A Cross-Task Comparison of False Belief Understanding in a Head Start Population

This research had two main goals: to compare different methods of assessing understanding of false belief and to extend the study of false belief to the population served by Project Head Start. Across two experiments the participants were ninety 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, drawn from low-income, primarily African-American families. Each child responded to a battery of false belief tasks that varied in the type of belief in question (contents tasks versus locations tasks), the target for the belief ascription (own belief versus other's belief), the method of presenting the reality information (visual versus verbal), and the presence or absence of a deception context. Performance was better on locations tasks than on contents tasks and among older children compared to younger children; the other comparisons resulted in smaller and less consistent effects. Despite the improvement with age, the level of performance fell short of that typically reported in the literature. Although correlations among tasks were significant, fewer than half of the children performed consistently across the problems.