Actions really do speak louder than words - but only implicitly: Young children's understanding of false belief in action

Children show understanding of a mistaken story character's actions in thei r visual-orienting responses before they show this in their answers to test questions. Clements and Perner (1994) interpreted the visual responses as reflecting implicit understanding (implicit-knowledge hypothesis). The pres ent study explores three possible ways of saving the hypothesis that differ ent bodies of exclusively explicit knowledge are involved (explicit-knowled ge-only hypothesis): the lack-of-confidence hypothesis asserts that childre n are just not confident of the novel but correct answer and the misinterpr etation hypothesis claims that children are simply misinterpreting the test question. The temporal stacking hypothesis assumes that children consider first the novel idea that the protagonist will go where he or she thinks th e object is and then they consider the more established idea that the prota gonist will go where the object really is. It explains the original finding by assuming that visual responses are governed by the earlier and the verb al answers by the later considered idea. The results offered little support for the first two of these attempts to save the explicit-knowledge-only hy pothesis. Although parts of the results are compatible with the temporal st acking hypothesis, the overall pattern of results is not. Rather, it is ver y similar to findings from implicit visual perception, where people experie nce a lack of conscious awareness. This similarity reinforces the original interpretation of a dissociation between implicit and explicit understandin g of belief-based action.