Cognitive scientists connected pretend play with the false belief task. Both require the use of metarepresentations. However, Cognitive scientists have realized that although children are able to pretend play, they are unable to pass the false belief task. The false belief task goes like this: A child is seated in front of an experimenter, who has two puppets, Sally and Anne. There is a basket and a box on the table between the child and the experimenter. Sally places a marble in the basket and then leaves the room, and while she’s away, Anne transfers the marble from the basket to the box. Sally then returns, and at this point, the experimenter asks the child: Where will Sally look for her marble? The child passing the task would be realizing …show more content…
She starts off describing the false belief task, and their findings when they performed the original, standard test on 3 and 4 year olds, except she used cookies instead of a marble. Their findings were the same as other researchers findings on the false belief task- 4 year olds correctly pointed to the location where the actor would find the object, because that’s where he saw it, whereas 3-year olds claimed that the actor would look in the second location, because “that’s where it was (Zaitchik 92). Her study then goes into three different hypothesis that try to explain why children have such difficulty passing the false belief …show more content…
The child then encodes that the actor has knowledge, that he “knows where they are.” Therefore, when the experimenter asks the child where the actor thinks the cookies are, they have already encoded the fact that the actor “knows where they are,” so they simply translate this to the actor knowing that the cookies are in the new location, because the child “translates information about seeing, into information about knowing.” Zaitchik’s hypothesis is this- “seeing that x is knowing x,” but not that “being that told x is knowing x” (Zaitchik 92). The child has problems passing the test only because these tasks are visually acquired. However, if they are like adults, then they will consider verbal reports less reliable than visual experience. If this is true, then the children will do considerably better in giving false beliefs that are acquired by testimony. Ziatchik’s second hypothesis why young children have trouble attributing false beliefs is that the false belief was once correct, and changing its status from true to false may be hard for them. Therefore, Zaitchik hypothesizes that they might effectively attribute a false belief that is false from the very