Understanding False Belief as Generalized Operant ... - OpenSIUC

The Psychological Record, 2006, 56, 341-364

UNDERSTANDING FALSE BELI EF AS GENERALIZED OPERANT BEHAVIOR LOUISE MCHUGH University of Wales, Swansea

YVONNE BARNES-HOLMES and DERMOT BARNES-HOLMES National University of Ireland, Maynooth

IAN STEWART National University of Ireland, Galway

The current work reports 2 experiments that investigate the development of false belief from the perspective of Relational Frame Theory. The true and false belief test protocol used across both experiments contained a range of tasks that involved responding in accordance with the 3 perspective-taking frames of I-YOU, HERE-THERE, NOW-THEN, and in accordance with logical NOT. Experiment 1 involved the presentation of a protocol containing 10 true/false tasks to participants of 5 age groups ranging from 3 to 30 years old. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the number of tasks presented in the protocol was increased to 60 and novel participants were employed. The results of both experiments indicated a developmental trend in which accuracy on the protocol appeared to increase as a function of age. Furthermore, the fact that neither study indicated a statistically significant effect for trial type suggested that responding to both true and false belief may involve overlapping behavioral processes. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for Relational Frame Theory, behavior analysis, and the mainstream developmental literature on understanding true and false belief..

Understanding false belief involves the ability to attribute an incorrect belief to another person and to discriminate when the individual is acting on this basis . At a general level, cognitive theorists have argued that the emergence of false belief is an important developmental milestone in one's ability to represent alternative worlds (Johnson-Laird, 1983). At a more specific level , it has also been argued that thn ability to attribute false beliefs to another is a prerequisite for understanding social interactions of moral significance, such as deception (perner, Leekam , & Wimmer, 1987; Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Woodruff & Premack, 1979). One of Correspondence may be sent to Louise McHugh , Department of Psychology, University of Wales, Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales, United Kingdom . (E-mail: I.mchugh @swan.ac.uk) .

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the most prominent contemporary cognitive approaches to the study of false belief is that proposed by Theory of Mind (ToM) researchers (e.g., Sodian & Frith, 1992), whose definition of false belief includes a variety of phenomena that range from the simple attribution of a ·mental state to another person to the more complex understanding that a person can have mental states about another person's mental states (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 2000) . False Belief and Theory of Mind (ToM) In the language of Theory of Mind, there are five levels in the development of the attribution of informational or mental states to the self and others that range from simple visual perspective-taking to predicting actions on the basis of false belief (Howlin, Baron-Cohen, & Hadwin, 1999). In the ToM model, Levels 1 to 3 are believed to describe early perspective-taking abilities that develop a basic or first-order understanding of the perceptions or perspectives of another. Levels 4 and 5, collectively referred to as second-order beliefs, describe the more complex attributions of true and false belief and appropriate predictions of actions on this basis. According to ToM, Level 4 of the model of informational states of the self and others involves the principle that actions can be predicted on the basis of true belief (Howlin et aI., 1999). Consider a traditional ToM training task involving toys, in which two similar scenes are portrayed. In one scene, a car is placed beside a boat, and in the other scene, an identical car is placed beside a plane. A child is then provided with the following true belief story. "This morning, you saw the car next to the boat but you did not see the car next to the plane." The child is then asked, "Where do you think the car is? Why do you think it is near the boat? Where will you go to get the car? Why will you go to the boat?" The correct conclusions regarding this scenario require the knowledge that one will only know what one has seen (i.e., a true belief), and that one will act on this basis. Level 5 of this model involves the principle that one can predict actions on the basis of false belief and can become aware that previous beliefs may have been false (Howlin et aI. , 1999). Cognitive researchers have suggested that this level of understanding requires the development of the mind's representational capacity to the extent that it can become reflexively aware of its own representations (Bennett, 1978; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Specifically, in instances in which one's representations or beliefs are discriminated as incorrect (e.g., when events occurred without one's knowledge) the individual can alter the belief held about these events and can recognize that prior to acquiring the new information he/ she was behaving on the basis of a false belief. The Deceptive Container Task is one of the most commonly used procedures for testing and training children's attributions of false informational states (perner, Frith, Leslie, & Leekam, 1989). A child is shown a Smarties box, for example, and asked, "What do you think is inside the Smarties box?" Unbeknownst to the child, the Smarties box

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does not contain Smarties, but does in fact contain pencils. The child is then shown inside the Smarties box, and asked, "Before we opened the Smarties box, what did you think was inside? And what is really inside?" Perner et al. (1987) suggested that the cognitive capabilities of children below 4 years of age are not sufficiently developed to handle the representational complexity involved in false belief tasks of this kind. A number of studies have supported this hypothesis. For example, Gopnik and Astington (1988) reported that 3-year-old children overall responded poorly on the Deceptive Container Task. Furthermore, Wimmer and Perner (1983) reported a notable developmental increase in children's abilities to make true and false belief attributions around 4 years of age. However, these researchers have resisted the argument that the development of false belief is merely a side effect of increased memory and central processing capacity, but suggested instead that a novel cognitive skill emerges some time between the ages of 4 and 6 years (see also Mossier, 1976). Relational Frame Theory and False Belief Although perspective-taking and true/false belil3f have traditionally been the domain of cognitive psychology, a group of behavioral psychologists have also recently become interested in these phenomena (McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes, 2004) . Specifically, these researchers have investigated , and attempted to account for, the development of perspective-taking and related cognitive skills under the rubric of a modern behavioral account of human language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory (RFT: Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). Consistent with the functional objectives of a behavioral analysis, RFT researchers have argued that although the ToM account of perspective-taking and true/false belief offers an elaborate description of these abilities, it falls short in terms of identifying the precise behavioral processes involved. Furthermore, therefore, it remains unclear how deIicits in this regard might best be remediated. According to RFT, the emergence of repertoires of derived relational responding forms the basis of the development of human language and cognition (Hayes et aI. , 2001; Hayes & Hayes, 1992). From this perspective, repertoires of derived naming or name-object symmetry are among the first relational skills to develop (Lipl 0.05) in correct responding between all age groups, except between the adolescent and late childhood participants (p = 0.5074) . This was the same pattern of results as found in the first experiment. Once again, in order to determine whether the high levels of accuracy excluded specific types of trials, the data for participants who scored at accuracy levels of 80% and higher were grouped according to trial type. The results are presented in Figure 8. The figure indicates that none of the youngest group of participants responded at an accuracy level of above 80% and that responding at this level appeared to increase as a function of age .

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Figure 8. Number of participants with accuracy levels of 80% and higher presented by trial type for the five age groups in Experiment 2.

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In summary, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 both indicated a developmental trend in the performances of participants aged from childhood to adulthood on the current true/false belief protocol. This trend was supported by significant differences in the number of correct responses between most of the age groups, and the fact that accuracy of responding appeared to increase as a function of age. Limited data points in Experiment 1 did not permit an analysis of the effect of trial type, but the results of Experiment 2, which did permit such an analysis, indicated no such effect. This finding suggests that there may be important overlaps among the repertoires involved in responding to the various trial types contained within the current true/false belief protocol and in responding to true and false belief in particular. GENERAL DISCUSSION From a relational frame perspective, undE3rstanding false belief involves complex patterns of derived relational responding in accordance with the deictic relational frames of I-you , here-there, and now-then as well as logical not. Both experiments in the current study showed differences in the relational performances of participants from various age groups between 3 and 30 years old on protocols involving true and false belief tasks in which these frames were emphasized explicitly. The results of both experiments yielded significant between-group differences with regard to age in terms of performance accuracy. Overall, accurate responding increased as a function of age with participants in the older groups performing significantly better than those in the younger groups. The results of both studies indicated no significant effect for trial type, which suggests that there may be important overlaps among the relational repertoires involved in responding to the various trial types employed in the current protocols. Two key differences emerged between the findings of the two experiments. First, though no significant difference between the adult and adolescent groups was recorded in Experiment 1, a significant difference did emerge in Experiment 2. Second, though a significant difference was recorded between the adolescent and late childhood groups in Experiment 1, no such difference was observed in Experiment 2. Both differences relate to the performances of the adolescent group who produced lower levels of accuracy in Experiment 2. The differences between the two studies might be accounted for by the simple fact that Experiment 2 (60 tasks) contained many more exposures than Experiment 1 (12 tasks) and that the weaknesses of the adolescent group emerged only in the latter. Thus, the adolescent group were no Significantly worse than the adult group, but were significantly better than the late childhood group in Experiment 1, but as their performances deteriorated in Experiment 2 these patterns of differences were altered. The current study is similar to a number of other recent studies in that it represents a broadening of the RFT research program into an area

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that has more traditionally been the domain of mainstream psychology; other such studies include for example McHugh et al. (2004) (perspective taking) and Stewart and Barnes-Holmes (2001) (metaphor). The current work, in particular, stemmed from previous RFT analyses of perspective taking in which McHugh et al. reported a distinctive developmental trend in the emergence of responding in accordance with the three perspectivetaking frames of I-you, here-there, and now-then. The results of the current experiment clearly corroborate the findings of such a developmental trend. However, the findings of the current study also differ in one important respect from those of the previous work on perspective taking. Specifically, McHugh et al. found a significant effect for trial type and suggested that the relational perspective-taking skills targeted by their protocol were functionally distinct operant response classes. The current experiment, however, found no such effect for trial type, suggesting a functional overlap between the relational skills targeted herein. McHugh et al. argued that responding in accordance with the perspective-taking frames may play an important role in Levels 1-3 of understanding informational states, as defined by the literature on Theory of Mind. It could be argued that the current work was primarily concerned with ToM Levels 4 and 5understanding informational states pertaining to true and false belief. The present finding of no significant effect for trial type suggests that responding to Levels 4 and 5 consists of overlapping repertoires that perhaps rely on similar behavioral processes. It may be the case, for example, that all three perspective-taking frames must be present for accurate responding to true and false belief, and that responding to one frame over another cannot be parsed out at this level of ability. Future research , therefore, might investigate whether training, for example, in responding to true belief would facilitate responding to false belief. The significant differences among the performances of the various age groups observed in the current experiment and in the previous work by McHugh et al. (2004) on perspective taking are largely consistent with the results of more mainstream developmental research. Wimmer and Perner (1983) , for example, reported a sharp increase in the ability of young children to respond to true belief between the ages of approximately 4 and 6 years old. These researchers argued that these findings indicated the development of a novel cognitive skill that is not present before this age. The current findings lend some support to this view, but go somewhat further by providing a functional-analytic account of this cognitive development using the language of RFT. From an RFT perspective, many prerequisite relational skills such as responding to 1you and responding in accordance with the relational frame of comparison are necessary for the development of responding to true and false belief, but the exact relationship between the development of these various skills is an empirical issue. Further research, therefore, will be needed to address these issues in greater detail. The developmental trend recorded overall in the performances of the participants in the current experiments and in those reported by McHugh

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et al. (2004) are also consistent with RFT in su!ggesting that relational skills such as those targeted here are repertoires of operant responses. In short, if understanding true and false beliefs involves deriving arbitrary stimulus relations, and if this type of behavior is operant in nature, then responding to true and false belief should develop over time. The current work clearly suggests this to be the case . Although the present work was generated by RFT, it is entirely consistent both with both traditional behavioral concepts as well as those from the mainstream developmental literature. The implications of this work, therefore, are of relevance to a range of schools of thought and suggest important areas of overlap among them. Similar to the work on relational perspective-taking, the current studies indicate the expansion of behavioral research into areas that appeared previously to be beyond the grasp of behavior analysis and thereby suggest important avenues for future research.

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