ARE ERRORS IN FALSE BELIEF TASKS SYMPTOMATIC OF A BROADER DIFFICULTY WITH COUNTERFACTUALITY

When children acknowledge false belief they are handling a counterfact ual situation. In three experiments 3- and 4-year-old children were gi ven false belief tasks and physical state tasks which required similar handling of counterfactual situations but which did not require under standing about beliefs or representations: Children were asked to repo rt what the state of the world might be now had an earlier event not o ccurred. The incidence of realist errors in the false belief and physi cal state tasks was significantly correlated independently of shared c orrelations with chronological age and receptive verbal ability. In a fourth experiment, children made significantly fewer realist errors wh en asked to infer a future hypothetical state. These results provide p reliminary evidence consistent with the suggestion that pre-school chi ldren's difficulty with false belief is symptomatic of a more general difficulty entertaining counterfactual situations.