DD201 – TMA 01 – Part One:
Describe the methods that researchers have used to assess mindreading abilities in
children and explain what this has revealed about whether mindreading abilities follow
a developmental trajectory…
Mindreading is defined as the ability to infer and attribute non-observable mental states,
such as emotions, desires, and intentions, to another person (Hewson, 2021, p. 27).
Everyday mindreading skills aid interpersonal communication and allow people to build
relationships, and successfully interact with others. In psychological terms, everyday
mindreading is often termed ‘theory of mind’ (Hewson, 2021, p 28). This essay will
explain some of the methods used to assess these abilities in children, using false belief
and visual perspective-taking tasks. It will then explain what the results of these studies
reveal about whether mindreading abilities follow a development trajectory; in other
words, whether they develop and change with age (Hewson, 2021, p 51).
One well-established method of assessing mindreading abilities in children is the false
belief task. This task measures a child’s ability to understand that other people can have
false beliefs. A widely used tool used for this purpose is the Sally-Anne Task (Hewson,
2021, p29-32). This involves two dolls called Sally and Anne and is a visual scene played
out for the child by an experimenter. On a tabletop sits a basket and a box. Sally places a
marble in the basket and then leaves the room. In Sally’s absence, in full view of the
child, Anne removes the marble from the basket and places it in the box. When Sally
returns, the child is asked where she will look for the marble.
The correct answer is that Sally will look for the marble where she left it: in the basket.
Children aged 4 and under generally answer incorrectly, stating Sally will look in the new
location. However, children aged 5 and above generally answer that Sally will look in the
basket, therefore demonstrating an understanding of Sally’s false belief (Hewson, 2021, p
31). A similar false belief assessment tool, the Maxi task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983,
cited in Hewson, 2021), is a spoken word test but is largely a variation of the traditional
Sally-Anne task. The Maxi task has revealed the same general results, that children 4 and
under tend to answer incorrectly, while children 6 and above answer correctly and
appear to understand the concept of Maxi’s false belief.
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, Other tests used to assess mindreading abilities in children are visual perspective-taking
tasks (Hewson, 2021, p 46-48). Level 1 tasks are used to assess a child’s understanding
that people with different lines of sight see different things. This involves a child being
shown visuals of two people in different positions, with an object only being viewable by
one person. The child is asked to detail what each person can see. Results show many
children, aged 2 and above, exhibit some mindreading abilities and can show an
understanding that people can see different things from different lines of sight (Flavell
1974; Moll and Tomasello 2006, cited in Hewson, 2021),
Level 2 is more complex and involves a diagram where two people can see the same
object from different perspectives. Again, the child is asked to state what each person
can see. Level 2 results show many children aged 3 and under fail to answer correctly
when asked what can be seen from different perspectives (Apperly, 2011; cited in
Hewson, 2021), suggesting that mindreading abilities for more complex visual
perspective-taking tasks are acquired later in a child’s development.
With the Sally-Anne and Maxi tasks, empirical results suggest children demonstrate an
understanding of false beliefs at age 4 years and above and 6 years and above,
respectively (Hewson, 2021, p 31, and Wimmer and Perner, 1983, cited in Hewson,
2021). Evidence obtained from visual perspective-taking tasks shows many children aged
2 and over pass Level 1, while many children aged 3 fail on the Level 2 task (Flavell 1974;
Moll and Tomasello 2006, and Apperly, 2011 cited in Hewson, 2021). This appears to
show that children demonstrate elementary mindreading abilities at a younger age in
visual perspective-taking tests than with false belief tasks.
The evidence shows that children can pass more basic mindreading tasks, as with the
visual perspective-taking tasks, at a younger age than they can with other, more complex,
tasks, such as traditional false belief tasks. This suggests that very young children have
some basic mindreading skills and that these abilities gradually develop and become
superior with age, thus following a developmental trajectory.
However, it is important to note that some research has suggested that failure on false
belief tasks - which happens at a more advanced age than with visual perspective taking
tasks - may be linked to other factors in the child’s development, such as a lack of
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