Hi, my name is Liang Zhou Koh.
I am a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto
and today I want to talk to you about the false belief task.
In the previous videos we were introduced to our capacity for mindreading
that is our capacity to attribute mental states to others
and to reason about those states.
In this video we will discuss an important experiment
designed to test for this capacity.
The false belief task is a test to see who can attribute false beliefs to others.
Why the emphasis on false beliefs?
Let us first consider some limitations of a test that involves only true beliefs.
In a pioneering study on mindreading in animals published in 1978,
psychologists and primatologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff
conducted an experiment with an adult chimpanzee named Sarah.
Sarah was shown a series of videos showing a trainer trying to reach some fruits
that were placed in inaccessible locations:
hanging from the ceiling, blocked by a crate, etc.
At the end of each video Sarah was shown two photos and told to pick one.
The photos depicted the trainer engaged in some action,
for instance, stepping onto a crate.
Only one of these actions would allow him to reach the fruits
in the video, just shown.
Sarah picked the correct photo in a significant number of trials.
The experimenters concluded that Sarah was able to predict the actions of the trainer
by attributing to him true beliefs such as
“there are fruits hanging from the ceiling” and
"I can reach those fruits by stepping onto a crate.”
However, this conclusion was soon met with objections.
Sarah, many argued, could have completed the task without engaging in mindreading.
For example she could have based her prediction on past
observations about how people act in similar situations.
Or, she could have picked out the correct action
by thinking about what she herself would do in order to reach those fruits.
In order to rule out these alternative hypotheses,
philosophers Daniel Dennett and Gilbert Harman suggested
that a proper test for mindreading
would check whether you can attribute to other agents
beliefs different from those you yourself hold -
beliefs that you think are false.
This would allow you to predict that someone would act in ways
that would be incongruent with their own goals,
or in ways different from how you yourself would act.
These suggestions were taken up by developmental psychologists
Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner
who designed a standard version of the false belief task,
commonly known as the Sally-Anne task.
Participants are shown a story with two characters.
Sally is the first shown hiding her toy in a red box before leaving the room
While she is away Anne comes into the room and moves the toy to the blue box
Participants are then asked to predict where
Sally will look for her toy when she returns.
The correct answer, as you would have guessed, is: in the red box.
This is also the answer, Wimmer and Perner found,
that most children aged 5 and above gave.
But they also found that this is not the case when it comes to 3-year-olds.
Most of these younger children consistently made the incorrect prediction
that Sally would look for her toy in the blue box
where they (but not Sally) knew that it actually was.
To date, hundreds of studies have been conducted on the false belief task,
with different variations in task structure.
And the results of Wimmer and Perner’s original study were generally replicated.
What are we to make of this?
According to the standard interpretation,
older children can make the right prediction because they can represent Sally
as having a false belief about the location of her toy.
This requires them to recognise that Sally has a perspective on the world
just different from their own.
They also have to understand that Sally’s beliefs are tied to her own perspective,
which means that it is possible for her beliefs to be different from their own.
They understand, for example, that it makes sense
for Sally to continue believing that her toy
is in the red box even after it has been shifted because she, unlike them,
didn’t see the transfer that took place while she was gone.
3-year-olds, on the other hand, seem to lack this understanding
and give answers from their own perspective.
Failing the Sally-Anne test suggests that they can’t appreciate
that others can have beliefs which do not match their own.
On this interpretation, passing the false belief task
is a major developmental milestone in human mindreading,
which takes place around the age of 4.
It is around this age that children are thought to acquire the ability
to distinguish between mind and reality, to correctly attribute beliefs to others
and to make predictions and explanations about others' actions
on the basis of those attributions.
This standard interpretation faces some challenges.
One objection argues that it grossly underestimates
the mindreading capacities of younger children.
There are two main factors that performance on any cognitive task reflects:
the conceptual understanding required to solve the problem
(in this case, an understanding of beliefs as mental states),
and the cognitive skills needed for completing the task.
For the standard version of the false belief task, those skills include
the ability to follow the narrative, remember its key details
and understand the questions being asked.
Perhaps younger children fail to do well in the standard false-belief task
not because they can’t track false beliefs in others
but because of the demands that such a task places
on their developing executive functions such as working memory.
Recent studies using non-verbal versions of the false belief task
seem to provide some support for this objection.
Young infants, some of these studies suggest, show signs of being sensitive
to the false beliefs of others.
For example, their looking patterns seem to anticipate
how someone with false beliefs will act.
How robust are these results and how should we interpret them?
These questions have sparked major debates
and are likely to continue to capture the attention of psychologists and philosophers.
In the next video, we will take a closer look at at the development of mindreading.