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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
Developmental Psychology
|November 2, 2011
Summary
Three-year-olds found appearance versus reality tasks challenging. Children succeeded when distinguishing between "real" and "looks like" but struggled to identify an object's dual appearance and reality.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Child Psychology
- Perceptual Development
Background:
- Young children often encounter difficulties with classic tests assessing appearance versus reality.
- Understanding the distinction between an object's perceived appearance and its true identity is a complex cognitive milestone.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate 3-year-olds' ability to differentiate between appearance and reality in object perception.
- To examine children's capacity to handle tasks requiring the confrontation of conflicting perspectives.
Main Methods:
- Study 1 involved children identifying requested objects based on 'real X' versus 'looks like X' cues with deceptive and non-deceptive items.
- Study 2 required children to identify a deceptive object's appearance (e.g., chocolate bar) and its reality (e.g., eraser).
Main Results:
- Children were largely successful in Study 1, correctly distinguishing between appearance and reality when explicitly prompted.
- Children demonstrated significant difficulty in Study 2 when asked to identify both the appearance and reality of a single deceptive object.
Conclusions:
- Findings suggest young children's struggles with appearance-reality tasks may stem from difficulties in confronting or integrating multiple perspectives.
- These challenges in perspective-taking could underlie difficulties observed in other classic theory of mind tasks.
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