Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Apr 27;17(4):e0266959. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266959. eCollection 2022.
The true belief (TB) control condition of the classical location-change task asks children to ascribe a veridical belief to an agent to predict her action (analog to the false belief (FB) condition to test Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities). Studies that administered TB tasks to a broad age range of children yielded surprising findings of a U-shaped performance curve in this seemingly trivial task. Children before age four perform competently in the TB condition. Children who begin to solve the FB condition at age four, however, fail the TB condition and only from around age 10, children succeed again. New evidence suggests that the decline in performance around age four reflects pragmatic confusions caused by the triviality of the task rather than real competence deficits in ToM. Based on these results, it can be hypothesized that the recovery of performance at the end of the U-shaped curve reflects underlying developments in children's growing pragmatic awareness. The aim of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test whether the developmental change at the end of the U-shaped performance curve can be explained by changes in children's pragmatic understanding and by more general underlying developmental changes in recursive ToM or recursive thinking in general. Results from Study 1 (N = 81, 6-10 years) suggest that children's recursive ToM, but not their advanced pragmatic understanding or general recursive thinking abilities predict their TB performance. However, this relationship could not be replicated in Study 2 (N = 87, 6-10 years) and Study 3 (N = 64, 6-10 years) in which neither recursive ToM nor advanced pragmatic understanding or recursive thinking explained children's performance in the TB task. The studies therefore remain inconclusive regarding explanations for the end of the U-shaped performance curve. Future research needs to investigate potential pragmatic and general cognitive foundations of this developmental change more thoroughly.
真信念（TB）控制条件的经典位置变化任务要求儿童赋予代理人一个真实的信念来预测她的行动（类似于错误信念（FB）条件来测试心理理论（ToM）能力）。对广泛年龄段的儿童进行 TB 任务的研究得出了一个令人惊讶的发现，即在这个看似简单的任务中，表现呈 U 形曲线。四岁以下的儿童在 TB 条件下表现出色。然而，那些在四岁开始解决 FB 条件的儿童却未能通过 TB 条件，只有在大约十岁时，儿童才再次成功。新的证据表明，四岁左右表现下降反映了任务的琐碎性导致的语用混淆，而不是 ToM 中真正的能力缺陷。基于这些结果，可以假设 U 形曲线末端表现的恢复反映了儿童日益增长的语用意识的潜在发展。因此，当前这组研究的目的是检验 U 形表现曲线末端的发展变化是否可以用儿童语用理解的变化以及递归 ToM 或一般递归思维的更普遍的潜在发展变化来解释。研究 1（N = 81，6-10 岁）的结果表明，儿童的递归 ToM，但不是他们先进的语用理解或一般递归思维能力，预测了他们的 TB 表现。然而，这一关系在研究 2（N = 87，6-10 岁）和研究 3（N = 64，6-10 岁）中无法复制，在这两项研究中，递归 ToM 以及先进的语用理解或递归思维都不能解释儿童在 TB 任务中的表现。因此，这些研究对于解释 U 形表现曲线的末端仍然没有定论。未来的研究需要更彻底地研究这种发展变化的潜在语用和一般认知基础。
