CHILDRENS MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF REFERENTIAL RELATIONS

We identify a surprising discrepancy in children's performance in two tasks which appear superficially to require handling of the same prope rties of the representational mind. Four- to six-year-olds made judgem ents about the knowledge of a protagonist who had only partial informa tion about an object: the child knew that an object in a box had two d escriptions, X and Y (e.g. dice and eraser), but the protagonist had a ccess to only one of these, X. In Experiment 1, children who passed a standard false-belief task also judged correctly that the protagonist did not know the X was Y, but often judged wrongly that he did know th ere was a Y in the box. In Experiment 2, children predicted wrongly wh ere the protagonist would look for a Y: the problem was not purely lin guistic. We argue that success on standard theory-of-mind tasks can be supported by a more basic representing ability than is assumed in cur rent theories, and that children's mental representation of referentia l relations between the world and the mind subsequently undergoes impo rtant change. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.