False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult Subject answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous- and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.