Does eye gaze indicate implicit knowledge of false belief? Charting transitions in knowledge

Three-year-olds sometimes look to the correct location but give an incorrec t verbal answer in a false belief task. We examined whether correct eye gaz e among 3- to 5-year-old children indexed unconscious knowledge or low conf idence conscious knowledge. Children "bet" counters on where they thought a story character would go. If children were conscious of the knowledge conv eyed by their eye gaze then they should have bet modestly on their explicit answer (i.e., been unsure whether this answer or the answer conveyed throu gh eye direction was correct). We found that children bet very highly on th e location consistent with their explicit answer, suggesting that they were not aware of the knowledge conveyed through their eye gaze. This result wa s supported by a number of conditions that showed that betting was a sensit ive measure of even small degrees of uncertainty. The results shed light on false-belief understanding, the implicit-explicit distinction, and transit ional knowledge. We argue that the transition to a full understanding of fa lse belief is marked by periods of implicit knowledge and explicit understa nding with low confidence. (C) 2001 Academic Press.