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Do 3-year-olds understand that appearances can ‘deceive’ and lead to false beliefs?
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Do 3-year-olds understand that appearances can ‘deceive’ and lead to false beliefs?
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Copyright 2021 Qianhui Ni DO 3-YEAT-OLDS UNDERSTAND THAT APPEARANCES CAN ‘DECEIVE’ AND LEAD TO FALSE BELIEFS? by Qianhui Ni A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS PSYCHOLOGY August 2021 ii Table of Contents List of Tables…………………..…………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures…………………..………………………………………………………………...iv Abstract……………………..……………………………………………………………….…… v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….…… 1 Experiment 1………………………………………………………………………………..……. 8 Method………………………………………………………………………………….8 Results and Discussion………………………………………………………………….14 Experiment 2……………………………………………………………………………………. 21 Method………………………………………………………………………………….21 Results and Discussion………………………………………………………………….23 General Discussion……………………………………………………………………………… 25 References …………………………………………………………………………….…………30 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………….………. 35 iii List of Tables Table 1. Number of Children per Group Who Expressed Suspense………………………………20 Table 2. Number (and Percentage) of Children…………………………………………..………23 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Deceptive Objects Used in Experiment 1……………………...………………………14 Figure 2. Procedure of the Puppet Show Task in Exp 1…………………………………………16 Figure 3. The Effect of Group and Condition on the Presence of Expression…………………...21 Figure 4. The Effect of Group and Condition on the Number of Expressions……………...…...22 Figure 5. Difference in the Timing of Expressions……………………………….……………...29 v Abstract This study using the suspense paradigm investigated whether 3-year-old children would express suspense when observing a misguided agent approaching an object with a deceptive appearance. In Experiment 1 (N = 60), 3-year-olds showed more expressions of suspense when the agent did not witness that her real food item was replaced with an inedible look-alike. However, this was true only for the children who saw the agent’s prior experience with the real food object. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), when the food item was replaced with a novel object with a different appearance, there was no significant difference in the number or the timing of suspenseful expressions. The findings reveal that although 3-year-olds seem to be able to track beliefs implicitly and sophisticatedly, they have a minimal Theory of Mind understanding which is limited in the following ways: (1) an experiential record relating the agent to the object is necessary for toddlers to ascribe epistemic states to the agent; (2) they have limited knowledge of how the object’s appearance impacts the agent’s representation of the object’s identity. 1 Do 3-Year-Olds Understand that Appearances Can ‘Deceive’ and Lead to False Beliefs? Introduction To communicate and cooperate effectively, humans often need to consider the mental perspective of others and imagine how others represent things in the world (Tomasello et al., 2005). This capacity to understand the relation between beliefs, desires, perspectives, and objects are normally discussed under the framework of Theory of Mind. When this capacity emerges in evolution and development, and how it ought to be measured, have been debated for roughly 40 years (e.g., Dennett, 1978; Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Most research on this problem has centered on the case of (Chandler & Carpendale, 1998; Phillips et al., 2020) because the possibility of misrepresentation inherent in beliefs creates a challenge not shared by either factive or conative mental states. Two sharply divided views have been dominating the debate for a long time. The early- onset view claims that Theory of Mind is present from birth (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005), while the delayed-onset view instead regards belief understanding as resulting from a conceptual change in the 4- to 5-year-olds’ mind (Wellman & Woolley, 1990). Between these two opposing views, there is a moderate account proposing that infants have limited belief knowledge—a “minimal Theory of Mind” (Butterfill & Apperly, 2013) —which later, in the preschool years, is complemented by a deeper understanding, rooted in a distinct and more demanding set of cognitive processes involving language and executive control (Low et al., 2016). Specifically, it claims that human’s mind-reading ability is supported by two systems, the efficient system (System 1) and the flexible system (System 2). System 1 uses simple relational attitudes to track facts relating to agents and objects quickly as well as automatically, and it is owned by both young children and adults. System 2 supports understanding of belief in an explicit manner, but it develops around the 2 age of 4 to 5 (Low & Simpson, 2012; Low & Watts, 2013). Although System 1 is quicker and more efficient, it has characteristic limits which might be the reason why children around age 3 only have an immature understanding of beliefs (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009). Testing out these limits is key not just to make theoretical progress on the question of development of Theory of Mind, but also to better understand empirically what kinds of understanding we can assume toddlers and young children to have when we interact with them. One way to reveal the characteristic limits in young children’s minimal Theory of Mind is to investigate their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. In many life situations, the appearance and reality of one single object can drift apart. For example, I may know that a bowl of salad in a restaurant’s display window is artificial and made of plastic. Others, who are less familiar with the restaurant, however, may take it to be a bowl of real fresh salad. After being revealed the true identity, most adults are able to appreciate the deceptive appearance and the reality of the same object simultaneously. The appearance and reality can be regarded as two characteristics of one object, which may bring difficulty in using the efficient system to track beliefs. From a developmental perspective, the question arises as to when and how children come to understand that appearance and reality can fail to correspond, and that appearances can cause false beliefs. Under the framework of Theory of Mind, a much smaller body of work is dedicated to children’s understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Flavell et al. (1983) developed the standard appearance-reality task in which children were confronted with a so-called “deceptive object,” e.g., a sponge that looks like a rock. After discovering what the object really was (a sponge), children were simply asked to judge what the object looked like and what it really was. The results showed that 3-year-old children made more mistakes than older children, and the 3 ability to differentiate appearance and reality increased with age. The subsequent studies also indicate that children reach a critical turning point at age 4 to 5, when they come to understand that people’s subjective representations do not always correspond with reality (Flavell et al., 1986; Flavell, Zhang, et al., 1983; Trautner et al., 2003). As Flavell (1993) proposed, it is possible that children at around age 4 are developing a new representation of the mind and gradually understand that things can be represented from different perspectives by different people. This new understanding manifests in 4-year-old children’s progress in both false-belief tasks and appearance-reality tasks. On the other hand, these findings encourage us to consider the nexus between children’s false-belief understanding and the understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Although the age of 4 has been generally considered to be the milestone, children younger than 4 were found to have some early understanding of the disconnection between appearance and reality when the task was non-verbal or manipulated. For example, when children were asked to pick up the object that looked like a rock or was a rock, 90% of 3-year-olds chose the right objects, but only 30% of them passed the standard task (Sapp et al., 2000). On that basis, Moll and Tomasello (2012) asserted that the difficulty children have in determining the distinction between appearance and reality is essentially a manifestation of their difficulty with taking confronting perspectives of the same thing. In their study, the deceptive objects (e.g., a chocolate-shaped eraser) and the real objects (e.g., a chocolate bar) were placed in front of the children at the same time. The experimenter first introduced the real properties of each object and asked the children to point at the one with the deceptive appearance or at the real one. The results showed that children’s level of accurate responses was significantly higher than chance regardless of the type of request. The researchers pointed out that the major differences between the standard appearance-reality 4 task and their paradigm are not only that the standard task requires explicit verbal answers, but also that it reaches a conceptual limitation that an object can be represented in a single way. A question arises in this context: what helps children younger than 4 comprehend diverse representations in the non-verbal measures? Here, we turn our attention to children’s ability to track experiences. When help was needed, 2-year-olds were more likely to turn to the people who have witnessed the related events (O’Neill, 1996). This capacity to track experiences has been observed in infants (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Tomasello & Haberl, 2003). A further study conducted by Moll and Tomasello (2007) showed that 18-month-olds have already been able to learn what an agent has encountered by simply watching the agent’s individual engagement with the object. Afterwards, they can use the knowledge of others’ prior experiences to make inferences and predictions. As the two-system account states, System 1 lets even infants track, within limits, others’ beliefs by representing not beliefs as such but non-representational proxies for beliefs called “registrations” (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009). With this system, infants can detect when an agent correctly or incorrectly registers an object, predict what an agent will do to reconnect with an object, and judge whether this attempt will succeed. Perner and colleagues also suggest that this “Experiential Record” matters for a child’s ability to cognize an agent’s perspective on an object whether the child can trace the agent’s interaction with the object back to a prior experience of the agent with the object (Perner et al., 2007; Perner & Roessler, 2010). On this basis, we propose that tracking prior experience helps young children cognize others’ mental representations and understand that another person may form a diverse assumption based on an object’s deceptive appearance. Thus, experiential record was also introduced to the present study as an independent variable. 5 In regard to measuring toddlers’ belief understanding, the question–answer format in the classic tasks has been criticized for masking the implicit understandings due to its large linguistic demands (Scott et al., 2012) and its requirement of inhibition (Baillargeon et al., 2010), and its strong reality pull (Perner et al., 2007). As a result, a series of implicit measures have been proposed and exploited, such as the looking-based measure (Southgate et al., 2007), action-based measure (Buttelmann et al., 2009), and narrative measure (Rubio-Fernández & Geurts, 2013). However, the affective dimension of belief understanding has received little direct attention. We propose that expressions are an important window into children’ understanding of other people’s mind. We human beings are well-recognized for our expressive behaviors which widely range from facial expressions, gestures, body postures, to speech, songs, and poetries. These expressions make our state of mind perceptible for other people and vice versa (Bar-On, 2015). Sometimes even a key expression can sufficiently provide information about the expresser’s mental state (described as the “characteristic components” in Green, 2010). Sias and Bar-On (2016) pointed out that the rise of an affective state first requires the construal of an object or an event. This construal either conflicts or matches with the person’s prior concern for the well-being of herself or some else. Bodily changes, as the third component, make an emotional state observable in nature. Due to its prevalence and flexibility, expressive behavior is proposed to be the natural precursors to human language (Bar-On, 2016). Hence, expressions can serve as a good tool for us to look into the belief understanding in young children with immature linguistic capacity. Expressions received far less attention in assessing Theory of Mind understanding, compared to verbal responses, looking behaviors, and actions. Moll and colleagues ( 2016, 2017) developed a suspense paradigm and investigated young children’s false belief understanding. This paradigm was carried in a puppet show in which children first witnessed a protagonist puppet 6 interacting with an object. After the protagonist puppet left the stage, an antagonist puppet appeared and changed the location, shape, number, or content of the object. Then the protagonist puppet returned and approached the object slowly. Children’s facial expressions were recorded and analyzed during the approaching phase. The suspense paradigm has an emphasis on facial expressions, specifically, suspense, provides an alternative way to assess children’s understanding of others’ different representations by revealing the affective dimension. Suspense is a combining emotion of excitement and anxiety and it is normally generated when people are waiting for upcoming events. The outcomes can be detrimental or beneficial and have been anticipated by the viewer (Zillmann, 1996). The existence of conflict and asymmetric information between the viewer and the story character are two necessary triggers of suspense (Alwitt, 2002). By way of using the suspense paradigm, it was shown that 3-year-olds and 2.5-year-olds showed signs of tension, as revealed by their tense facial expressions when they anticipated a misinformed agent’s impending encounter with reality. The findings suggested even 2.5- and 3-year-olds can put themselves in the mental shoes of others who misrepresent the world (Moll et al., 2016, 2017). By considering children’s understanding of appearance-reality distinction from this angle, if children younger than 4 show suspense when they observe an agent approaching a deceptive object, it would demonstrate that children realize the conflict between the true identity of the object and the agent’s subjective representation. Thus, the suspense paradigm can be modified to be a unique blend of the false-belief task and the appearance-reality task. In the current study, using the novel suspense paradigm, we aimed explore whether toddlers at 3 years old understand that objects can have appearances that lead people to form false assumptions about the object’s identity. We also attempted to test the role of experiential record. To do so, we created puppet show stories in which an agent formed false expectations based on an 7 object’s deceptive appearance. Children were introduced to a number of deceptive food-like objects, such as a fake chocolate bar made of rubber. The agent then approached this deceptive object, not knowing what it is. The main question is whether children who know the object’s inedibility understand the unknowledgeable agent will be misled by the object's deceptive appearance, as well as whether an experiential record is necessary to form this understanding. We predicted that 3-year-olds, who cannot pass the standard appearance-reality task, will show signs of early competence by way of expressing suspense when they observe the agent making contact with the deceptive object, and this is only true when the agent has some prior interaction with the object. To test this prediction, we recorded children’s facial expressions as they observed the agent approaching the object. 8 Experiment 1 This experiment was preregistered at https://osf.io/te4va on the Open Science Framework. Method Participants A power analysis with alpha set at .05 and power of .80 (G*Power version 3.1, F tests – linear multiple regression) yielded that a sample of N = 52 was necessary to achieve an effect size 𝑓 2 = .20. For counterbalancing reasons, we decided on N = 60. The final sample included 60 (30 females) English-speaking 3-year-olds (M = 42.29 months, range = 36.77–47.30 months). Another 5 children (4 from the ER Group; 2 from the No-ER Group) were tested but excluded because they did not want to watch all puppet shows (3) or because there was strong indication that the parent misreported the child’s age and possibly identity (2). Children were recruited from social media, research society email listserv, and websites for recruiting children for online testing (e.g., childrenhelpingscience.com). The racial composition of the final sample was 23% multi-racial, 5% African American, 5% Asian, 65% White, and 2% “other”. The children came from diverse socio-economics backgrounds, as is indicated by household incomes varying from < $20,000 to > $120,000. Materials Puppet Show Task. Children watched the puppet shows on computers/tablets with a minimum screen size of 11 inches. A white puppet theatre (71 x 74 x 14 cm) with a curtain and dowel mounted in the left corner was used. Each of four stories involved a different deceptive object and a different pair of puppets (Puppet A and Puppet B, all measuring between 25 - 35 cm in height). The four deceptive objects, shown in Figure 1, were a fake chocolate bar made from rubber (5 x 3 9 x 0.6 cm); a fake cupcake made from hard plastic (7.6 cm in diameter); fake cherries made from foam plastic (each cherry 2.3 cm in diameter) and a fake ice-cream bar made from soft foam (12 x 4 x 1.8 cm). A clear plastic cup (8.5 x 8.5 x 7 cm) served as container for the chocolate, cherries, and ice-cream bar in the response phase. Figure 1. Deceptive Objects Used in Experiment 1 Standard Appearance-Reality Task. Two deceptive objects were used for this task. These were a candle that looked like a crayon (“crayon-candle”, 7.4 x 0.8 cm) and a box that looked like a book (“book-box”, 20.3 x 14 x 2.5 cm). A fake piece of cake and a lighter served to demonstrate that the “crayon-candle” was really a candle. Design Puppet Show Task. A 2x2 experimental design was used, with condition (Demonstration Unwitnessed vs. Demonstration Witnessed) as within-subject variable and group (Experiential Record vs. No Experiential Record; from here on ER vs. No-ER) as between-subjects variable. Children were randomly assigned to the ER or the No-ER Group (n = 30, 15 females per group). Each child received four stories: chocolate story, cupcake story, cherries story, and ice cream story. Every story came in two versions. In one version, Puppet A did not witness Puppet B’s demonstration of the object’s fakeness (Demonstration Unwitnessed Condition); in the other 10 version, A witnessed B’s demonstration (Demonstration Witnessed Condition). Each child received the Demonstration Unwitnessed Condition for two stories and the Demonstration Witnessed Condition for the other two stories. Story order and condition order were counterbalanced. Standard Appearance Reality Task. Children received two test questions for each of the two deceptive objects. The appearance question (AQ) pertained to the object’s appearance, and the reality question (RQ) pertained to the object’s actual identity (see Procedure for details). Order of deceptive objects (crayon-candle first vs. book-box first), order of test questions (AQ first vs. RQ first), and the order in which the two answer options were named in the test question (e.g., “crayon” first vs. “candle” first) were counterbalanced. Procedure Children first received the puppet show task and then the standard appearance-reality task in a single session on the video platform Zoom. Children’s parents had given written consent (by email or DocuSign), reported demographic information, and received instructions prior to testing. The study was conducted by one female experimenter (E). During the session, the child sat at eye level approximately 45 cm in front of the screen. The parent was located behind the child and was instructed not to interfere. E introduced herself to the child, shared her screen, and presented the videos in the order prescribed by the counterbalancing schedule. The entire session was recorded by a research assistant who was not visible to the child during the task. 11 Figure 2. Procedure of the Puppet Show Task in Exp 1 Puppet Show Task. Each participant watched four pre-recorded puppet show stories. Stories were acted out by a single female puppeteer. Their structure was as follows (with scripts of individual stories in the Appendix A). A bell rang and the curtain opened. For the ER Group, the show started with A entering the stage from the left with a food item (e.g., chocolate). After introducing herself to the child, A tasted the food (e.g., by taking a bite from the chocolate bar) and said how much she liked it (e.g., “It’s so yummy!”). A placed the food in the right corner of the stage, excused herself (“I have to go wipe my hands. I will leave this here. I will be back soon. Bye!”) and exited left. What happened next depended on condition. In the Demonstration Unwitnessed Condition, B entered from the right with an inedible look-alike of A’s food item. B demonstrated the inedibility 12 of the look-alike (“Look at what I’ve brought. This is not tasty at all. It is rubbery. Look! You cannot eat this!”). B then replaced A’s food item with the inedible look-alike, stating “Now let me switch these. I will take this one away and put this one here instead”. B exited right. In the Demonstration Witnessed Condition, the procedure was identical with the difference that after leaving for 3s, A returned to stage and positioned herself on the dowel prior to B’s arrival. A witnessed the events, which she expressed by vocalizing “aha” after B demonstrated the look- alike’s inedibility and again after B replaced the real item with its look-alike. The response phase started when A returned to stage (Demonstration Unwitnessed Condition) or stood up from the dowel (Demonstration Witnessed Condition). A expressed her intent to fetch the object, exclaiming “Ooo~! Alright! Let me go get that!” She then traversed the stage left to right while making a humming sound. A then made contact with the object, at which point the bell rang and curtain shut, marking the end of the response phase. The entire response phase lasted 20-23 s, depending on the story, with equal durations for the two versions (conditions) of a given story. In the No-ER Group, children watched puppet shows that were identical except for the following changes. In the puppet shows, A entered the stage without any food item. After introducing herself, she simply declared “I love chocolate! Do you like chocolate? I eat chocolate all the time!” Having expressed her fondness of the food, A left the stage. The subsequent parts of the story were as in the ER Group. The only difference was that rather than replacing the food item, B placed the fake food on stage, stating “Now let me put this here”. Figure 2 shows the procedural steps in the two groups broken down by condition. Standard Appearance-Reality Task. E2 brought out the first deceptive object and held it up toward the child. She said, “Look at what I have here. What do you think this is?” After the child answered, E2 said “Ok. But look!” and demonstrated the object’s real identity. She opened the “book-box” 13 and showed its hollow inside. She inserted the “crayon-candle” into a cake and lit it. She then asked the two test questions in the order prescribed: “When you look at this with your eyes right now, what does it look like? Does it look like a [A/R] or does it look like a [A/R]” (Appearance Question), and “What is it really? Is it really a [A/R] or really a [A/R]?” (Reality Question). After the child answered, E2 said “Ok” and posed the next question. If a child gave no answer for 5s, E2 moved on to the next question. The procedure was repeated with the second deceptive object. The entire session lasted about 20 minutes. It finished with E1 emailing the parent a $30 Amazon electronic gift card. Scoring and Reliability Puppet Show Task. A rater, who was unaware of the child’s group (ER vs. No-ER) and of experimental condition (the left part of the screen was blocked) judged for each trial whether expressions were absent or present (0 = expressions absent, 1 = expressions present) in the response phase. If expressions were present, the rater additionally judged how many expressions occurred (e.g., 2 = two expressions). The coding scheme she used was based on the coding scheme used by Moll et al. (2016, 2017), which lists facial expressions such as smirking, brow furrowing, lip biting, and a small number of bodily expressions such as making a fist or clinging to the chair. The coding scheme was treated as non-exhaustive: if a child idiosyncratically expressed tension in ways not captured by the scheme, the rater added a label and description of the behavior to the coding scheme. The rater noted all expressions observed 175. However, if two or more expressions occurred within a 1s time frame, these expressions were combined into one cluster which was counted as one expression in the following analyses. The final coding scheme can be found in the Appendix B. To determine inter-rater reliability, a second rater, who was unaware of group and condition judged for 16 randomly selected children (8 per group, roughly 25%) if 14 (absence/presence) and how many (frequency) expressions there were in a given response phase. Inter-rater reliability for the absence/presence and expressions was good (Kappa = .90). Two raters agreed on 95.31% of the trials. For the number of expressions, two raters agreed on 82.81% of the trials (Kappa = .76). Disagreements were resolved by discussion. Standard Appearance Reality Task. An independent rater, who was unaware of the question children had been asked, used a two-step rating process. First, she listened to a child’s answer and determined if the child said “book” or “box” or “crayon” or “candle”, respectively. Subsequently, the rater was shown what question the child had been asked, allowing the rater to decide whether her answer was correct (1) or incorrect (0). If a child gave no (39 trials) or an unintelligible (10 trials) answer, she received a score of 0. If a child answered “both” (4 trials), a score of .5 was given. To assess inter-rater reliability, a second rater scored the answers of 16 (8 from each group, > 25%) children using the same scoring procedure. Inter-rater reliability was high (Kappa = .90). Disagreements were jointly discussed and resolved. Results and Discussion Puppet Show Task Two Generalized Linear Models (GLM) were conducted to test whether the variables age, gender, story, or trial, had any significant effect on the presence or number of expressions, respectively. Neither model observed any effects of these variables on the presence or number of expressions, p’s > .12. There were 175 expressions coded in total and they fell under 41 categories. The most commonly observed ones were: smirk (49 times), lip bite (19 times), raised brow (18 times), furrowed brow (16 times), and lip pout (11 times). 15 Table 1 shows for both groups (ER vs. No ER) separately how many children expressed greater tension in the Unwitnessed than the Witnessed Condition (U>W), how many expressed less tension in the Unwitnessed than the Witnessed Condition (U<W), and how many expressed equal tension in both conditions (U=W). The number of children whose expressions in the Unwitnessed Condition outweighed the expressions in the Witnessed Condition was three times as high as the number of children whose expressions in the Witnessed Condition outweighed those in the Unwitnessed Condition. This was the case both, when a binary measure of the presence of expressions in a given trial (0 vs. 1) was used, and when a continuous measure of the number of expressions in a given trial (0, 1, 2, etc.) was used. Table 1. Number of Children per Group Who Expressed Suspense Measure Group Comparison of conditions U > W U < W U = W Presence of expressions ER 12 4 14 No-ER 8 9 13 Number of expressions ER 15 5 10 No-ER 8 9 13 To test for differences in the presence of expressions as a function of group and condition, we ran a logit Generalized Linear Mixed-effects Model (GLMM) with group as between-subject predictor and condition as within-subject predictor. In general, the main effect of group was not statistically significant, β = .11, p = .73, neither was the main effects of condition, β = .41, p = .13. The interaction between group and condition was marginally significant, β = .99, p = .08. We then gave an in-depth examination of the effect in each group. The results of conditional effect showed that children from the ER Group expressed suspense in a greater number of trials in the Unwitnessed than the Witnessed Condition β = .92, p < .05. No significant difference between was conditions was found in the No-ER Group, β = -.08, p = .85 (see Figure 3). 16 Figure 3. The Effect of Group and Condition on the Presence of Expression Another GLMM was conducted predicting the number of expressions with group and condition as the predictors. The results of the model showed that condition had a significant main effect, β = .34, p < .03, while the main effect of group is not significant, β = .22, p = .29. The interaction between these two predictors was significant, β = .77, p < .05. As showed in Figure 4, participants in the ER Group showed a greater number of expressions in the Unwitnessed Condition than the Witnessed Condition, β = .69, p < .01. In the No-ER Group, there was no significant difference between two conditions, β = .08, p = .73. 17 Figure 4. The Effect of Group and Condition on the Number of Expressions Standard Appearance-Reality Task For each deceptive object, before the demonstration, children were asked “what do you think this is?” 68% of the children initially thought the book-box was a book, with the remaining children giving no (12) or unintelligible responses (7). 72% of them thought the crayon-candle was a crayon (including 4 children who called it a “pen” (2), “marker” (1) or “pencil” (1)), with the remaining children giving no (9), or unintelligible (3), or unrelated responses (5). No children identified the book-box as a box or the crayon-candle as a candle, suggesting that the objects were, indeed, deceptive. Table 2 shows how many children gave correct and incorrect answers as a function of the test question and the deceptive object. A GLM predicting children’s scores did not reveal any significant effects of age, gender, trial, or the order in which the two labels were mentioned in the 18 questions, p’s > .19. There was, however, a marginally significant effect of object, p = .05, β = - .12, with children giving more accurate answers for the book-box than the crayon-candle. Next, for each child, three scores were calculated: (1) the overall accuracy score calculated by adding up their scores from all 4 trials (ranging from 0 to 4); (2) the accuracy score for the Reality Question calculated by adding up the scores from 2 Reality Questions (ranging from 0 to 2); (3) the accuracy score for the Appearance Question calculated by adding up the scores from the Appearance Questions (ranging from 0 to 2). On average, children achieved an overall accuracy score of 1.47 with a standard error of .13. A one-sample Wilcoxon signed rank test was used due to the skewness of the scores (Kurtosis = -.70). It showed that children’s performance did not exceed chance, V = 132.5, p = .99. (In fact, children scored below chance, p < .001). In answering the Reality Questions, children’s average accuracy is .78 with a standard error of .09. For the Appearance Question, their average accuracy is .68 with a standard error of .09. A paired-sample Wilcoxon test revealed no significant difference between children’s performance in answering these two types of questions, V = 382.5, p = .42. Table 2. Number (and percentage) of children Answer Book-Box Crayon-Candle Test Question Test Question Appearance Reality Appearance Reality Correct 27 (45.00%) 24 (40.00%) 13 (21.67%) 22 (36.67%) Incorrect 33 (55.00%) 35 (58.33%) 45 (75.00%) 37 (61.67%) "Both" 0 1 (1.67%) 2 (3.33%) 1 (1.67%) Relation between Puppet Show Task and Standard Appearance-Reality Task In order to test for the possibility that children’s performance in the Puppet Show Task was correlated with their performance on the standard Appearance Reality task, we correlated children’s scores in the Standard Appearance Reality Task with an ‘ability score’ that we 19 constructed for the Puppet show performance. This ability score was calculated by first adding the number of expressions a child showed in the two trials of the Witnessed condition and then subtracting that sum from the number of expressions the same child showed in both trials of the Unwitnessed Condition (Σ expressions in the Unwitnessed Condition – Σ expressions in the Witnessed Condition). We then correlated the sum scores of the Standard AR task with the ability score from the Puppet show task. A Spearman correlation analysis found that they are not significantly correlated, Spearman's rho = .09, p = .52. Since children from the No-ER Group did not have experiential records, based on our hypothesis, their understanding in the puppet show task was supposed to be limited. We thus ran the same correlation with only the children from the ER Group. However, this made no difference: there still was no significant correlation between the two tasks, Spearman's rho = .14, p = .47. The results of this experiment confirm that 3-year-olds’ theory of mind is limited in significant ways. The limits are consistent with those postulated by the two-systems account for children under the age of 4 to 5. As this account argues, only children who witnessed a prior ‘encounter’ between agent and object were able to ascribe epistemic states to the agent. When the object A placed on stage--the real food item—is swapped with a different one—the fake look- alike, A has what the two systems account calls a “false registration” of the object. The suspense arises from children’s realization of the clash between reality and the puppet’s false registration, which results from a mismatch between what the agent previously encountered (e.g., the real chocolate) and what she is about to encounter. However, what the results leave open is the question of whether children realized how the object’s appearance impacted the agent’s representation of the object’s identity. All that can be inferred from the experiment is that children, as is predicted by the two-systems account, have to 20 witness ‘encountering’ (perception-like relations between subjects and objects) to be able to attribute epistemic relations pertaining between subjects and objects. The results do not, however, allow any conclusions about these epistemic relations’ complexity. Specifically, what remains unanswered is whether children realized that the fake food ‘fooled’ the agent and led her assume that the object was the food she had left on stage. If the two-systems account is correct, then the 3-year-olds did not represent the agent’s misconception of the object’s identity, or the role that the particular appearance of the look-alike played in causing this misconception. The reason for this is that only System 2--which has not developed by age 3—can represent how, i.e., in what aspectual shape or under what description, an agent represents an object. System 1—the only system available to our participants—is limited to determining whether or not the agent had previously established contact with the object. To further test the limits of 3-year-olds’ understanding and the correctness of the two- systems account’s predictions, we conducted a second experiment. The follow-up experiment was designed to test whether 3-year-olds, if given the chance to trace an agent’s interaction with an object back to a prior experience as was the case for the ER Group of the current experiment (Experiment 1), discern the role that an object’s deceptive appearance has on the agent’s object representation. To this end, we constructed two different experimental conditions. In the Deceptiveness Condition, the storyline is as same as the Unwitnessed Condition for the ER group in Exp 1. We removed the deceptiveness of the object brought by B in the other condition (Non-Deceptiveness Condition). In this condition, B enters the stage with a totally new object in different color and different shape. The rest remains the same. The rationale is that if children understand the role of deceptive appearance in sustaining A’s misrepresentation, in the Deceptiveness Condition they 21 should show suspense throughout A’s approach of the object. Children would first show suspenseful expressions when A returns because they should learn that A wants to fetch the object and probably eat it. As A is walking closer to the deceptive object, the tension build. Thus, children would show suspense multiple times along the way. By contrast, in the No Deceptiveness Condition they should only show suspense when A first sees and thus identifies the new object. Once children observe that A sees the novel non-look-alike, they should learn that A already knows that this is not her original object, and she would not eat it. When A walks to the novel object, A does not have false assumption, so children would not show more suspense during the approaching. Therefore, except the number of expressions, we were also expecting a marked difference in the timing of children’s expressions. Experiment 2 This experiment was preregistered at https://osf.io/te4va on the Open Science Framework. Method Participants To match statistical power to that of Experiment 1, a sample size of N = 30 (fifteen female) 3-year-olds (M = 42.49 months, range = 36.03 – 48.00 months) was used for this experiment. One additional child was tested but did not finish the procedure due to uncooperativeness. The same recruitment method as for Experiment 1 was used. Again, all participants were English speakers. The racial breakdown of the final sample was as follows: 17% multi-racial, 3% African American, 7% Asian, 70% White, and 3% “other”. The families’ household incomes ranged from < $20,000 to > $120,000, indicating highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Materials 22 The same deceptive objects as in Experiment 1 were used. In the Non-Deceptiveness Condition, four additional, non-deceptive, objects were used. These were an orange rubber toy (8 x 8 x 1.5 cm,), a yellow wooden block (9 x 2.8 x 1.5 cm), a pile of pink foam cubes (each one’s side length is 3.8 cm) and a blue stress relief ball (5 cm in diameter). Each non-deceptive object was matched to a deceptive object and appeared in the same story (orange toy = Chocolate Story; yellow block = Cupcake Story; pink cubes = Cherries Story; blue ball = Ice Cream Story). Design Children watched the same four stories as in Experiment 1. Each story came in two versions, matching the two conditions. In the Deceptiveness Condition, B replaced A’s food item with an inedible look-alike, as was the case in the ER Group of Experiment 1. The Non- Deceptiveness Condition differed in that B replaced A’s food item not with a look-alike but with a different, non-deceptive, object. In neither condition did A witness the substitution, so that A returned to stage with a false expectation. Each child received the Deceptiveness Condition of two stories and the Non-Deceptiveness Condition of the two other stories. Story order and condition order were counterbalanced. Procedure The procedure of the Deceptiveness Condition was the same as the procedure of the Demonstration Unwitnessed Condition in the ER Group of Experiment 1. The only difference was that A, when she returned to stage and looked at the replaced object, said “Oooh, look!”, paused 2s and then stated “Alright, let me go get that”. The reason for the slight change was that a neutral expression for both conditions was needed (“Oooh look” can be interpreted as A’s realization of there being a different object in the Non-Deceptiveness Condition). The procedure of the Non- Deceptiveness Condition was the same as that in the Deceptiveness Condition with the sole 23 difference that B exchanged the food item not with an inedible look-alike (e.g., fake chocolate) but with an entirely different object (e.g., orange rubber toy). In both conditions, B demonstrated the new object’s inedibility in the way she had done in Experiment 1. Scoring and Reliability The same coding scheme and scoring rules were applied as in Experiment 1. In addition to coding for presence and frequency of expressions, as she had done in Experiment 1, the rater also applied a time stamp indicating how far into the response phase (0s - 28s) a given expression occurred. For example, a time stamp of “3 s” indicates that an expression was observed 3s into the response phase. A second rater made the same judgments for 8 (4 from each condition) randomly determined children (>25%). Inter-rater reliability for the number of expressions was good (agreement on 81% of trials, Kappa = .66), and inter-rater reliability for the timing of expressions was excellent (Kappa = .88). Disagreements were resolved by discussion. Results and Discussion Out of the 30 children, 11 showed more expressions in the Deceptiveness than the Non- Deceptiveness Condition; 9 showed more expressions in the Non-Deceptiveness than the Deceptiveness Condition, and 10 showed the same number of expressions in both conditions. The GLM analysis showed that there was no effect of age, gender, story, or trial, p’s > .44. In total, the coder coded 83 expressions which fell under 18 categories. Children showed the following expressions most frequently: smirk (20 times), raised brow (15 times), lip bite (13 times), mouth tightening (6 times), and furrowed brow (6 times). A GLMM predicting the number of expressions with condition as the predictor showed that the main effect of condition is not significant, β = .02, p =.91. This indicated that children did 24 not show more suspenseful expressions in the Deceptiveness Condition than in the Non- Deceptiveness Condition. As shown in Figure 5, The timing of expressions is not significantly different between these two conditions Condition, F(1,81) = 2.31, p = .13. In the Deceptiveness Condition, participants were still likely to express suspense at the very beginning of the test phase, and in the Non-Deceptiveness Condition, they sometimes show multiple expressions as A is getting closer to the new object. Figure 5. Difference in the Timing of Expressions 25 General Discussion The present study showed that 3-year-olds expressed suspense when they observed an agent approaching an inedible deceptive object which has an identical appearance to her original real food item. More suspenseful expressions existed when the agent had no knowledge of the replacement (Experiment 1, Unwitnessed Condition). This was only true when children had seen the agent encountering the food item in the past (Experiment 1, ER group). Children’s implicit understanding was not related to their performance in the explicit standard appearance-reality task. In Experiment 2, when the real food item was replaced with a novel object with a different appearance, 3-year-olds did not express more or fewer expressions in earlier times, compared with when the superseder was an object with a deceptive appearance. Therefore, there is no clear indication that children can represent the effect of objects’ deceptiveness on agents’ beliefs. One of the most important findings in this study is that experiential record is essential in children’s understanding of belief/assumption formation. As children witness the agent actually interacting with the real food object at the beginning of the story, an encounter is registered. This registration contains the agent, the food item, and the relation in-between (e.g., Maxi eats chocolate). Simply hearing the agent talking about the object cannot generate an experiential record. The object and the experience need to be concrete. When the replacement happens, children can successfully get to know that the second object, not matter if it is a look-alike or a non-look- alike, has not been registered in the agent’s mind. Thus, they predict that the agent is going to face something unexpected, which manifests in their suspenseful expressions. They are unclear that the deceptiveness of the look-alike is the cause of the agent’s false belief. Our findings support the proposal of Perner et al., (2007) that children use experiential records to reason about behaviors, 26 even though they do not share the same desires, and they do not distinctly know what constitutes the false beliefs. In Experiment 2, no difference was detected in either the number or the timing of suspenseful expressions, which did not match our original predictions. We conclude that 3-year- olds’ understanding is still limited because they have not grasped the essential role of deceptiveness. One alternative explanation is that the Deceptiveness Condition is harder for children in nature than the Non-Deceptiveness Condition. Specifically, the Non-Deceptiveness Condition can be treated as an adapted version of the classic change-of-content task (Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987). If children are not able to show tension in this baseline condition, they will not show tension in the Deceptiveness Condition which can be treated as adding appearance-reality distinction to the classic change-of-content task. Then there is no difference that can be detected. However, based on our results, children showed expression multiple times in the Non-Deceptiveness Condition. The differences should be revealed if exist. Thus, we can deny this alternative of floor effect. Another alternative explanation is that when A returns and sees the new object, children would be curious about what would happen next, and this curiosity manifest in their expressions. So far there is little previous evidence that can help us differentiate curiosity from suspense since the suspense paradigm is relatively novel. Future study can take a deeper insight into the categorization of expressions and compare the number or the timing of expression in the suspense paradigm in diverse tasks. The findings of Experiment 2 are also inconsistent to some extent with a previous study conducted by Rice et al. (1997). In their study, when children were encouraged to consider what another person without knowledge of the object would think, they were more likely to infer that person’s perspective correctly than in the standard appearance-reality test. This indicates that with 27 some prompting, children are able to understand that another person may have a false belief caused by the deceptive appearance. These kinds of prompts did not exist in our study, so we would not like to rule out the possibility that with lower information processing demand and proper priming, 3-year-olds are able to understand the nexus between belief formation and appearance-reality distinction. The findings, especially those from Experiment 1, are mostly consistent with previous empirical evidence about young children’s comprehension of false beliefs and appearance-reality distinction respectively. For example, when the false assumptions are caused by the change of content (e.g., changes in quantity), 2.5- and 3-year-old children express suspense when the agents are approaching the changed object (Moll et al., 2016, 2017). Similarly, the original objects were changed in a general sense. The essential difference is that in the present study the appearances remained the same. This raises the question of what is special about deceptive appearances. Compared with the change-of-location and change-of-content tasks commonly used in previous research, the appearance-reality distinction is more about two characteristics regarding one single object. It requires children to understand the fake chocolate bar possesses a “dual identity”: it is chocolate-shaped (the appearance identity), and it is an inedible non-food object (the reality identity). Children’s difficulty in understanding the dual identity might thus be subject to the identity limit of the efficient mindreading system (System 1, see Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Low & Watts, 2013). This efficient system only uses simple relational attitudes to track facts relating to agents and objects quickly as well as automatically. Edwards and Low (2017) used a moving object with each side of its body colored with blue and red in order to reveal the signature blind spot. They found that the efficient system cannot support people to consider the dual identity of an object, in other words, that an object can be represented from different perspectives of different 28 people. It is very possible that in our study, 3-year-old children mainly used System 1 to quickly track the agent’s prior experience with the object, when the agent was about to encounter something unregistered, children expressed suspense to show their anticipation and concern about potential negative outcomes. The identity limit of System 1 restrains them from understanding the causal role of deceptiveness in maintaining the agent’s false belief. Therefore, our study also provides supporting evidence for the two-system account. We briefly touched upon the gap between children’s implicit understanding of belief formation and their explicit understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Consistent with the classic study conducted by Flavell et al. (1983), 3-year-olds made both phenomenism errors and intellectual realism errors in their verbal answers. Children’s performance in the standard appearance-reality task which did not involve others’ beliefs was seemed to be irrelevant to their implicit understanding of false beliefs in the puppet show task. Thus, for these young children, the next necessary two steps might be to grasp appearance-reality distinction, and then to connect deceptive appearances with false-belief formation. Future studies ought to look into how children take the steps and reach the next developmental level of Theory of Mind in 3- to 6-year-olds. The present study exploited an implicit measure —— the suspense paradigm, which turned our attention to the affective dimension of Theory of Mind understanding. We coded both facial expressions (e.g., smirk, bite lip, and raise eyebrows) and bodily expressions (e.g., pull body together, shrug shoulder, and raise hand). In many times facial and bodily expressions appeared simultaneously, and they are classic expressions that appear when people anticipate upcoming bad (Cikara & Fiske, 2012; Ekman & Friesen, 2003). It is more likely that the suspense shows their prediction of the agenting eating the fake object, instead of simulating themselves to be the agent in the story. 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Apprearance-reality distinction and development of gender constancy understanding in children. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 27(3), 275–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/01650250244000362 Wellman, H. M., & Woolley, J. D. (1990). From simple desires to ordinary beliefs: The early development of everyday psychology. Cognition, 35(3), 245–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(90)90024-E Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103– 128. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5 Zillmann, D. (1996). The psychology of suspense in dramatic exposition. In Suspense: Conceptualizations, theoretical analyses, and empirical explorations. 35 Appendix Puppet Show Stories in Experiment 1 Chocolate Story Maxi (Puppet A) entered the stage with a real chocolate bar (ER group) or empty handed (No-ER group), saying: “Hi, I’m Maxi. I love chocolate! Do you like chocolate? I eat chocolate all the time!” Only for the ER group, after shaking the chocolate bar on his hand, he bit it and then ate the broken chocolate piece, stating: “It’s so yummy!” He placed the chocolate bar on the right corner of the stage and existed. Maxi came back after around 3 seconds and sit in the left corner (Witnessed Condition) or did not come back (Unwitnessed Condition). In both conditions, Bob (Puppet B) entered with a fake chocolate that looks exactly like the chocolate bar. Bob demonstrated that this fake chocolate is inedible by bending it back and forth, stating: “This is not tasty at all. It is rubbery, look! You cannot eat this!” Next, Bob replaced the real chocolate with the fake one (ER group) or placed the fake one on the right corner (No-ER group) and left. After 3 seconds, Maxi stood up (Witnessed Condition) or came back (Unwitnessed Condition). Then he looked at the fake chocolate and exclaimed: “Oooh~! Alright! Let me go get that!” and started walking slowly towards the fake chocolate. When Maxi touched it, the bell rang, and the curtains were closed. Cupcake Story Cindy (Puppet A) entered the stage with a real cupcake (ER group) or empty handed (No- ER group), saying: “Hi, I’m Cindy. I love cupcakes! Do you like cupcakes? I eat cupcakes all the time!” The ER group watched Cindy taking a bite from the cream of the cupcake and saying: “It takes so good!” The real cupcake was left on the right corner. Cindy came back 3 seconds later and sat in the left corner (Witnessed Condition) or did not come back (Unwitnessed Condition). 36 In both conditions, Daisy (Puppet B) brought a deceptive cupcake that looks identical to the real cupcake. Daisy said: “This is not yummy. It is hard like wood. See? You cannot eat this!” and meanwhile turned it upside-down, shook it, and knocked it against the stage. Daisy then replaced the real cupcake with the fake one (ER group) or placed the fake one on the right corner (No-ER group), and she existed. Cindy stood up (Witnessed Condition) or came back (Unwitnessed Condition) after 3 seconds. After taking a look at the fake cupcake, Cindy said: “Oooh~! Alright! Let me get this now!” and walked slowly towards it. Lastly, Cindy fetched the fake cupcake, the bell rang, and the curtains were closed. Cherry Story Emma (Puppet A) entered the stage with a pile of real cherries (ER group) or nothing (No- ER group), stating: “Hi, I’m Emma. I love cherries! Do you like cherries? I eat cherries all the time!” The ER group watched Emma eating one whole cherry, saying: “oh, so juicy!” and placing the cherries on the right corner. Emma came back after 3 seconds and sit in the left corner (Witnessed Condition) or did not return (Unwitnessed Condition). Next, Fiona (Puppet B) entered with a pile of fake cherries that share the same appearance with the real cherries. Fiona opened one fake cherry and showed the foamy inside, exclaiming: “These things aren’t tasty and sweet. Look, they’re foamy! You cannot eat these!”. She replaced the real cherries with the fake ones (ER group) or placed the fake ones on the right corner (No-ER group), and left. Emma stood up (Witnessed Condition) or came back (Unwitnessed Condition) after 3 seconds. She looked at the fake cherries and said “Oooh~! Alright! Now I’m going to get those!”. She moved at a slower pace towards the fake cherries. When she touched the fake cherries, the bell rang, and the curtains were closed. Ice-cream Story 37 Grace (Puppet A) entered the stage with a real ice cream bar (ER group) or nothing (No- ER group), stating: “Hi, I’m Grace. I love ice-cream! Do you like ice-cream? I eat ice-cream all the time!” Only in the story that the ER group watched, Grace licked the ice-cream bar, stating: “This is delicious!” and she put it on the right corner of the stage. She excused herself and left. Then, Grace came back after 3 seconds and sit in the left corner (Witnessed Condition) or did not came back (Unwitnessed Condition). Next, Hank (Puppet B) appeared with a fake ice-cream bar that looked as the same as the real one. He demonstrated its inedibility by squeezing it and said: “It’s not tasty at all, it’s squishy! See? You cannot eat this thing!” Before Hank existed, he then switched the real ice-cream and the fake ice-cream (ER group) or placed the fake ones on the right corner (No-ER group). Next, Grace stood up (Witnessed Condition) or came back (Unwitnessed Condition). After seeing the ice-cream, she stated her intention to fetch it by saying “Oooh~! Alright! Now I’m going to get that!”. She walked at a slower pace towards the fake ice-cream. When she finally got close and picked it up, the bell rang, and the curtain were closed.
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This study using the suspense paradigm investigated whether 3-year-old children would express suspense when observing a misguided agent approaching an object with a deceptive appearance. In Experiment 1 (N = 60), 3-year-olds showed more expressions of suspense when the agent did not witness that her real food item was replaced with an inedible look-alike. However, this was true only for the children who saw the agent’s prior experience with the real food object. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), when the food item was replaced with a novel object with a different appearance, there was no significant difference in the number or the timing of suspenseful expressions. The findings reveal that although 3-year-olds seem to be able to track beliefs implicitly and sophisticatedly, they have a minimal Theory of Mind understanding which is limited in the following ways: (1) an experiential record relating the agent to the object is necessary for toddlers to ascribe epistemic states to the agent; (2) they have limited knowledge of how the object’s appearance impacts the agent’s representation of the object’s identity.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Ni, Qianhui
(author)
Core Title
Do 3-year-olds understand that appearances can ‘deceive’ and lead to false beliefs?
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Psychology
Degree Conferral Date
2021-08
Publication Date
07/30/2021
Defense Date
04/28/2021
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
appearance-reality distinction,false-belief understanding,OAI-PMH Harvest,theory of mind
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Moll, Henrike (
committee chair
), Manis, Frank (
committee member
), Mintz, Toby (
committee member
)
Creator Email
niqianhui1208vicky@gmail.com,qni@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15670111
Unique identifier
UC15670111
Legacy Identifier
etd-NiQianhui-9943
Document Type
Thesis
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Ni, Qianhui
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
appearance-reality distinction
false-belief understanding
theory of mind