. Results are discussed with respect to theories of preschoolers' theory-of-mind development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Queen's University at Kingston, ON, Canada. sabbagh@post.queensu.ca
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Sabbagh
authors.forename: Louis J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Moses
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shiverick
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D003469:Culture; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D008297:Male; D018187:Personal Construct Theory; D010781:Photography; D011337:Probability Learning; D011340:Problem Solving; D013223:Statistics as Topic