Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Although it is well established that four-year-olds outperform three-year-olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four-year-olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief-desire reasoning.

[1]  L. Moses,et al.  The role of inhibitory processes in young children's difficulties with deception and false belief. , 1998, Child development.

[2]  A. Leslie,et al.  Solving belief problems: toward a task analysis , 1998, Cognition.

[3]  Alan M. Leslie,et al.  Domain specificity in conceptual development: Neuropsychological evidence from autism , 1992, Cognition.

[4]  F. N. Dempster,et al.  The rise and fall of the inhibitory mechanism: Toward a unified theory of cognitive development and aging , 1992 .

[5]  David F. Bjorklund,et al.  The resources construct in cognitive development: Diverse sources of evidence and a theory of inefficient inhibition. , 1990 .

[6]  P S Goldman-Rakic,et al.  Development of cortical circuitry and cognitive function. , 1987, Child development.

[7]  M. Posner,et al.  Selective attention and cognitive control , 1987, Trends in Neurosciences.

[8]  S. Baron-Cohen,et al.  Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind” ? , 1985, Cognition.

[9]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception , 1983, Cognition.

[10]  T Shallice,et al.  Dual functions of consciousness. , 1972, Psychological review.

[11]  D. Hubel,et al.  Receptive fields and functional architecture of monkey striate cortex , 1968, The Journal of physiology.

[12]  L. Frank.  The Society for Research in Child Development , 1935 .

[13]  R. Rafal,et al.  The neurology of inhibition: Integrating controlled and automatic processes. , 1994 .

[14]  James A. Russell,et al.  Autistic children's difficulty with mental disengagement from an object: Its implications for theories of autism. , 1993 .