THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYmental challenges that, say, a typical four-year old could pass but that
any two-year-old would most certainly fail. A classic example is the false-
belief task. Children are presented with a cartoon scenario in which a
character empties a pencil tin of pencils and fills it with Smarties. A new
character appears on the scene and the children are asked what she will
think is in the tin. Children of four years of age and upwards under-
stand that the new character has no reason to think the tin will contain
anything other than pencils. By contrast, two- and three-year-olds tend
to say the new character will think the tin is full of Smarties because they
haven’t yet grasped the notion that people can hold false beliefs.
However, psychologists are forever devising new ways to reveal infant
and childhood abilities, with the result that Piaget’s theory of errors and
stages no longer holds up as well. It’s not that these abilities are fully
formed from birth, rather it’s that the first signs of understanding – the
building blocks – are being discovered at earlier and earlier ages. The
findings reveal a picture of development that’s more continuous than
Piaget’s abrupt stages implied.
For a good example, let’s return to children’s appreciation of other
people’s point of view – an ability psychologists call having a theory of
mind. Piaget devised a test known as the “three-mountain task”, inspired
by the scenic landscape surrounding Geneva. The task involved sitting
children in front of a model of the mountains and asking them to
Jean Piaget founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva
in 1955 and directed it until shortly before his death in 1980.