Call J, Tomasello M
School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, U.K.
Child Dev. 1999 Mar-Apr;70(2):381-95. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00028.
A nonverbal task of false belief understanding was given to 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 28) and to two species of great ape: chimpanzees and orangutans (N = 7). The task was embedded in a series of finding games in which an adult (the hider) hid a reward in one of two identical containers, and another adult (the communicator) observed the hiding process and attempted to help the participant by placing a marker on the container that she believed to hold the reward. An initial series of control trials ensured that participants were able to use the marker to locate the reward, follow the reward in both visible and invisible displacements, and ignore the marker when they knew it to be incorrect. In the crucial false belief trials, the communicator watched the hiding process and then left the area, at which time the hider switched the locations of the containers. When the communicator returned, she marked the container at the location where she had seen the reward hidden, which was incorrect. The hider then gave the subject the opportunity to find the sticker. Successful performance required participants to reason as follows: the communicator placed the marker where she saw the reward hidden; the container that was at that location is now at the other location; so the reward is at the other location. Children were also given a verbal false belief task in the context of this same hiding game. The two main results of the study were: (1) children's performance on the verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks were highly correlated (and both fit very closely with age norms from previous studies), and (2) no ape succeeded in the nonverbal false belief task even though they succeeded in all of the control trials indicating mastery of the general task demands.
一项关于错误信念理解的非语言任务被给予了4岁和5岁的儿童（N = 28）以及两种大型猿类：黑猩猩和猩猩（N = 7）。该任务被嵌入一系列寻找游戏中，在游戏里一名成年人（隐藏者）将奖励藏在两个相同容器中的一个里，另一名成年人（传达者）观察隐藏过程，并试图通过在她认为藏有奖励的容器上放置一个标记来帮助参与者。最初的一系列对照试验确保参与者能够使用标记找到奖励，在奖励可见和不可见移动的情况下追踪奖励，并在知道标记不正确时忽略它。在关键的错误信念试验中，传达者观看隐藏过程，然后离开该区域，此时隐藏者切换了容器的位置。当传达者回来时，她在她看到奖励被隐藏的位置标记了容器，而这个位置是不正确的。然后隐藏者给受试者找到贴纸的机会。成功完成任务要求参与者进行如下推理：传达者在她看到奖励被隐藏的地方放置了标记；当时位于那个位置的容器现在在另一个位置；所以奖励在另一个位置。孩子们在这个相同的隐藏游戏情境中也被给予了一个语言错误信念任务。该研究的两个主要结果是：（1）儿童在语言和非语言错误信念任务上的表现高度相关（并且都与先前研究中的年龄规范非常吻合），以及（2）没有一只猿在非语言错误信念任务中成功，尽管它们在所有对照试验中都成功了，表明它们掌握了一般任务要求。
