title: 2.5-year-olds succeed at a verbal anticipatory-looking false-belief task.
abstract: Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of non-elicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behaviour). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible explanation for these findings is that toddlers succeed when they correctly interpret the prompt as a self-addressed utterance (making the task a non-elicited-response task), but fail when they mistakenly interpret the prompt as a direct question (making the task an elicited-response task). Here, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in a verbal anticipatory-looking task that was designed to help them interpret the anticipatory prompt as a self-addressed utterance: the experimenter looked at the ceiling, chin in hand, during and after the prompt. Children gave evidence of false-belief understanding in this task, but failed when the experimenter looked at the child during and after the prompt. These results reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief reasoning and provide additional support for the distinction between non-elicited- and elicited-response false-belief tasks. Three accounts of the discrepant results obtained with these tasks - and of early false-belief understanding more generally - are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. hezij2@mail.sysu.edu.cn
authors.forename: Zijing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bolz
authors.forename: Renée
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Baillargeon
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D003469:Culture; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011340:Problem Solving; D011936:Reality Testing; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D056345:Theory of Mind; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014796:Visual Perception