Oktay-Gür Nese, Rakoczy Hannes
Institute of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Germany.
Institute of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Germany.
Cognition. 2017 Sep;166:28-41. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.002. Epub 2017 May 26.
According to the standard picture of explicit theory of mind (ToM) development, children begin to (explicitly) ascribe beliefs to others and themselves from around age 4. The empirical basis of this picture comes from numerous studies consistently showing that children master verbal false belief (FB) tasks from around age 4 while children much younger have no difficulty in mastering structurally analogous true belief (TB) tasks. The standard picture, though, has come under serious attack from recent studies using TB tasks with wider age ranges. These studies have found that, paradoxically, children begin to fail TB tasks once they master FB tasks. Such findings cast doubt on the standard picture and suggest, instead, that FB tasks may be solved by much simpler strategies than proper belief reasoning. In the present study, we tested for the development of FB and TB performance in comprehensive and systematic ways. In particular, we tested the competing predictions of competence accounts (according to which TB failure reflects lack of conceptual competence) versus performance limitation accounts (according to which the standard picture is true yet children from around age 4 fail TB tasks due to performance factors). Studies 1 and 2 showed that performance in a variety of novel TB tasks showed a clear U-shaped curve, with children until age 3 and from age 10 performing competently and children in between failing, with strong negative correlations between TB and FB. Crucially, these patterns were found for various kinds of TB tasks, including those for which existing competence limitation accounts would not even predict any difficulty. Study 3, therefore, directly tested performance limitation accounts in terms of pragmatic and related factors and found that these patterns (failure in TB and negative TB-FB correlations) disappear once the relevant performance factors have been removed from the TB tasks. Taken together, these findings suggest that previous TB findings constitute false negatives, clearly speak for performance limitation accounts and thus corroborate the standard picture of the development of explicit theory of mind.
根据心智理论（ToM）明确发展的标准图景，儿童大约从4岁开始（明确地）将信念赋予他人和自己。这一图景的实证基础来自大量研究，这些研究一致表明，儿童大约从4岁开始掌握言语错误信念（FB）任务，而年龄小得多的儿童在掌握结构类似的真实信念（TB）任务时没有困难。然而，标准图景受到了近期使用年龄范围更广的TB任务的研究的严重冲击。这些研究发现，矛盾的是，儿童一旦掌握了FB任务，就开始在TB任务上失败。这些发现对标准图景提出了质疑，并表明，与恰当的信念推理相比,FB任务可能通过更简单的策略来解决。在本研究中，我们以全面和系统的方式测试了FB和TB表现的发展。特别是，我们测试了能力解释（根据该解释，TB失败反映了概念能力的缺乏）与表现限制解释（根据该解释，标准图景是正确的，但大约4岁的儿童由于表现因素在TB任务上失败）之间相互竞争的预测。研究1和研究2表明，在各种新颖的TB任务中的表现呈现出明显的U形曲线，3岁及以下和10岁及以上的儿童表现良好，而两者之间的儿童则表现不佳，TB和FB之间存在强烈的负相关。至关重要的是，在各种TB任务中都发现了这些模式，包括那些现有能力限制解释甚至无法预测任何困难的任务。因此，研究3直接从语用和相关因素方面测试了表现限制解释，发现一旦从TB任务中消除了相关的表现因素，这些模式（TB失败和TB-FB负相关）就会消失。综上所述，这些发现表明，先前的TB研究结果构成了假阴性，明确支持表现限制解释，从而证实了心智理论明确发展的标准图景。
