Running head: CHILDREN'S ATTRIBUTIONS OF BELIEFS

Children's Attributions 6

Carruthers & Smith, 1996; Whiten, 1991). Although some evidence has emerged for the
presence of representational reasoning in 3-year-olds (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Hala,
Chandler, & Fritz, 1991; Lewis & Osbourne, 1990; Siegal & Beattie, 1991), the bulk of the data
available suggests that this ability is neither stable nor robust until children are five or older
(Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Moses, 1990; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987; Wellman &
Bartsch, 1988; Wellman & Wooley, 1990; Wimmer & Perner, 1983).

Since Premack and Woodruff (1978) started experimenting with non-human primates in
order to establish the possibility that they had a ‘theory of mind,’ different ways of testing for
this have been designed and tried out. As Dennett (1978) pointed out, you can credit an entity
with a conception of belief only if there is evidence that it is able to understand that others may
entertain false beliefs. Therefore, to probe children’s representational understanding of agency -
whether they have a conception of belief - it is necessary to ascertain that they figure out that
people can have false beliefs and that these beliefs can motivate behavior.

A variety of false-belief tasks have been developed in the last twenty years to test
children’s understanding of beliefs. One such experiment is known as the ‘Sally-Ann’ test
(Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In this test, the child is made to look at a scene in which two dolls are
animated by experimenters. The dolls are used to represent human beings - Wellman, Cross, and
Watson (2001) have shown in a meta-analysis of false-belief studies that using a doll as a proxy
for an actual human being does not affect the outcome of the experiment. The two dolls enter the
stage; one of them (Sally) places an object in one of two containers and leaves the room. While
Sally is out, the second doll (Ann) moves the object into the second container. Sally re-enters the
stage; at that point, children are asked where Sally, who is unaware that the switch took place,

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