which tests, in eVect, for the presence of desire–perception psychology, and
which chimps and gorillas can pass. This suggests that great apes may have
the mind-reading abilities of at least two- to three-year-old children.)
4.1 Normal developmentIt is possible to subject children to a false-belief test, however, as Wimmer
and Perner (1983) showed. The paradigm such test features a character,
Maxi, who places some chocolate in location A (a drawer in the kitchen).
He then goes out to play, and in the meantime his mother moves the
chocolate to another location, B (a cupboard in the kitchen). Maxi comes
back feeling hungry after his exertions and wanting his chocolate. The
children are then asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate. The correct
answer, of course, is that he will look in location Abecause that is where
Maxi thinks it is. In order to succeed in the false-belief task children have to
appreciate that the actual location of the chocolate (B, in the cupboard) is
something that Maxi does not know about. (Control questions are used to
probe whether the children remember where the chocolate was originally
located, and whether they recall where it was moved to.)
Most normal children are able to pass this test by about the age of four,
whereas younger children say that Maxi will look where the chocolate
actually is. This standard false-belief experiment has been repeated many
times with many possible variations in the manner of presentation (such as
puppet-characters, actors, story-books and so on). So the reliability of this
watershed in mind-reading development has to be regarded as a highly
robustWnding. One can say of children that they start to ‘do false belief’
towards the end of their fourth year in much the same way that one can say
that they start to toddle at the beginning of their second year.
Success on false-belief tasks at four years of age seems surprisingly
precocious in relation to anything which might be expected on a Piagetian
schedule of domain-general developmental stages. But in fact it may be
that the request for averbalresponse in standard false-belief tests actually
inhibits a mind-reading ability which is already present. At least, this
would seem to be the conclusion to draw from some research in which
children’s responses to false-belief tasks were assessed by noting the direc-
tion of their gaze, or by getting them to respond with very rapid motor
activity (Clements and Perner, 1994). By these measures, children were
succeeding on the tasks by as much as six months to a year earlier.
One variant on the original false-belief test isthe Smarties task. In this
experiment children are shown a container for a familiar type of sweet – a
Smarties tube (the US equivalent is M&Ms) – and asked what the tube
contains. The usual answer, as you might expect, is ‘sweets’ or ‘Smarties’.
92 Mind-reading