Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 380

Young children do not yet understand people can hold different beliefs and that some may be incorrect. Three-year-old children tend to perform poorly on false-belief tasks, tasks that require them to understand that someone can have an incorrect belief. In a classic false-belief task, children who are presented with a Band-Aid box that contains pencils rather than Band-Aids will show surprise but tend to believe that other children will share their knowledge and expect the Band-Aid box to hold pencils (Flavell, 1993), similar to Figure 7.6. The children do not yet understand that the other children hold different, false beliefs. In addition, the children will claim that they knew all along that the Band-Aid box contained pencils (Birch, 2005). They confuse their present knowledge with their memories for prior knowledge and have difficulty remembering ever having believed something that contradicts their current view (Bernstein, Atance, Meltzoff, & Loftus, 2007).

Some researchers, however, assert that young children are much more competent than they appear. Research with infants using preferential looking and habituation tasks has suggested an understanding of false belief as early as 15 months of age (Scott & Baillargeon, 2017). Similar to arguments regarding object permanence in infancy and egocentrism in early childhood (see Chapter 5), it may be that children understand the concept (that another person will understand that the Band-Aid box contains bandages, not pencils) but may have difficulty communicating their understanding to the researcher (Helming, Strickland, & Jacob, 2014). Yet many researchers counter that false-belief findings with infants reflect perceptual preferences, that is, a desire to look at one object over another, not theory of mind (Heyes, 2014). Indeed, the research to date suggests that theory of mind as evidenced by false-belief tasks emerges at about 3 years of age and shifts reliably between 3 and 4 years of age (Grosse Wiesmann, Friederici, Singer, & Steinbeis, 2017). By age 3, children can understand that two people can believe different things (Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2007). Four-year-old children can understand that people who are presented with different versions of the same event develop different beliefs (Eisbach, 2004). By age 4 or 5, children become aware that they and other people can hold false beliefs (Moses et al., 2000).

Figure 7.6 False-Belief Task

Source: Nathan Davidson

Advanced cognition is needed for children to learn abstract concepts such as belief. Performance on false-belief tasks, such as the Band-Aid task, is associated with measures of executive function, the abilities that enable complex cognitive functions such as planning, decision making, and goal setting (Doenyas, Yavuz, & Selcuk, 2018; Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses, & Lee, 2006). Advances in executive functioning facilitate children’s abilities to reflect on and learn from experience and promote development of theory of mind (Benson, Sabbagh, Carlson, & Zelazo, 2013). For example, one longitudinal study following children from ages 2 to 4 found that advances in executive functioning predicted children’s performance on false-belief tasks (Hughes & Ensor, 2007). Children’s performance on false-belief tasks is closely related with language development and competence in sustaining conversations (Hughes & Devine, 2015).