Evidence for goal‐ and mixed evidence for false belief‐based action prediction in two‐ to four‐year‐old children: A large‐scale longitudinal anticipatory looking replication study

Recently, theory-of-mind research has been revolutionized by findings from novel implicit tasks suggesting that at least some aspects of false-belief reasoning develop earlier in ontogeny than previously assumed and operate automatically throughout adulthood. Although these findings are the empirical basis for far-reaching theories, systematic replications are still missing. This article reports a preregistered large-scale attempt to replicate four influential anticipatory-looking implicit theory-of-mind tasks using original stimuli and procedures. Results showed that only one of the four paradigms was reliably replicated. A second set of studies revealed, further, that this one paradigm was no longer replicated once confounds were removed, which calls its validity into question. There were also no correlations between paradigms, and thus, no evidence for their convergent validity. In conclusion, findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief paradigms seem less reliable and valid than previously assumed, thus limiting the conclusions that can be drawn from them.

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The robustness and generalizability of findings on spontaneous false belief sensitivity: a replication attempt

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.172273 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 5 (5) ◽

pp. 172273 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Tobias Schuwerk ◽

Beate Priewasser ◽

Beate Sodian ◽

Josef Perner

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Test Phase ◽

False Belief ◽

Replication Study ◽

Familiarization Phase ◽

Sole Purpose ◽

Link Type ◽

Explicit Theory ◽

Implicit And Explicit ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Influential studies showed that 25-month-olds and neurotypical adults take an agent's false belief into account in their anticipatory looking patterns (Southgate et al. 2007 Psychol. Sci. 18 , 587–592 ( doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x ); Senju et al. 2009 Science 325 , 883–885 ( doi:10.1126/science.1176170 )). These findings constitute central pillars of current accounts distinguishing between implicit and explicit Theory of Mind. In our first experiment, which initially included a replication as well as two manipulations, we failed to replicate the original finding in 2- to 3-year-olds ( N = 48). Therefore, we ran a second experiment with the sole purpose of seeing whether the effect can be found in an independent, tightly controlled, sufficiently powered and preregistered replication study. This replication attempt failed again in a sample of 25-month-olds ( N = 78), but was successful in a sample of adults ( N = 115). In all samples, a surprisingly high number of participants did not correctly anticipate the agent's action during the familiarization phase. This led to massive exclusion rates when adhering to the criteria of the original studies and strongly limits the interpretability of findings from the test phase. We discuss both the reliability of our replication attempts as well as the replicability of non-verbal anticipatory looking paradigms of implicit false belief sensitivity, in general.

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Evolutionary foundations of knowledge and belief attribution in nonhuman primates

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x20001521 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 44 ◽

Author(s):

Fumihiro Kano ◽

Josep Call

Keyword(s):

Nonhuman Primates ◽

Great Apes ◽

False Belief ◽

Belief Attribution ◽

Belief Attributions ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Abstract Recent findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief tests have shown that nonhuman great apes and macaques anticipate that an agent will go to the location where the agent falsely believed an object to be. Phillips et al.'s claim that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief should thus be reconsidered. We propose that both knowledge and belief attributions are evolutionary old.

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False Belief Understanding in Young Children: Explanations do not Develop Before Predictions

International Journal of Behavioral Development ◽

10.1080/016502598384441 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 403-422 ◽

Cited By ~ 49

Author(s):

Heinz Wimmer ◽

Heinz Mayringer

Keyword(s):

Transfer Task ◽

False Belief ◽

Action Prediction ◽

Epistemic States ◽

False Belief Understanding ◽

Critical Object ◽

Action Analysis ◽

Critical Account ◽

Simple Action ◽

Wrong Place

Two studies contrasted children’s ability to predict a wrong action with their ability to explain such an action in a standard unexpected transfer task. It was found that the majority of 31/2- to 41/2-year-old children was unable to explain in an appropriate way why the protagonist looked for the critical object in the wrong place and, therefore, exhibited at least as much difficulty with explanation as with prediction. This finding speaks against Fodor’s (1992) critical account of the standard false belief tasks. According to Fodor, these tasks induce children to rely on too simple action prediction heuristics (“Predict that the agent will act in a way that will satisfy his desire”) although they possess an understanding of belief and desire as joint causes of action. Analysis of children’s inadequate explanatory attempts showed that in the majority of these answers they referred to the protagonist’s desire to get the object or to the actual location of the object. These desire and reality orientations in explanation are similar to response tendencies in prediction and suggest a lacking in understanding of the causal links between misleading informational conditions, epistemic states, and resulting actions in younger children.

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Validation of reported genetic risk factors for periodontitis in a large-scale replication study

Journal Of Clinical Periodontology ◽

10.1111/jcpe.12092 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 40 (6) ◽

pp. 563-572 ◽

Cited By ~ 58

Author(s):

Arne S. Schaefer ◽

Gregor Bochenek ◽

Thomas Manke ◽

Michael Nothnagel ◽

Christian Graetz ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Risk Factors ◽

Genetic Risk ◽

Large Scale ◽

Genetic Risk Factors ◽

Replication Study

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Author response: Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

10.7554/elife.33468.024 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mante S Nieuwland ◽

Stephen Politzer-Ahles ◽

Evelien Heyselaar ◽

Katrien Segaert ◽

Emily Darley ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Comprehension ◽

Large Scale ◽

Replication Study ◽

Author Response ◽

Probabilistic Prediction

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Applying the implicit-explicit distinction to development in children

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x99532184 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 22 (5) ◽

pp. 783-783

Author(s):

Ted Ruffman

Keyword(s):

Real World ◽

Implicit Knowledge ◽

False Belief ◽

False Belief Task ◽

The World ◽

Anticipatory Looking

This commentary focuses on how Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) claims relate to aspects of development. First, I discuss recent research that supports D&P's claim that anticipatory looking in a false belief task is guided by implicit knowledge. Second, I argue that implicit knowledge may be based on exposure to regularities in the world as D&P argue, but equally, it may sometimes be based on theories that conflict with real world regularities. Third, I discuss Munakata et al.'s notion of graded representations as an alternative to the implicit-explicit distinction in explaining dissociations in infancy.

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Are Humans all Alike? Personality Differences in Mean Profiles of IPIP-NEO Respondents around the Globe

10.31234/osf.io/yavsm ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Minhaaj Rehman ◽

John Anthony Johnson

Keyword(s):

Personality Traits ◽

Large Scale ◽

Replication Study ◽

Current Paper ◽

Large Dataset ◽

Personality Differences ◽

Global Study ◽

Mean Differences

Allik et al. (2017) studied scores of 71,870 participants from 76 samples, 62 countries and 37different languages and found out that mean differences in personality traits between countries and cultures were about 8.5 times less than two randomly picked individuals from the respective sample. No such global study has been conducted with the data from IPIP-NEO-300 scores. A brief study of 12 nation comparison based on IPIP-NEO-120 scores was conducted, but no large-scale meaningful and generalizable results were obtained (Kajonius, 2017). Authors in current paper have attempted a replication study of (Allik et al., 2017) with a large dataset of over 300,000 respondents globally.

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A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju, & Csibra (2007)

10.31234/osf.io/gzy26 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Dora Kampis ◽

Petra Karman ◽

Gergely Csibra ◽

Victoria Southgate ◽

Mikołaj Hernik

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Young Children ◽

Collaborative Study ◽

False Belief ◽

Action Prediction ◽

Belief Attribution ◽

False Belief Understanding

The study by Southgate, V., Senju, A., and Csibra, G. (Southgate et al., 2007) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies were unable to replicate the original finding, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested 160 24- to 26-month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure, and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked in anticipation to the location of an agent’s impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent’s beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that the paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false belief understanding in 2- year-old children. While the results of the current study do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence, can no longer serve that function.

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Are we less social in noisy environments? No effect of noise on implicit Theory of Mind performance

10.31234/osf.io/jmkfh ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Louisa Kulke ◽

hannes rakoczy

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Environmental Noise ◽

False Belief ◽

Implicit Theory ◽

Noisy Environments ◽

Testing Environment ◽

Gaze Patterns ◽

Replication Research ◽

Different Levels ◽

Anticipatory Looking

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others, has been a recent focus of replication research. While some researchers found an implicit form of ToM, which could be measured with different tasks, including anticipatory looking measures, other researchers could not replicate these finding. The testing conditions may play a role for the success of replications. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of a noisy testing environment on results in an anticipatory looking false belief task. The original findings could only be partially replicated, leaving room for alternative explanations. Environmental noise did not significantly affect gaze patterns. Therefore, previous failed replications are unlikely to be related to different levels in environmental noise.

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