Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 28, 2026

A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras
Published on: October 5, 2018
Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality--just not about the same object at the same time
Henrike Moll1, Michael Tomasello
1Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. moll@eva.mpg.de
Abstract:
Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that looks like X." In Study 2, children of the same age had to indicate what a single deceptive object (e.g., a chocolate-eraser) looked like and what it really was by selecting one of two items that represented this object's appearance (a chocolate bar) or identity (a regular eraser). Children were mainly successful in Study 1 but not in Study 2. The findings are discussed with a focus on young children's difficulty with "confronting" perspectives, which may be involved in their struggles with a number of classic theory of mind tasks.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Piaget's Stage 3 of Cognitive Development
Conservation and Constancy of Quantity
A significant cognitive milestone in the concrete...
Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development
Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development
Exploration...
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
The Nativist Approach
Depth Perception and Spatial Vision

