Text

theses

ETD graduate

Preschoolers’ performance in the standard false belief task has been shown to be correlated with working memory and inhibitory control tasks. The Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) account (Leslie, 1987; Leslie, 1992, 1994) posits that inhibition plays a role in the expression of theory of mind understanding (Leslie & Polizzi, 1998; Leslie, German, & Polizzi, 2005), and that the difference in performance between the ages of three and four can be explained by changes in children’s inhibitory control. There is also evidence that children can track multiple minds each with distinct false beliefs (Cheng, 2018). Specifically, they found that 4-year-olds can track up to 4 minds, showing adequate working memory resources at the age of 4. In another vein, an unexplored part of theory of mind research is on how children understand second order false beliefs (FB): “Anne believes that Sally believes the marble is in the box.”. Whereas initial studies suggested success around 6.5-7 years of age (Perner & Wimmer, 1985), simplified versions found success around the age 5.5 by reducing processing demands (Sullivan et al., 1994). It is still an open question what specifically those processing demands are. The initial aim of the current project is to replicate Cheng’s (2018) findings, and as the main aim, we planned on testing children by manipulating two demand factors: working memory (by including more than a single agent in the story), and inhibitory control (by having low and high demand levels). However, the current project only contains data for 4- and 5-year-olds’ performance in a double agent low inhibitory demand task. The results from Experiment 1 shows that five-year-olds were more successful compared to four-year-olds in both first and second-order false belief understanding. However, due to concerns about certain details of the stimuli and the delivery of the task in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was conducted. Results from Experiment 2 were almost identical to Experiment 1, showing that the potential limitations thought to be affecting results in Experiment 1 were not influential in children’s performance. Furthermore, both in Experiment 1 and 2 the results show a pattern that when children are successful in the first order questions, they also tend to be successful in the second order question. Further directions and need for testing a high inhibitory demand condition are discussed

ETD_11456

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-d8qt-zw16

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