A Study On The Violation-Of-Expectation Paradigms

This particular article focused its experiment on the violation-of -expectation paradigm, which in this case meant that the infant would help the experimenter find an object that she noticed was hidden in a place she thought the experimenter knew about or did not know about. In the introduction of the article, it stated that it is classically believed that children start to understand false beliefs at ages four to five years old, but the experiment shows that infants as old as 18 months have a sense of false belief, which the study proves to be true. The experiment shows whether or not an infant can help others through understanding a sense of false relief. The researchers ran two studies. In the first study, there were 24 two and a half year old German kids. Twelve were boys, and twelve were girls. Half of the kids were randomly assigned to the false belief condition and the other half were in the true belief condition. The experiment consisted of one stuffed caterpillar toy, two boxes, one pink and one …show more content…
With infants being able to know someone's mental state, they can act upon that and choose a behavioral response. The eighteen-month-old infants showed understanding of this and the sixteen-month-old infants did, but they were not fully aware. That concludes that it only fully evident that at eighteen months old, infants have an understanding of false belief. In conclusion, it is thought that understanding false belief is developed around four to five years of age, but through experimentation, it has been shown that infants start to understand false beliefs around 16 - 18 months. They are able to understand through people and behavior, they act upon helping others, and they imagine a person's mental state. In this study particularly, majority of the infants chose correctly demonstrating this, and reiterating that false beliefs are understood in