STRATEGIC GAME PLAYING IN CHILDREN THROUGH THE WINDOWS TASK

Recently, the 'windows task' was devised to explore preschoolers' capa city for strategic deception (Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe & Tidswell, 19 91). The windows task required a child to point. at an empty box to ob tain a second box which contained a desired object (a chocolate). Russ ell et al. (1991) found that, unlike older children, 3-year-olds consi stently failed to adopt a strategy which would help them win the choco lates. A majority of their 3-year-old subjects perseverated on the wro ng response across all trials of their experiment. Two experiments wer e devised to investigate why 3-year-olds consistently failed the windo ws task. Experiment 1 included five versions of this task, four of whi ch modified Russell et al.'s instructions to see whether simplified ta sk demands would affect the children's responses, and the fifth attemp ted to replicate the original wording of Russell et al. (1991). Childr en in all groups performed well, failing to replicate the perseveratio n witnessed in that experiment. Performance on the task was found to b e unrelated to performance on standard theory of mind tasks. Experimen t 2 was devised to replicate exactly the conditions of the Russell et al. (1991) experiment. Again, children had little difficulty solving t he task. The present experiments provide evidence that children as you ng as 3 years can override their desire to reach or point to an object if they need to make a contrary response to obtain the object. These results indicate that executive control limitations as measured by thi s task cannot sufficiently explain preschoolers' failure on theory of mind tasks.