CHILDRENS THEORY OF MIND - FODOR HEURISTICS EXAMINED

The study reported in this manuscript examined Fodor's (1992) argument that standard false belief tasks used in developmental research serio usly underestimate young children's understanding of false belief. The problem of these tasks according to Fodor is that always a unique, ac tual state of affairs (e.g., chocolate is now in cupboard B) is contra sted with a believed state of affairs (e.g., chocolate is still in cup board A). Fodor argued that this uniqueness feature may be critical be cause young children with limited computational resources have to trad e reliability of behavioral prediction for computational simplicity an d, therefore, may rely on simple heuristics such as ''Predict that the agent will act in a way that will satisfy his desires''. In the stand ard false belief task such a heuristic will result in a unique, but in correct (reality-based) prediction. Fodor's expectation is that when y oung children are not misled into applying such heuristics by the poss ibility of unique, reality-based prediction, then their true competenc e for belief-based reasoning will become evident. The present study co ntrasted for two different belief tasks a traditional unique version w ith a non-unique version, but found no support for Fodor's expectation as both 3- and 4-year-old children did not improve in the non-unique version.