Children's Implicit Understanding about Theory of Mind

마음이론에 대한 아동의 암묵적 이해

This study examined the difference in children's performance between two types of task by the number of protagonists and children's implicit understanding of false-belief. The implicit measure by eye gaze was contrasted with children's explicit answers to the experimenter's question about where the protagonist would look for an object. Results showed there was no difference according to the task type by number of protagonists. On false-belief, 2- and 3-year-olds showed low performance compared with 4-year-olds on explicit responses. On implicit responses, 3- and 4-year-olds out-performed 2-year-olds. These results suggest that implicit understanding precedes explicit understanding.