Lydia P. Schidelko 1, Michael Huemer 2,3, Lara M. Schröder 2,3, Anna S. Lueb 1, Hannes Rakoczy 1, Josef Perner 2,3 1 Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, Germany 2 Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, Austria 3 Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Austria
The litmus test for the development of a meta-representational Theory of Mind is the False Belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent falsely represents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail True Belief (TB) control versions of the task. Pragmatic performance limitation accounts assume that the TB task is difficult for pragmatic reasons: It is confusing since it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviation. In the present study, we test the pragmatic performance limitation account by administering to three- to six-year-olds (N = 88) True and False Belief tasks and structurally analogous True and False Sign (FS/TS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and meta-representational complexity; the crucial difference is that FS/TS tasks do not involve a question that refers to the perspective of a rational agent and should thus be less pragmatically confusing. The results replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, show parallel and correlated developments in FB and FS tasks, but show diverging patterns in TB and TS tasks: while performance declines with age in TB, it remains high in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance limitation account.
