ELSEVIER Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325

COGNITION
Realism and children's early grasp of mental
representation: belief-based judgements in the state
change task
Rebecca Saltmarsh a Peter Mitchell b*, Elizabeth Robinson b
"Department of Psychology, University College of Swansea, Singleton Park,
Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
bSchool of Psychology, University of Birmingham, PO Box 363, Birmingham BI5 2TT,
UK
Received January 10, 1994, final version accepted April 26, 1995
Abstract
In a standard deceptive box procedure, children aged around 3 years typically fa
il
to acknowledge their own prior false beliefs. For example, they judge incorrectl
y
that they had initially thought a Smarties tube contained pencils after discover
ing
these to be the actual content. Wimmer and Hart (1991) showed that children were
more likely to answer correctly in a variant of this task known as a "state chan
ge",
procedure. In this task, they saw that a container held its expected content (so
the
initial belief was true) before this was exchanged for something atypical. This
appears to offer powerful evidence suggesting that children who fail the standar
d
task do not understand about belief. However, we argue against this view. In a s
eries
of 4 experiments, we show that when children see the expected contents before th
ese
are swapped for something atypical, this not only makes it easier to report thei
r own
and a puppet's initial true belief but also a puppet's current false belief. The
results
are consistent with the "reality masking hypothesis", according to which facilit
ation
is due to the belief option being linked with a physical counterpart in the stat
e
change procedure.
1. Introduction
The results of a great deal of research into early conceptual development
suggest that a radical shift occurs around the time of the child's fourth
birthday, culminating in the acquisition of the concept of belief as distinct
* Corresponding author.
0010-0277/95/$09.50 . 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
SSD1 0010-0277(95)00675-3
298 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
from reality (e.g, Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner & Davies, 1991;
Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987; Sullivan & Winner, 1991; Wimmer &
Perner, 1983). This small yet profound insight we are told the child
experiences, supposedly heralds a giant step into the metarepresentational
domain sufficient to credit the child thereafter with a theory of mind similar
in form if not content to that of an adult (e.g., Perner, 1988, 1991).
A number of researchers oppose this view by attempting to show that,
young children can succeed in acknowledging false belief in certain favour-
able contexts (see below). The ensuing controversy has now assumed a
central position in research into the child's early theory of mind. If we show
that young children can acknowledge false belief in favourable contexts,
prior to passing a standard test (e.g., the deceptive box task devised by
Perner et al., 1987), then perhaps the view that the development of a theory
of mind involves a radical conceptual shift need no longer stand. Converse-
ly, if it turned out that demonstrations of early understanding of false belief
were artifactual, then the radical shift suggestion would remain the best
account of development.
Some attempts to demonstrate early understanding of false belief have
been subjected to apparently valid criticism. Research by Chandler and
colleagues (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Hala, Chandler, & Fritz, 1991)
appeared to reveal understanding of deception (implanting a false belief in
another's mind) well before children pass standard false belief tasks.
However, other research has suggested that those results were over-inter-
preted, and that genuine understanding of deception does not precede
success on standard false belief tasks (Ruffman, Olson, Ash, & Keenan,
1993; Sodian, 1991; Sodian, Taylor, Harris, & Perner, 1991). Another
attempt to demonstrate early acknowledgement of false belief was made by
Bartsch and Wellman (1989). They reported that children were better able
to explain wrong search behaviour in a protagonist by reference to false
belief than they were to predict wrong search in a protagonist who they
could infer held a false belief. However, this research has been criticized
(e.g., Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990), and the results were only weakly
supported by those of Moses and Flavell (1990; Moses, 1993). In particular,
Perner argued that children may have been acknowledging that the
protagonist was thinking of the desired item (akin to daydreaming) whilst
visiting an empty location, but not appreciating that the protagonist thought
that (i.e., a false belief) the item was there.
A further attempt to demonstrate early acknowledgement of false belief
has been to show that children simply misconstrue the test question to refer
to what they or a protagonist thought once the current reality had been
revealed. For example, in the deceptive box task, perhaps children assumed
that the experimenter was asking what the next child would think was in the
Smarties tube once he or she had looked inside and seen the pencils.
Similarly, in the unexpected transfer test, perhaps children assumed that the
experimenter was asking where Maxi would look eventually, having found
-
300 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
belief had been deleted. What remains then is reference to reality. Hence,
when asked about belief the child, would not respond randomly, but would
show a positive preference to report current reality. This explanation of
children's errors obviates the need to cite a reality bias to account for their
distinctive judgements.
Generally, then, any attempt to reveal early competence, and thereby
challenge the radical shift view (e.g., Perner, 1988, 1991; Wimmer & Hartl,
1991), would not be fully adequate if it only seemed to show that children
can pass a given task earlier than a standard test of false belief. What is also
required is an alternative explanation of how children pass a state change
task, while failing a standard task.
Superficially, it seems in particular that the state change results pose a
serious problem for our, "reality masking hypothesis" (e.g., Mitchell, 1994;
Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Robinson, 1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994,
1995). This hypothesis posits that young children prefer to base judgements
of belief on reality, a preference which masks any early insight into mind
that the child might have (Fodor, 1992; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992; Mitchell,
1994; Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Mitchell & Saltmarsh, 1994; Robinson,
1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994, 1995; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, &
Tidswell, 1991). For example, Russell et al. (1991) argue that when belief
and assumed reality are in conflict, reality wins because it is more salient to
the young child. According to Fodor (1992), this is so because making an
inference about a belief according to assumed reality makes fewer process-
ing demands on the young child. A related point is that since simple factual
beliefs would normally be true, a short cut to judging belief is to report
reality (Leslie, 1994; Mitchell, 1994). Moreover, Mitchell (1994) suggests
that children are born with a higher value-weighting for assumed reality than
belief as a useful heuristic that allows them efficiently to come to terms with
the characteristics of their physical environment. The assumption is that it is
more important to understand the physical world before we apply our
limited information processing resources to the psychological environment.
Hence, reality can be described as assuming a physical salience for the child
that would mask any fledgling understanding of belief; beliefs would be less
salient than reality by virtue of their lack of a physical existence.
Leslie (1994; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) distinguishes between errors due to
failure to understand about belief (which arise from abnormality in a
"Theory of Mind Module", ToMM) and errors due to focusing attention on
an inappropriate feature of the task such as the current content in a
deceptive box task (which arise from an undeveloped "Selection Processor"
module, SP). Clinically normal preschoolers, according to Leslie, have a
well/developed ToMM but as yet an undeveloped SP. As a consequence of
their undeveloped SP, they fail false photo tests as well as false belief tests.

The false photo test requires the child to anticipate that a scene in a
developing photo will be as it was at the time the film was exposed rather
than as it is currently, but requires no understanding of belief (Zaitchik,
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 301
1990; also, Robinson, Nye, & Thomas, 1994). In contrast, older children
with autism fail false belief tests but pass false photo tests (Charman &
Baron-Cohen, 1992; Leekam & Perner, 1991; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992),
suggesting they have an intact SP but an abnormal ToMM. This account is
fortified by the reality masking hypothesis, which may begin to provide an
account of why the SP fails to select the correct information for the child's
inference machine when beliefs are being inferred.
Evidence to support the masking hypothesis arises from Mitchell and
Lacohee's (1991) "posting procedure", in which children posted a picture of
what they thought a deceptive box contained when they first saw it. Children
were better able to recall their initial false belief under this condition than
in
a standard non-posting procedure or in a procedure involving the posting of
irrelevant pictures. We argued that the initial belief was given a physical
salience matching that of the true content of the deceptive box, because it
had a physical counterpart in the form of the posted picture. In contrast,
verbal (Riggs & Robinson, 1995) or other non-physical clues (Robinson &
Goold, 1992) to initial belief did not yield facilitation, suggesting specifical
ly
that it is the physical salience of current reality and lack of physical salienc
e
of initial belief that features heavily in children's realist errors.
Another physical token of false belief is the behaviour an actor displays
when searching in the wrong place for an item due to a misapprehension.
This situation was investigated by Bartsch and Wellman (1989) and by
Moses and Flavell (1990) but their results were equivocal, as mentioned
earlier. However, we (Robinson & Mitchell, 1995) have used a different
procedure following a similar theme that has yielded results consistent with
the reality masking hypothesis-results that are not susceptible to the
criticisms of the earlier work. In our research, children heard a story about
identical and visually indistinguishable twins, one of whom was absent when
their ball was moved from one drawer to another. Children who failed a
standard test of false belief nonetheless frequently judged that the twin who
later searched for the ball where it used to be, was the one who had been
absent when it was moved. We argued that this twin's wrong search served
as a physical counterpart to his false belief, and was responsible for the
observed facilitation. This interpretation is not susceptible to Perner's
criticism of Bartsch and Wellman (1989) that young children are only willing
to acknowledge that someone searching in an empty place is merely thinking
of the desired item, akin to daydreaming. Children succeeded in linking a
protagonist with prior absence at an epistemically critical moment, which
reveals their understanding that the protagonist held a false belief. This is
because absence of access to an earlier critical event is relevant to false
belief but not relevant to daydreaming: One can daydream about (think of)
an item in a place where in fact it is not, but there is no reason to link this
daydreaming to an earlier event of epistemic relevance. Since children did
make the link, it seems they were genuinely acknowledging false belief.
Despite the evidence supporting the reality masking hypothesis, it begins
302 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
to appear implausible given the state change results. As suggested above, if
current reality is salient to the child, as the hypothesis posits, perhaps they
should refer to this in the state change procedure just as much as in the
standard deceptive box task. Moreover, just as Leslie and Thaiss (1992)
hypothesize that a faulty SP would lead the child wrongly to attend to the
current situation in making judgements in Zaitchik's (1990) false photo test,
so we should expect the same in the state change task. Given that children
very often give a correct judgement in the state change task, this could
seriously undermine the masking hypothesis (but see below). For this and
other reasons mentioned above, the state change procedure is an impressive
control supporting the idea that a concept of belief (and thus perhaps the
basis of a representational theory of mind) is not available to children until
they are shown to pass a standard test of false belief. A corollary is that a
grasp of belief and indeed a theory of mind, seems to emerge in a stage-like
radical conceptual shift.
However, we now consider the possibility that correct judgements in state
change actually offer powerful support for the reality masking hypothesis
rather than being inconsistent with it. There is a clear parallel between the
state change procedure and the posting procedure devised by Mitchell and
Lacohee (1991). In both, the initial belief, based on the picture on the box,
is subsequently given a physical counterpart: the picture posted in the
posting procedure, and the expected contents in the state change procedure.
If then, the picture helps children resist the attentional magnetism af current
reality in the posting procedure, we might expect that seeing the expected
contents would serve the same purpose in the state change procedure.
According to this suggestion, children find it easier to report their initial
belief in the state change procedure than in the standard deceptive box task
because the belief has a physical counterpart in the former but not the
latter.
In sum, Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) state change procedure confuses a
test of acknowledging true belief with a test in which that belief is endowed
with a physical counterpart. We aimed to devise a kind of state change
procedure which incorporated a test of false belief in order to dissociate the
truth of the belief being judged from its physical basis. If facilitation
remained, then the critical component of state change would appear not to
be the truth of the belief, but that the belief has a reality counterpart. We
created a "false belief state change": as in the Wimmer and Hartl state
change task, children formed an expectation about the contents of a box,
had that confirmed, and then saw the expected content being changed for
something atypical. In contrast to Wimmer and Hartl's version, however, we
asked children to infer the belief of another person who had not seen either
of the box's contents and who therefore held a false belief based on the
external appearance of the container. Hence, children still had the support
of a physical counterpart when they were asked to infer the other's false
belief because initially they saw a physical counterpart of what would later
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 303
become the other's false belief. Consequently, if the masking account is
correct, there should be an increase in correct judgements compared with a
standard test of false belief.
In order to test the validity of this argument we went through the
following stages:
(1) We checked the replicability of Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) finding
that acknowledging own prior belief is easier in a true belief state change
than in a standard deceptive box task. The children were asked "When you
first saw the box, before we opened it, what did you think was inside?"
Were there more correct answers when children saw the expected contents
being swapped for something atypical, compared with when they saw only
the atypical contents?
(2) Next we asked children to judge the initial belief of a puppet who sat
alongside them when the unopened box was first shown, and so shared their
expectations. This was to check that the state change procedure helped
children to judge what the puppet, as well as they themselves, had thought
initially. There is no obvious reason why any state change facilitation should
not generalize from self to other, whether we accept Wimmer and Hartl's
(1991) account or that arising from the reality masking hypothesis. In the
"other's initial belief" version the child judged "When (puppet) first saw
the box, before we opened it, what did he think was inside?" Again, our
aim was to check whether there were more correct answers when children
saw the expected contents being swapped for something atypical, rather
than just seeing the atypical contents.
(3) Next, we introduced a condition (false belief state change, described
above) in which the child was asked not about the puppet's initial true
belief, but about the puppet's current false belief. The puppet was absent
when the box's expected contents were shown to the child and then
swapped, so by the end of the trial the puppet held a false belief about the
contents of the box. Children were asked "What does (puppet) think is
inside the box now?" Would children find it easier to infer the puppet's
current false belief, than in a standard deceptive box procedure in which the
expected contents had not been seen and so had no physical counterpart?
The standard task was procedurally identical to false belief state change
except that the child did not see the expected content initially because the
box contained something atypical right from the beginning.
If correct judgements were more common in the false belief state change
task than in a standard deceptive box task, it would be consistent with the
reality masking hypothesis. Conversely, such a result would be inconsistent
with the views of Wimmer and Hartl (1991), and other radical shift theorists
(e.g., Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, 1988, 1991; Sullivan & Winner,
1991), who would predict that our false belief state change task would
provoke just as many realist errors as a standard deceptive box task. They
would predict this since if the child lacked a concept of belief he or she
304 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
would interpret the test question "What does (puppet) think is inside the
box now?" as "What is inside the box now?", and so would report the box's
current content.
(4) Finally, we checked directly on Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) assump-
tion that children answer correctly about their own prior belief in the true
belief state change task not by referring to their prior belief, but rather by
referring to the initial reality. Children without a concept of belief, it is
argued, must gloss the question "What did you think was in there?" as
"What was in there?" In our final experiment we tested this using a
variation of the state change procedure in which prior belief differed from
initial reality, so we could tell which of these children were referring to in
answer to the test question. Children formed an expectation about what was
inside the box, and saw that the box contained something unexpected that
was then swapped for another atypical content as the child watched. Finally
we asked children "When I first showed you the box, what did you think
was inside?" If they answer by referring to the prior reality, as argued by
Wimmer and Hartl, they should report the first content they saw, rather
than either their initial belief before they saw inside the box (i.e., the ex-
pected content) or the current content. In contrast, the reality masking hypo-
thesis predicts that children would answer by reference to current content
as much under this condition as under a standard deceptive box procedure,
since their initial belief has no physical counterpart to help them recall it.
A summary of conditions and questions presented to children in the
various experiments is shown in Table 1.
EXPERIMENT 1
In the first study we checked on the replicability of Wimmer and Hartl's
(1991) finding that children answered correctly more frequently in a true
belief state change task than in a standard false belief deceptive box task. In
the former, the child's (and the puppet's) initial belief was confirmed true
when the experimenter opened the container to reveal the expected content.
This was then exchanged for something atypical as the child watched.
Finally the child was asked what he or she had thought was in the container
at the beginning. We ventured beyond Wimmer and Hartl's procedure to
examine whether state change facilitation occurred when children judged
the initial belief of another (a puppet) who saw the unopened container at
the same time as the child, so both child and puppet had the same initial
belief. There is no obvious reason why this should not be the case,
whichever interpretation of state change facilitation is correct. However, we
needed to check on this before trying a condition in which the puppet has a
false belief.
-
-
-
-
=
=
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 309
5. Results
Only one child judged the current content of the box by reporting its
initial content in the state change trial. All reported the current content
correctly in the deceptive box trial. Because of children's lack of confusion
between initial and current content, this cannot account for the facilitation
in correct belief attributions following the state change rigmarole that we
witnessed in the first experiment. This sample was comparable to those of
the previous experiment, as indicated by the prevalence of realist errors on
the deceptive box trial in which we asked a question about the puppet's
current false belief (trial 3). Nineteen of the 22 children tested gave a realis
t
response by reporting the current content of the box, when it would have
been correct to respond with the stereotypical content.
EXPERIMENT 2
In the second study, as in trial (3) of the subsidiary study, we asked
children what the puppet thinks now, but this time we used a state change
procedure. In other words, the child saw the box's expected content initially
and also saw this exchanged for something atypical. After the box was
closed once again, the puppet appeared and the child was asked what the
puppet thinks is inside the box now. Hence while a past tense question, as
used in Experiment 1, gives rise to true (past) belief state change, wording
the question in the present transforms the same task into false (current)
belief state change. To amplify, since the puppet was absent when the
expected contents were revealed and then exchanged, the puppet (but not
the child) holds a false belief at the time the child is asked the present tense
question about the puppet's belief. The only difference between this and the
deceptive box task was that in the latter the box contained something
atypical all along, so it was a closely matched test of false belief in all
respects but one.
From Wimmer and Hartl's (1991; also Perner, 1988, 1991) account, we
can predict that shifting the tense of the test question from past to present in
the false belief state change procedure would be sufficient to increase the
incidence of realist errors. This is because if the child ignored the word,
"think", and glossed the question as "What is in the box now?", as Wimmer
and Hartl suggest they do, they would report the current content and
thereby commit a realist error. In contrast, the reality masking hypothesis
predicts continued facilitation with the present tense question in false belief
state change, because what is to become the puppet's false belief (e.g.,
toothpaste) has previously been endorsed with a physical counterpart, so
making it more accessible to the child as a response option when judging the
puppet's current false belief. This element was absent from the deceptive
box task, which was identical to false belief state change otherwise. Hence,
--=
R. Saltrnarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 311
Table 3
Numbers and percentages(in parentheses)of childrengivingcorrect and incorrectjud
gements
on false belief state change and deceptivebox trials in Experiment 2
False belief state change
Deceptive box Correct Incorrect
correct 8 (19) 2 (5)
incorrect 12 (29) 2(I (48)
generate a level of facilitation comparable with the true belief state change
procedure investigated in Experiment 1. We made a direct comparison in the
next study.
EXPERIMENT 3
Children who answer correctly in the false belief state change procedure
with a present tense test question must do so by referring to the puppet's
current false belief rather than to current reality. Our aim in Experiment 3
was to check whether the frequency of correct judgements in this equalled
that for a true belief state change task with a past tense question. To achieve
this, we presented identical tasks to two different groups of children, but
phrased the test question differently-either in present or past tense. The
task was that employed in Experiments 1 and 2, in which the child saw the
box's expected content initially and also saw this subsequently exchanged for
something atypical. After the box was closed once again, the puppet
appeared and the child was asked either what the puppet thinks is inside the
box now or what he thought was in it when he first saw it. According to
Wimmer and Hartl (1991), children gloss these questions as "What is in the
box now?" and "When the puppet first saw the box, what was inside it?" If
they are right, then children would report the first content when asked about
the puppet's past belief and the final content when asked about the puppet's
current belief. Since the puppet's belief matches reality regarding the past
tense question, Wimmer and Hartl would predict correct judgements, but
since there is a mismatch between the puppet's current belief and current
reality regarding the present tense question, they would predict incorrect
realist judgements. At the very least, they would predict more correct
judgements for the past than present tense question wording. Effectively,
Wimmer and Hartl's prediction would be that a judgement of true belief
would be easier for children than a judgement of false belief.
In contrast, the reality masking hypothesis predicts a distinctly different
pattern of results. For both question wordings, the correct judgement is to
report the stereotypical content of the box (e.g., toothpaste). In both cases,
this potential response option has been supported by a reality counterpart as
far as the child is concerned: she initially saw toothpaste in the box which
=
=
-
=
=
=
=
= = =
=
=
= = = =
-
-
-
-
= = =
= = =
=
318 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
An incidental feature of the results was that unlike most published
studies, we found no age trend; older children were just as likely as younger
ones to commit realist errors. In this respect, our results more strongly
resemble those reported by Wimmer and Perner (1983), who concluded that
children specifically below 5 years of age have difficulty acknowledging false
belief. Evidently, the age at which children acknowledge false belief in a
standard test is not so rigid as some authors have suggested (e.g., Sullivan &
Winner, 1991). A moral we can draw from this is that it is likely to be more
fruitful to focus on the theoretical significance of contrasts in children's
performance between tasks rather than focusing exclusively on the discrete
age of acquisition of a concept of false belief
GENERAL DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
We have replicated Wimmer and Hartl's (1991) finding that some children
who fail a standard deceptive box test of false belief are nonetheless able to
give a correct judgment in a true belief state change task. However,
contrary to Wimmer and Hartl's claim, it seems that children do not treat
the test question in the state change procedure ("What did you think was in
here . . . ?") as a question about prior reality ("What was in here . . . ?")
rather than prior belief. If they did, in Experiment 4 they would have
answered the question "What did you think was inside?" by referring to the
first of the two unexpected contents of the deceptive box. In fact, children
did this much less frequently than when they were asked "What was
inside?", and the most common error was to refer to the current content,
which is a typical realist error.
Furthermore, in Experiment 2, children who saw the expected content
before this was swapped for something atypical were more likely to give a
correct judgment of a puppet's current false belief (when asked a present
tense question) than children who had seen only the atypical content in a
standard false belief task. This facilitation was just as potent as when they
were asked about the puppet's prior true belief (Experiment 3) in a standard
state change task (with a past tense question). The present tense question
cannot be glossed as a question about past reality, so Wimmer and Hartl
(1991) must be wrong in their reasoning that the true belief state change
question (past tense) is easy because correct answers are based on prior
reality.
Furthermore, this result from Experiment 3 suggests that children have no
more difficulty acknowledging false belief than true belief contrary to
Wellman's (1990) suggestion. According to Wellman young children do
possess an early grasp of the concept of mind, but the case of false belief
poses a special problem for them. In other words, he argued (contrary to
Wimmer a Hartl, 1991) that young children do understand true beliefs as
representations of reality rather than reality itself. Wellman supposed that
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 319
children's difficulty specifically with false belief stemmed from their adher-
ence to what he calls a "copy theory". This idea is that children do not
expect any beliefs to be false because they do not take into consideration the
role of sensory interpretation as an interface between mind and reality.
Instead, so Wellman claims, children assume reality copies itself faithfully
into the mind. Our results speak against this argument: the truth of the
belief in question was irrelevant to the incidence of correct judgements in
Experiment 3.
More positively, our findings offer further support for the reality masking
hypothesis. We suggest that success at inferring beliefs (true or false)
emerges gradually over the preschool years, at least partly as a function of
the waning of an excessive reality orientation. Tasks that offer the child a
reality-based support in making judgements of belief ought to reveal an
early competence in understanding mind. This condition is satisfied by
Mitchell and Lachohee's (1991) posting procedure and Robinson and
Mitchell's (1995) development of Bartsch and Wellman's (1989) task. In the
latter, a protagonist's search in an empty location provides physical support
in the form of a behavioural counterpart to the protagonist's false belief.
In the Introduction we drew a parallel between the physical embodiment
of an initial belief supplied by the posting procedure (Mitchell & Lacohee,
1991) and that supplied by the test box initially holding its expected content
in a state change, thereby providing a physical counterpart to that initial
belief. We suggest that state change owes its facilitating effect to the fact th
at
the belief being judged has a physical embodiment.
However, a follow-up to the posting study, carried out by Freeman and
Lacohee (cited in Freeman, 1994) offers data that superficially seem
anomalous with this view. They contrasted a condition in which children
posted a picture of their initial belief (e.g., a picture of Smarties) with one
in
which they posted a sample (e.g., they posted an actual Smartie). Although
both procedures yielded significantly more correct belief judgements than a
standard test of false belief, the facilitation was significantly greater for
children's picture posting than sample posting. If children are helped to
acknowledge false belief when there is a physical counterpart (our suggested
explanation for the facilitating effect of the state change procedure over the
standard task), why was performance not as good if not better in the sample
posting than picture posting?
We suggest the following: when children posted a picture, they were
posting a token of what they believed the Smarties tube contained. When
they posted a sample, they did so perhaps with the assumption that this was
not a Smartie from the tube that was the target of attention, since that tube
was apparently new and unopened, so the sample Smartie could not be from
inside. Hence although children assumed the sample was similar to what was
in the tube that was the target of attention, perhaps they did not regard it as
a token of what was in the tube. If the children did not regard the sample as
a token of the content of the target tube, physical or otherwise, then it is not
320 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
surprising that there was a relative lack of facilitation in children's acknowl-
edgement of false belief. A similar point is made by Perner et al. (1994). In
contrast, the presence of the expected content in the state change task did
serve as a physical counterpart of the child's belief about the content of that
particular box.
The results from our state change tasks allow us to discard a factor that
could have been responsible for success in the posting task, namely a
concern to maintain cognitive consistency. In the posting procedure,
children actively committed themselves physically to their initial belief by
selecting and then posting a picture of what they (wrongly) thought the box
contained (e.g., Smarties). A possibility raised by Mitchell and Lacohee
(and also more generally by Moses, 1993, and Moses & Flavell, 1990) is that
children are motivated to maintain a cognitive consistency. In the posting
procedure, given that they recall having posted a picture of Smarties,
presumably they would feel compelled to judge that they had believed the
tube contained Smarties. It would be inconsistent to have posted a picture of
Smarties, only then to claim to have believed the tube contained pencils all
along.
Of course, in a standard deceptive box procedure, it is also inconsistent to
say initially that the tube contains Smarties but then judge that they had
believed it contained pencils all along. However, in this case there is no
remaining evidence to remind the child of his or her inconsistency. Indeed,
children deny that they even said "Smarties" initially, and instead make a
realist error just as frequently as when asked what they had thought (e.g.,
Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991; Mitchell & Isaacs, 1994; Riggs & Robinson,
1995; Wimmer & Hartl, 1991). A similar denial did not occur in the posting
procedure; children had little difficulty acknowledging that they had posted
a picture of Smarties.
This consistency account cannot explain why children perform better in
the false belief state change task than in a standard deceptive box task. In
the false belief state change task children did not even report the puppet's
initial belief so there was no opportunity for experiencing an inconsistency
when the puppet's current false belief was inferred. It seems that having the
correct belief based option supported by a reality counterpart in the state
change procedure is in itself sufficient to promote correct attributions of
false belief. The present findings, then, offer support for the version of the
masking hypothesis proposed by Mitchell and Robinson (Mitchell, 1994;
Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Robinson, 1994; Robinson & Mitchell, 1994).
Conversely, they offer no support for the version advocated most strongly
by Moses (1993; Moses & Flavell, 1990), which focuses on the possibility
that children are motivated to maintain a cognitive and behavioural
consistency.
Specifying the locus of facilitation in this way leads us to predict that an
unexpected transfer test of false belief (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) should be
easier for children than a deceptive box test (Perner et al. 1987). In the
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 321
former, Maxi's false belief that the chocolate is stored in the red cupboard
should be easier for children to acknowledge because this had previously
been supported with a reality counterpart in that the chocolate really used to
be there (but now it is in the blue cupboard). There is no systematic
comparison between these two procedures reported in the published
literature, but note that for a fair comparison the deceptive box task would
have to be presented within a playpeople narrative. This is because the extra
processing demands of following a narrative with playpeople in an un-
expected transfer test might cancel out any advantage this procedure would
otherwise have over a standard deceptive box procedure which gets the child
involved directly.
Indeed, Lewis (1994) reports data suggesting that if children are helped to
overcome their difficulties in following a narrative, then they approach
ceiling performance in their correct attributions of false belief in an
unexpected transfer test. Lewis argues that the only important impediment
to young children's acknowledgement of false belief is their difficulty with
narratives. That argument seems implausible to us because children display
difficulty with false belief in a deceptive box procedure that does not involve
a narrative. The possibility that an unexpected transfer test of false belief is
easier for children when they are assisted to overcome their difficulties with
narrative is consistent with the reality masking hypothesis. Contrary to
Lewis, however, we focus on the protagonist's false belief having had a
counterpart in reality (the chocolate was previously seen in the location that
forms the content of the protagonist's subsequent false belief) as the critical
feature, rather than narrative per se.
As children becomes less susceptible to a realist bias with increasing age,
so they will eventually come to solve most tests of false belief unaided.
However, if realism has the importance we assign to it, then we might
expect to find vestiges of realism well beyond early childhood. We might
even expect subtle manifestations of realism in adult's judgements of false
belief. Such effects are reported by Mitchell, Robinson, Isaacs, and Nye
(1995). In a series of studies, adults watched videos in which a person
received contradictory information. For example, he saw that a jug con-
tained orange juice, but was later told that it contained milk. The adults
judged what the person now believed the jug contained. We found that their
judgements were biased in the direction of the information they themselves
assumed to be true: if they were told that the contents of the jug had been
changed so the utterance was now true, then they tended to judge that the
person in the video would believe the utterance. In contrast, if the adult
judges themselves assumed that what had been seen in the jug was still
there, they tended to judge that the person would disbelieve what he had
been told. That is, adults' judgements of whether or not a listener would
believe an utterance were influenced by what they themselves assumed to be
true on the basis of information that was not available to the listener.
Other evidence of a realist bias in adults has existed for some time under
-
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 323
conceptual shift at approximately 4 years of age, provides an excessively
restrictive and limited perspective. The limitations are due both to a
tendency to focus rather rigidly on the age at which success is achieved, and
also to focus on a single underlying change, namely coming to understand
about beliefs in particular or about representations more broadly. In our
view, and according to the evidence summarized and presented here,
acknowledging false belief owes at least as much to shedding a realist bias as
it does to acquiring an understanding that people hold beliefs that can be
false.
On the basis of the evidence currently available, we cannot decide
whether the strong claim can be made, that acknowledgement of false belief
is due only to a shedding of a realist bias, with little or no growth in
understanding about beliefs during the preschool years (as presented by
Mitchell, 1994). This strong view would be largely consistent with Leslie's
account (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) according to which ToMM is substan-
tially developed in normal children by around 24 months of age. The reality
masking account helps to provide an explanation for why Leslie's SP fails to
select the correct information to feed into the child's inference machine
when beliefs are inferred.
The difficulty with making this strong claim is that although we have
shown that young children's correct judgements of false belief in another
person are promoted by initially subjecting the child to state change,
nonetheless realist errors were common. We did not achieve anything like
ceiling performance with the state change procedure. This might have been
because providing a physical counterpart to belief was insufficient to distract
some children away from current reality at the time they answered the test
question. If so, the strong version of the masking hypothesis can be
maintained.
Alternatively, it could be that providing a reality counterpart for the
belief-based option can only ever promote correct judgements in a subset of
children: those who have developed a sufficiently strong grasp of belief. If
this is correct, the masking account should be presented in a weaker form,
according to which development consists not only negatively in a diminution
of the salience reality holds for the child, but also positively in a firmer gra
sp
of the concept of belief. A challenge for future work is to determine
whether the strong or the weaker version of the masking hypothesis
provides a more accurate account of the development of a theory of mind.
Acknowledgements
This research forms part of a PhD thesis (University of Wales) by the first
author. We are grateful to Ted Ruffman for making a suggestion which led
us to conduct Experiment 4.
324 R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325
References
Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H. (1989). Young children's attribution of action to bel
iefs and
desires. Child Development, 60, 946-964.
Chandler, M., Fritz, A.S., & Hala, S. (1989). Small-scale deceit: deception as a
marker of
two-, three-, and four-year-olds' early theories of mind. Child Development, 60,
1263-1277.
Charman, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1992). Understanding drawings and beliefs: A fur
ther test
of the metarepresentation theory of autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psyc
hiatry, 33,
1105-1112.
Fischhoff, B., (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: the effect of outcom
e knowledge on
judgement under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perceptio
n and
Performance, 1, 288-299.
Flavell, J.H., Green, F.L., & Flavell, E.R. (1986). Development of knowledge abo
ut the
appearance-reality distinction. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Develop-
ment, Serial No. 212, 51(1).
Fodor, J.A. (1992). A theory of the child's theory of mind. Cognition, 44, 283-2
96.
Freeman, N.H. (1994). Associations and dissociations in theories of mind. In C.
Lewis & P.
Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind: Origins and development
, (pp.
95-111). Hove: Erlbaum.
Gopnik, A., & Astington, J.W. (1988). Children's understanding of representation
al change
and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality
distinction.
Child Development, 59, 26-37
Gopnik, A. & Slaughter, V. (1991) Young children's understanding of changes in t
heir mental
states. Child Development, 62, 98-110.
Hala, S., Chandler, M., & Fritz, A. (1991). Fledgling theories of mind: deceptio
n as a marker
of 3-year-olds' understanding of false belief. Child Development, 62, 83-97.
Leekam, S.R., & Perner, J. (1991). Does the autistic child have a metarepresenta
tional deficit?
Cognition, 40, 203-218.
Leslie, A.M. (1994). Pretending and believing: Issues in the theory of ToMM. Cog
nition, 50,
211-238.
Leslie, A.M., & Thaiss, L. (1992). Domain specificity in conceptual development:
neuro-
psychological evidence from autism. Cognition, 43, 225-251.
Lewis, C. (1994). Episodes, events and narratives in the child's understanding o
f mind. In C.
Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mind: Origins and
development
(pp. 457-480). Hove: Erlbaum.
Lewis, C., & Osborne, A. (1990). Three-year-olds' problems with false belief: co
nceptual
deficit or linguistic artefact? Child Development, 61, 1514-1519.
Mitchell, P. (1994). Realism and early conception of mind: a synthesis of phylog
enetic and
ontogenetic issues. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understan
ding of mind:
Origins and development. Hove: Erlbaum.
Mitchell, P, & Isaacs, J.E. (1994). Understanding of verbal representation in ch
ildren, with
autism: the case of referential opacity. British Journal of Developmental Psycho
logy, 12,
439-454.
Mitchell, P., & Lacohee, H. (1991). Children's early understanding of false beli
ef. Cognition,
39, 107-127.
Mitchell, P., Robinson, E.J., Isaacs, J.E., & Nye, RM. (1995) Contamination in r
easoning
about false belief: an instance of realist bias in adults but not children. Cogn
ition (in press).
Mitchell, P., & Saltmarsh, R. (1994). Communicating, reading one's own mind and
resisting
reality. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 13, 652-660.
Moses, L.J. (1993). Young children's understanding of belief constraints on inte
ntion. Cognitive
Development, 8, 1-25.
Moses, L.J., & Flavell, J.H. (1990). Inferring false beliefs from actions and re
actions. Child
Development, 61, 929-945.
R. Saltmarsh et al. / Cognition 57 (1995) 297-325 325
Perner, J. (1988). Developing semantics for theories of mind: from propositional
attitudes to
mental representation. In J.W. Astington, P.L. Harris, & D.R. Olson (Eds.), Deve
loping
theories of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. London: MIT Press.
Perner, J., & Davies, G. (1991). Understanding the mind as an active information
processor:
Do young children have a "copy theory of mind"? Cognition, 39, 51-69.
Perner, J., Baker, S., & Hutton, D. (1994). Prelief: the conceptual origins of b
elief and
pretence. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children's early understanding of mi
nd: Origins
and development (pp. 261-286). Hove: Erlbaum.
Perner, J., Leekam, S.R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds difficulty with f
alse belief:
the case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,
5, 125-137.
Riggs, K., & Robinson, E.J. (1995) Making links between what people say and what
they
think. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, (in press).
Robinson, E.J. (1994). What people say, what they think, and what is really the
case: children's
understanding of utterances as sources of knowledge. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (
Eds.),
Children's early understanding of mind: Origins and Development. Hove: Erlbaum.
Robinson, E.J., & Goold, J. (1992). Young children's ability to report their own
superseded
beliefs: Facilitation via physical embodiment. Unpublished manuscript, Universit
y of Bir-
mingham, UK.
Robinson, E.J. & Mitchell, P. (1994). Young children's false belief reasoning: i
nterpretation of
messages is no easier than the classic task. Developmental Psychology, 30, 67-72
.
Robinson, E.J., & Mitchell, P. (1995). Masking of children's early understanding
of the
representational mind: backwards explanation versus prediction. Child Developmen
t 66,
1022-1039.
Robinson, E.J., Nye, R., & Thomas, G.V. (1994). Children's conceptions of the re
lationship
between pictures and their referents. Cognitive Development, 9, 165-191.
Ruffman, T., Olson, D.R, Ash, T., & Keenan, T. (1993). The ABC's of deception: d
o young
children understand deception in the same way as adults? Developmental Psycholog
y, 29,
74-87.
Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S. & TidsweU, T. (1991). The 'windows task' a
s a measure
of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. British Journal of
Developmental
Psychology, 9, 331-350.
Siegal, M., & Beattie, K (1991). Where to look first for children's knowledge of
false beliefs.
Cognition, 38, 1-12.
Sodian, B. (1991). The development of deception in young children. British Journ
al of
Developmental Psychology, 9, 173-188.
Sodian, B., Taylor, C., Harris, P., & Perner, J. (1991). Early deception and the
child's theory
of mind: false trails and genuine markers. Child Development, 62, 468-483.
Sullivan, K., & Winner, E. (1991). When 3-year-olds understand ignorance, false
belief and
representational change. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 159-172
.
Thouless, R.H. (1931). Phenomenal regression to the real object, II. British Jou
rnal af
Developmental Psychology, 22, 1-30.
Wellman, H.M. (1990). The child's theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wimmer, H., & Hartl, M. (1991). Against the Cartesian view on mind: young childr
en's
difficulty with own false beliefs. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,
9, 125-138.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and const
raining
function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognit
ion, 13,
103-128.
Zaitchik, D. (1990). When representation conflicts with reality: the preschooler
's problem with
false beliefs and "false" photographs. Cognition, 35, 41-68.