Children's divergent thinking improves when they understand false beliefs

This research utilized longitudinal and cross-sectional methods to investig ate the relation between the development of a representational theory of mi nd and children's growing ability to search their own minds for appropriate problem solutions. In the first experiment, 59 preschool children were giv en 3 false-belief tasks and a divergent-thinking task Those children who pa ssed false-belief tasks produced significantly mole items, as well as more original items, in response to divergent-thinking questions than those chil dren who failed. This significant association persisted even when chronolog ical age and ver bal and nonverbal general ability were partialed out. In a second study, 20 children who failed the false-belief task in the first ex periment were retested 3 months later. Again, those who now passed the fals e-belief tasks were significantly better at the divergent-thinking task tha n those who continued to Sail. The associations between measures of diverge nt thinking and understanding false beliefs remained significant when contr olling for the covariates. Earlier divergent-thinking scores did not predic t false-belief understanding three months later. Instead children who passe d false-belief tasks on the second measure improved significantly in relati on to their own earlier performance and improved significantly more than ch ildren who continued to fail. False-belief task performance was significant ly, correlated to the amount of intraindividual improvement in divergent th inking even when age and verbal and nonverbal skills were partialed out. Th ese findings suggest that developments in common underlying skills are resp onsible for the improvement in understanding other minds and searching one' s own. Changes in representational and executive skills are discussed as po tential causes of the improvement.