Teaching Children to Attribute Second-order False Beliefs: A Training Study with Feedback

The ability to reason about another person’s mental states, such as belief, desires and knowledge – first-order theory of mind – develops between the ages three and four. On the other hand, children need one or two more years to reason about a person who reasons about another person – secondorder theory of mind. Is it possible to accelerate the development of theory of mind? There are several training studies that showed that it is possible to teach preschool children to pass first-order false belief tasks. However, the literature is missing analogous training effects for school-age children with respect to second-order false belief tasks. In this study, we focus on the role of feedback in the development of second-order false belief reasoning in two different conditions in children between the ages five and six: (i) feedback with explanation, (ii) feedback without explanation. Children’s performance improved in both conditions. Previous theories suggest either that children’s development of second-order theory of mind requires conceptual changes or that 4-5 year old children have cognitive constraints that need to be overcome in order for them to be able to apply second-order theory of mind. In line with our findings, however, we argue that five-year-old children who cannot yet pass the secondorder false belief task reason about the false belief questions based on the reasoning strategy that they most frequently use in daily life (i.e. first-order or zero-order theory of mind). Moreover, we argue that most of the time children can revise their wrong reasoning strategy and change to the correct second-order reasoning strategy based on repeated exposure to the feedback “Correct/Wrong” together with the correct answer.