{"pk":25400,"title":"Teaching Children to Attribute Second-order False Beliefs: A Training Study with Feedback","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The ability to reason about another person’s mental states,\nsuch as belief, desires and knowledge – first-order theory of\nmind – develops between the ages three and four. On the\nother hand, children need one or two more years to reason\nabout a person who reasons about another person – secondorder\ntheory of mind. Is it possible to accelerate the\ndevelopment of theory of mind? There are several training\nstudies that showed that it is possible to teach preschool\nchildren to pass first-order false belief tasks. However, the\nliterature is missing analogous training effects for school-age\nchildren with respect to second-order false belief tasks. In this\nstudy, we focus on the role of feedback in the development of\nsecond-order false belief reasoning in two different conditions\nin children between the ages five and six: (i) feedback with\nexplanation, (ii) feedback without explanation. Children’s\nperformance improved in both conditions. Previous theories\nsuggest either that children’s development of second-order\ntheory of mind requires conceptual changes or that 4-5 year\nold children have cognitive constraints that need to be\novercome in order for them to be able to apply second-order\ntheory of mind. In line with our findings, however, we argue\nthat five-year-old children who cannot yet pass the secondorder\nfalse belief task reason about the false belief questions\nbased on the reasoning strategy that they most frequently use\nin daily life (i.e. first-order or zero-order theory of mind).\nMoreover, we argue that most of the time children can revise\ntheir wrong reasoning strategy and change to the correct\nsecond-order reasoning strategy based on repeated exposure\nto the feedback “Correct/Wrong” together with the correct\nanswer.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Second-order theory of mind"},{"word":"false belief\nreasoning"},{"word":"Feedback"},{"word":"training"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zw9683d","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Burcu","middle_name":"","last_name":"Arslan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen","department":""},{"first_name":"Rineke","middle_name":"","last_name":"Verbrugge","name_suffix":"","institution":"Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen","department":""},{"first_name":"Niels","middle_name":"","last_name":"Taatgen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen","department":""},{"first_name":"Bart","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hollebrands","name_suffix":"","institution":"Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25400/galley/15024/download/"}]}