Attribution of false belief in French children: Décalages between tasks and cultural differences.
Résumé
Theory of Mind (ToM) is usually considered a universal cognitive skill that children progressively master in very similar patterns of age-related changes (Wellman, Cross & Watson, 2001). However, developmental trajectories can be modulated by specific experiential factors and differences could exist in the timing of first acquisitions and in the mastering of different components of ToM. Preliminary data suggested that French children, like children in other countries (e.g., China, Japan, Italy; Liu et al, 2008; Lecce & Hughes, 2010), succeed false belief tasks later than English-speaking children as reported in published literature. Moreover, we also found a decalage between performances in Unexpected Content (UC) and Change of Location (CL) FB tasks, the former being succeeded earlier than the latter. The study reported here aimed to check the validity of these preliminary results, controlling more precisely the instructions and the order of presentation of the two tasks. 160 children, 5 to 8 years, were included in this study, with the order of tasks counterbalanced equally among them. The preliminary results were confirmed. Rate of success on the UC FB task correspondedto that obtained with English-speaking children, while success in CL FB task lagged behind. The discussion will bear on the decalage between the tasks and on the significance of these cultural differences.