INTEGRATING RELATIONSHIP CONSTRUCTS AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE INTO FALSE BELIEF TASKS IN PRESCHOOL-CHILDREN

Themes of separation from attachment figures are involved when caregiv ers are integrated into standard theory of mind tasks in which objects or toys are located. Two experiments test the hypothesis that searchi ng for a caregiver would interfere with false belief performance and b e related to a child's emotional awareness. Experiment 1 consisted of a cross-sectional study of three-to five-year-old children administere d false belief tasks related to object identity, object location, and caregiver location, i.e., false belief tasks where story characters be came separated from a parent and had to locate them. As expected, ther e were age-related improvements in false belief performance to above-c hance levels during object identity and object location tasks, but per formance on the caregiver location tasks showed no age-related improve ment and at age five was poorer than other tasks. Emotional integratio n also varied with task. Children who were relatively more aware of em otions were more likely to pass tasks involving objects, and queries o f emotions during tasks were related to false beliefs about objects bu t not caregivers. A second study of children Eve years of age indicate d that it was not caregivers per se that disrupted their performance o n false belief tasks. Additional tasks showed that this finding was du e to caregivers being animate ''behaving'' objects whose relocation ha d been self-as opposed to other-directed, which suggests that false be lief performance was related to the intent of the sought item. The dev eloping awareness of the minds of others in five-year-olds and emotion al content of the task may interfere with performance in false belief tusks that are social. (C) 1997 Academic Press.