Belief-Desire Reasoning

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According to Bjorklund and Hernandez-Blasi (2012), theory of mind is how a child develops the perception of mental activity. It is being able to predict how the mind works and organizing facts. Once a child is able to understand how the mind works and what causes their behaviors they can understand what causes the actions of others. Theory of mind requires belief-desire reasoning.
Belief -desire reasoning proposed the idea that people predict and explain what others do based on what they understand that person beliefs and desires are. We do this by watching the person ideas, knowledge, opinions, and suppositions and by referring to their goals, hopes, wants, and wishes (Bjorklund & Hernandez-Blasi, 2012). Watching and referring to these factors …show more content…
These tasks determine how much that child knows about the minds of others by having the child predict what another person would say or do. Among these tasks includes the false belief. The false belief task is a task where a child must predict if another person would believe something that is incorrect (Bjorklund & Hernandez-Blasi, 2012).
One way to test the false belief task is by using a distinctive box or object that the child is familiar with. For example, a child is shown a box of Smarties and is asked what they think is in the box. Normally they would say that the box contains Smarties. The box is opened revealing that there were no Smarties but instead crayons. The child is than asked to predict what would someone else who hasn’t seen the inside of the Smarties box think is inside of it. The first question test the child’s beliefs while the second question test the child ability to understand false belief (Bjorklund & Hernandez-Blasi, …show more content…
A child watches someone hide a marble in a specific location while two dolls are present one named Sally and the other called Anne. Sally leaves the room and once she is gone Anne hides the marble in a different location. The child is than asked when Sally returns where would she think the marble is placed. According Bjorklund and Hernandez-Blasi (2012), by the age of four a child should be able to solve this question correctly stating that Sally would assume the marble to be in the first location. This shows that the child understands Sally has a false belief. Children under the age of four usually can’t understand this concept they will state that Sally would look for the marble in the new hidden area.
Low (2010) did a study on preschoolers implicit and explicit false-belief understanding. His research included three individual studies that were used to investigate the device that allowed for three to four years old to understand false-belief. Low’s study had two main hypotheses. First, he hypothesized that early false-belief showed up on indirect anticipatory eye gaze and not on direct verbal answering. Secondly, he hypothesized that eye gaze was language independent but anticipatory eye gaze and compliment mastery uniquely contributed to predicting explicit false-belief understanding (Low,
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