دانلود رایگان مقاله انتخاب رمزنگاری و تاثیر آن بر آنالیز اندازه گیری باور نادرست

Abstract

The unexpected contents task is a ubiquitous measure of false belief. Not only has this measure been used to study children’s developing knowledge of belief, it has impacted the study of atypical development, education, and many other facets of cognitive development. Based on a review of articles using this task, we show that there is no consensus regarding how to score this measure. Further, examining both a logit analysis of performance on this measure and performance of a large sample of preschoolers, we show that which coding scheme researchers used to analyze raw data from this measure has a reliable effect on results, particularly when smaller sample sizes are used. Integrating our results, we conclude that the most frequently used coding scheme is flawed. We recommend best practices for scoring the unexpected contents task, and that researchers examine how they analyze data from this measure to ensure the robustness of their effects.

6. Best practices and general discussion

We have shown thatthere is no consensus in how the unexpected contentsmeasure is scored, and thatthemostfrequently used scoring system based on our review did notfactor in any control measure into analyses ofthe task. Further, across several analyses, we found that the coding scheme researchers used to score the unexpected content tasks potentially contributes to the significance level of analyses reported by the researchers. As such, we suspect that the coding scheme used for scoring this measure (and potentially related measures of false belief) could be a “researcher degree of freedom” (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011, p. 1559) present in studies of children’s theory of mind. We do not suspect that malice or deceptive intentions underlie any researcher when they choose how to score this measure. Indeed, we suspect that some authors have used a particular coding scheme for long periods, and this presumably reflects a genuine belief that there is an unambiguous way of scoring the measure. But this seems to reflect a minority; the majority of researchers using this measure appear to succumb to the genuine ambiguity in how to best score this measure. We want to point out a particular limitation with our review, which is that we only focused on the unexpected contents task. Other measures of false belief (e.g., unexpected transfer, appearance-reality, etc.) also use control questions or pretests to ensure that children have the requisite attentional or memory capacities necessary to demonstrate their theory of mind knowledge.We limited our analysis to the unexpected contents task for two reasons. Thefirst was practical – we had available to us a data set on children’s performance on this particular measure. The second was that in the unexpected contents procedure, there tends to be only one control question asked (about the actual contents of the box), which simplified the review of the literature and our categorization of the different coding schemes. To our knowledge, other measures of false belief have not been analyzed in the manner presented here. We suspect that this analysis is representative of the broader literature on explicit judgments about false belief.