False Belief Tasks (Sally & Ann Tasks)

Why do autistic children fail false belief tasks?

What are the components of false belief tasks?

Peterson, D & Bowler, D.M. (2000). Counterfactual Reasoning and False Belief Understanding in Children with Autism. Autism, 4(4), 391-405

False belief tasks can be tackled by a strategy ¡V subtractive reasoning, e.g. if (object) had not been moved, where would it be now? When this supposition is provided, autistic children can answer correctly. But in false belief tasks, this is not immediately available. Without the supposition serving a cue, they fail the task more easily. It shows that what they lack is a generative ability.

Russell, J., Saltmarsh R. & Hill, E. (1999). What Do Executive Factors Contribute to the Failure on False Belief Tasks by Children with Autism? Journal of Child Psychology & psychiatry, 40(6), 859-868

Russell et al. used a similar but modified false photograph task to test autistic children. The tasks are representational but non-mentalistic. Results are similar to false belief tasks. It therefore shows that failure of false belief tasks is due to executive factors.

Henry Wellman published (in Child Development) a meta analysis of 179 false belief studies. He identified 6 variable relationships of importance.

1. motive

2. participation

3. real presence

4. salience

5. country of origin ¡V there is a cultural difference

6. temporal marking ¡V it implies linguistic knowledge can be an advantage

De Villiers, J. (2000) Language and theory of mind : what are the developmental relationships? Understanding other minds. Oxford : Oxford University Press

Several researchers have found that mastery of false-belief reasoning tasks is related to measures of language ability, in both normally-developing children and children with autism (Happˆm 1995: Tager-Flusberg 1996: Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan 1994). Astington and Jenkins (1995) found with normal-developing children that general false-belief understanding assessed by summing across four standard tests of false-belief reasoning, was significantly correlated with measures of syntactic and semantic maturity on the Test of early Language Development (TELD), even when the effects of age were partialled out. The sophisticated use of sentence forms involving mental-state verbs and their complements coincides roughly in time with the child¡¦s successful performance on standard false-belief tasks (Astington and Jenkins 1995; de Villiers 1995a;Tager-Flusberg 1996) A number of recent studies on oral deaf subjects showed a strong relationship between language mastery and false-belief understanding. (Peterson and Siegal, 1995; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1999)

Measures of autistic children¡¦s lexical knowledge by means of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) or its British counterpart, the BPVT, correlated with subjects¡¦ performance on theory of mind tasks. (Happˆm, 1995: Dahlgren and Trillingsgaard, 1996; Sparrevohn and Howie, 1995)