Abstract

The present five studies examined the Korean children's understanding of false belief using the change-of location false belief tasks. Exp 1 tested 3- and 4-year-old children using the standard change-of-location task. Three-year-olds' performance was below the chance level and the four-year-olds' was around the chance level. However, their performance was increased when some important cues were provided. when the object was disappeared rather than transferred to new location (Exp 2), when the protagonist showed the surprizing reaction when s/he came back (Exp 3), when it was emphasized that the protagonist did not see the other person transferred the object (Exp 4), and when the object was transferred to new location by other person in order to make the protagonist fool (Exp 5). In all these new conditions, four-year-olds' performance was improved to above chance level but 3-year-olds' performance was till the chance level. The results suggest that children do not understand false belief until four years old.