TEACHING FALSE BELIEF AND VISUAL PERSPECTIVE TAKING SKILLS IN YOUNG CHILDREN: CAN A THEORY OF MIND BE TRAINED?

False belief understanding typically develops around the fourth year of life. In Experiment I, a training scheme was devised to teach false belief understanding to 3-year-old children who failed two pre-training false belief tasks. In the training, the children were encouraged to reflect on the events of various false belief scenarios, particularly the thoughts of the protagonist. The false belief training group significantly outperformed a control group on a close transfer false belief task. However, no generalization to distant transfer tasks was observed. In Experiment 2, this finding was replicated and an additional visual perspective taking training condition was included, following which childrenʹs performance on close transfer visual perspective taking tasks improved. No distant transfer effects were observed for either training group. These results suggest that task-specific strategies for close transfer posttest success were learned, rather than demonstrating a real increase in childrenʹs conceptual understanding of mental states. The results are discussed in relation to different training methods and to the findings of prior training studies.