Relations Among Preschool Children's Understanding of Visual Perspective Taking, False Belief, and Lying

Abstract

This study investigated the relations among preschool children's ability to understand that other people see things differently than they do, that other people can believe things differently than the children know to be true, and that they can manipulate others' beliefs through intentional lying. Children between the ages of 3 and 5 were given tasks that tested their knowledge of Level 2 visual perspective taking, understanding of false belief, and the discriminative use of deceptive ploys. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III) was administered as a measure of language proficiency. The children's scores on the three types of tasks were correlated with each other and with children's age, but not with scores on the PPVT-III. Most children either passed all the tasks or failed all the tasks. Regression analyses indicated that scores on visual perspective taking and false belief independently predicted each other, and scores on false belief and the discriminative use of deception independently predicted each other. The results provide evidence that advances in visual perspective taking, false belief understanding, and the discriminative use of deceptive ploys are developmentally related and occur in close synchrony.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was conducted in partial fulfillment of an undergraduate honors degree by Kevin Dugas. It was aided by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant to Ann E. Bigelow.

Gratitude is expressed to the children who participated in the study, to Michelle Power for her research assistance, and to Jennifer Sullivan for her statistical advice.

Notes

^a The second locations false belief task had only one control question.

¹The children's performance on some of the control questions for the first locations false belief task and the contents false belief tasks suggest that there may have been ambiguity in the questioning, which may have affected performance. The third control question on the first locations false belief task, “Did Maxi know that his mother moved the chocolate while he was out playing?” and the third control question on the contents false belief tasks, “Did your friend see inside the box?” were answered incorrectly more frequently than the other control questions, although most children answered correctly on these questions. In the first locations task, the story did not explicitly say that Maxi did not know his mother had moved the chocolate; thus, some children may have answered the target question incorrectly because they assumed Maxi knew his mother moved the chocolate. In the contents false belief tasks, the children were not explicitly told that their friend did not see inside the (Band-Aid/Crayon) box, although they were told that the box was “all closed up”; thus, some children may have incorrectly assumed that their friend had seen inside the box. However, for the contents false belief tasks, there were two target questions for each of the tasks. The first target question was concerned with the children's understanding of their own previous false belief, and thus was not affected by whether they thought their friend had seen inside the box, whereas the second target question was concerned with the children's understanding of their friend's false belief, and thus could have been affected by whether they thought the friend had seen inside the box.

As a check on the children's false belief understanding, an analysis of their false belief performance was conducted using only the children's performance on the second locations false belief task and on the first target question of the contents false belief tasks, with the children who did not answer correctly on the control questions omitted. A repeated measures ANOVA on the children's performance of these three tasks (N = 39) indicated they performed similarly across tasks (p > .23), with most children either passing all the tasks (N = 19) or failing all the tasks (N = 13). Thus, when possible ambiguity in the questioning was eliminated, the children's false belief performance yielded a pattern of results similar to the pattern using all the children's false belief performance on the four full false belief tasks.

Note. Numbers in parentheses are SDs.

²In the visual perspective taking task, the children were asked four times for their own perspective. They answered correctly to 90% of these questions. Although these questions could be seen as control questions, consistent with past research (Flavell etal., 1981; Masangkay etal., 1974), the questions concerning the children's own perspective were not used to determine the mastery of the task.

To investigate whether the children's pattern of performance was due to the scoring of the visual perspective taking task being more lenient than the scoring for the other tasks, a comparison of the children's performance across tasks was conducted in which answering correctly to all the questions about the children's own perspective was added to the criteria for passing the visual perspective taking task. The results using this modified assessment of the children's performance on visual perspective taking paralleled theresults using the original scoring. The pattern of correlations among the tasks and with age and scores on the PPVT-III was identical, as was the relative difficulty among the tasks. Details of the analyses using this more conservative scoring for the visual perspective taking task are available from the first author upon request.

**p < .01

*p < .05, **p < .01.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Dugas

Kevin Dugas is now at Emory University.