WHERE TO LOOK 1ST FOR CHILDRENS KNOWLEDGE OF FALSE BELIEFS

Recent research has shown that, although young children have a substantial knowledge of beliefs as internal mental states, they have considerable difficulty in understanding how a false belief can lead to an outcome which is in conflict with a desire. However, this evidence has come from tasks which assume that children follow an experimenter's "implicatures" in conversation and interpret the question "Where will a person (with the false belief) look for the object?" to mean "Where will the person look first?" rather than "Where will the person have to look (or go to look) to find the object?" In our investigation, even 3-year-olds often responded correctly when asked to predict the initial behavior of a story character with a false belief. We discuss these results in terms of the conversational worlds of children and adults. © 1991.