Children’s reasoning strategies on call and Tomasello’s nonverbal false belief test: no sign of false-belief reasoning
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: • We studied children’s reasoning on Call and Tomasello’s (1999) nonverbal FB test. • In Exp. 1, half of the children responded not different from random guessing. • The remaining children gave consistently correct responses. • In Exp. 2, we found that these correct responses may be based on a simple strategy. • Our results suggest that this task fails to detect reasoning about FBs in children. The present study systematically investigated how 83 (42 female, Austrian, 41 to 79 months) children reasoned on Call and Tomasello’s (1999) nonverbal false belief task. Experiment 1 replicated the central finding that children realized that a mistaken communicator tended to mark the wrong, unbaited box. However, we found that less than half of the children gave consistently correct responses while others responded in a way indistinguishable from random guessing. Some children noted that markings were consistently wrong, suggesting a simple response strategy of choosing the unmarked box without reasoning about the communicator’s false belief. Experiment 2 undermined this potential strategy by adding correctly marked trials. Performance dropped so that it could not be distinguished anymore from random responding. These results call into question whether Call and Tomasello’s task detects reasoning about false beliefs.
Institutions: University of Salzburg, Philipps University of Marburg
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,500
OpenAlex ID: W4415481076