Young children from Germany and China fail at a low-demand false belief task when alternative strategies are controlled for

Previous research has shown that 2.5-year-old toddlers succeed at a verbal false belief (FB) task when response generation and inhibitory control demands were reduced (Setoh et al., 2016). However, this low-inhibition version of a traditional FB task was criticized for being susceptible to low-level strategies, such as pointing to the last location where the object had been, rather than inferring the agent’s belief. To rule out such alternative explanations, we extended the Setoh et al. (2016) paradigm by adding a second condition (FB=first) where the location the agent believed the object to be was its first location. German (N=56) and Chinese (N=45) 3- to 5-year-olds were tested with this extended low-demand FB task, a standard FB task, and an inhibitory control task. Across both cultures, children performed well in the original FB=last condition from age 3, but only passed the new FB=first condition around age 5. Performance in the FB=first condition was related to age and performance in the standard FB task, while the FB=last condition was not. The discrepancy between FB=first and FB=last condition suggests that young children’s success in the original study by Setoh et al. (2016) was due to the non-mentalistic strategy of choosing the last object location. Our findings are consistent across two cultures, suggesting that, in line with the traditional theory, explicit false belief reasoning emerges around age 4 in both Western and Chinese cultures, even when the executive demands of the task are reduced.