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Abstract

We report four experiments on children’s reasoning about intentions using a new change-of-intentions task, in which an observer witnesses an actor carrying out an action, e.g., Mary hears her brother Tom say he wants to switch on the TV to watch a cartoon DVD. Mary goes away and the reason for the action changes, Tom’s grandmother tells Tom to switch on the TV to watch the news. The experiments examine reasoning about false beliefs, e.g., What will Mary believe is the reason that Tom is switching on the TV?, and counterfactual reasoning, e.g., If Tom’s grandmother hadn’t asked Tom to switch on the TV to watch the news, what would have been the reason he was switching it on? Experiment 1 reveals three effects, first,children aged 6 years make more mistakes than those aged 8 years, second, they make more mistakes in false belief than counterfactual reasoning, and third, they make more mistakes for a desire changed to an obligation, compared to an obligation changed to a desire. Experiment 1B shows that the effects also occur for children aged 7 years compared to 9 years. Experiment 2 shows that the effects occur for unfamiliar make-believe content, and Experiment 3 shows that they occur in stories with a simpler structure. The implications for understanding the cognitive processes underlying children’s reasoning about intentions are discussed.

6. General discussion

How does a child who is invited to play on a swing by another child figure out the other child’s intentions, such as that the child wishes to make friends, and track changes in the other child’s reasons, such as that the other child initially issued the invitation because her mother instructed her to do so, but now the other child wishes to be friends? The results of the four experiments reported in this paper shed some light on the cognitive processes that develop from the ages of 6 years to 9 years as children acquire new reasoning skills about mental states. The primary contribution of the four experiments is the discovery that younger children aged 6 years make more correct counterfactual inferences compared to false-belief inferences, even when they concern the same sorts of mental states. The result suggests that even when children can make counterfactual inferences about mental states, they must still develop further skills to acomplish ‘mind-reading’ other people’s mental states (e.g., Riggs et al., 1998). A central component of this discovery is the new change-of-intentions task. It shows that children aged 6 and 7 years make more mistakes than children aged 8 and 9 years in false belief reasoning about intentions. The children in all of the experiments passed the standard false belief task about the unexpected change of location of a physical object. The finding of such a difficulty in false belief reasoning about intentions advances the suggestion that mastery of second-order false belief reasoning, such as reasoning about a person’s beliefs about another person’s beliefs, constitutes a significant cognitive feat (e.g., Miller, 2009; Perner & Wimmer, 1985). It is a further landmark development that is accomplished at an older age compared to first-order false belief reasoning about a person’s beliefs about the physical world. The four experiments indicate that accuracy is not achieved until about 9 years in the case of reasoning about a person’s beliefs about another person’s reasons for their actions.