The Influence of Personal Involvement on the Performance in a False Belief Task: A Structural Analysis

In this study, 200 children (age range 2;6-5;6 years) were tested by using a standard task aimed at assessing their understanding of other’s false belief. The children were then divided into two groups: those who passed and those who failed. Later, those children who had failed the first test, were put into different groups and tested again under different conditions. This was done in order to check the effect of representational and motivational variables related to personal involvement on performance in the second task. The results showed a tendency towards an improvement of performance in the second task, when the following two conditions were simultaneously satisfied: (1) children were retested with a familiar peer instead of puppets; and (2) children were actors who took part in the action instead of remaining external spectators of the scene. A tentative explanation of the findings on the basis of the representational complexity of the different false belief tasks was proposed.