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A Developmental Lag between Children's Understanding of First-Order and Second-Order Mental States

Abstract

The current study investigated to what extent a developmental lag exists between children's understanding of first-order and second-order beliefs. Children aged 4-5 years (N=72) were divided into four age-subgroups and received 2 first- and 2 second-order false belief tasks. First- and second-order tasks were designed to have a similar story structure and length, while minimizing differences in complexity between the two tasks. In addition to analyzing mean level of success, the study provided information about individual patterns of performance through within-child comparisons. The main findings were that first-order success did precede second-order success and that this sequence of mastery was invariant across all participants. It also appeared that the time lag between the two success was approximately 1 year; first-order success emerged after 4.5 years of age while second-order success emerged after 5.5 years of age. These findings provide evidence for the predicted developmental lag between first- and second-order theory-of-mind.

keywords
Submission Date
2013-07-15
Revised Date
2013-08-30
Accepted Date
2013-09-08

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