Moses L J, Flavell J H
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, CA 94305-2099.
Child Dev. 1990 Aug;61(4):929-45.
Current evidence suggests that young children have little understanding of false belief. Standard false belief tasks, however, may underestimate children's ability for 2 reasons. First, the only cue to belief in these tasks is a protagonist's lack of perceptual access to some critical event, and this may not be a very salient cue for young children. Second, the standard tasks require children to make forward-looking predictions from the causes of a belief (e.g., from what a protagonist has or has not perceived) to either the protagonist's belief or the protagonist's action, and children may not be very skilled at making such predictions. In 2 experiments we investigated whether 3-year-olds would do better on tasks in which the belief cues were stronger, and in which they could reason backward to the belief from its effects (e.g., from a protagonist's actions and reactions). Even on these easy tasks, however, they did not perform well. These findings provide strong support for the view that children of this age do not fully understand the representational nature of belief.
目前的证据表明，幼儿对错误信念的理解很少。然而，标准的错误信念任务可能会低估儿童的能力，原因有两个。第一，在这些任务中，信念的唯一线索是主人公对某个关键事件缺乏感知，而这对幼儿来说可能不是一个非常显著的线索。第二，标准任务要求儿童从信念的原因（例如，主人公所感知或未感知到的事物）对主人公的信念或主人公的行为做出前瞻性预测，而儿童可能不太擅长做出这样的预测。在两项实验中，我们研究了3岁儿童在信念线索更强、且他们可以从信念的效果（例如，主人公的行为和反应）反向推理信念的任务中是否会表现得更好。然而，即使在这些简单的任务中，他们的表现也不佳。这些发现为这一观点提供了有力支持，即这个年龄段的儿童没有完全理解信念的表征本质。
