I know you see it wrong! Children use others’ false perceptions to predict their behaviors
Abstract
Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to
others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a
novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental
state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age,
children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory
object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was
whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the
object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33
preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused
a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small.
To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would
falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly
anticipate the agent’s actions on that basis. Children performed significantly
better than chance in our false perception test, and there
was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5 years
of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings
demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding
that other individuals will be perceptually misled by
illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their
actions in predictable ways.