True or False: Do 5-Year-Olds Understand Belief?

• Published in: Developmental psychology 2010-11, Vol.46 (6), p.1402-1416
• Main Authors: Fabricius, William V, Boyer, Ty W, Weimer, Amy A, Carroll, Kathleen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age Differences; Attitudes; Belief & doubt; Beliefs; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child Development; Child psychology; Child, Preschool; Children; Children & youth; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Ability; Cognitive Development; Cognitive Processes; Comprehension; Culture; Developmental psychology; False Beliefs; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Hypothesis Testing; Information processing; Male; Mental states; Mind; Older children; Orientation; Perception; Perceptual Development; Personal Construct Theory; Prediction; Problem Solving; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reasoning; Task Analysis; Task performance; Theory of Mind; Thinking Skills; Visual Perception; Young Children
• ISSN: 0012-1649; 1939-0599
• DOI: 10.1037/a0017648

In 3 studies ( N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U -shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis.