The relation between preschool children's false-belief understanding and domain-general experimentation skills

The focus of the present study is on the developmental antecedents of domain-general experimentation skills. We hypothesized that false-belief understanding would predict the ability to distinguish a conclusive from an inconclusive experiment. We conducted a longitudinal study with two assessment points (t1 and t2) to investigate this hypothesis. As language, executive functioning, working memory, and intelligence have been discussed as potential influencing factors in theory of mind and scientific reasoning development, we included measures of these abilities as control variables. We recruited 161 preschool children (73 girls and 88 boys); we administered a false-belief task, an experimentation task, and the control variables at t1 when the children were 4 years old. We repeated the false-belief and experimentation tasks at t2 when the children were 5 years old. Our results show that children who solved the false-belief task correctly at age 4 were more likely to solve the experimentation task correctly at age 5, but not vice versa, even after controlling for the influence of language, executive functioning, working memory, and intelligence. The implications of these results on theories about the development of scientific reasoning and for science education concepts for young children are briefly discussed.