Children’s reasoning strategies on call and Tomasello’s nonverbal false belief test: no sign of false-belief reasoning

The present study systematically investigated how 83 (42 female, Austrian, 41 to 79 months) children reasoned on Call and Tomasello's (1999) nonverbal false belief task. Experiment 1 replicated the central finding that children realized that a mistaken communicator tended to mark the wrong, unbaited box. However, we found that less than half of the children gave consistently correct responses while others responded in a way indistinguishable from random guessing. Some children noted that markings were consistently wrong, suggesting a simple response strategy of choosing the unmarked box without reasoning about the communicator's false belief. Experiment 2 undermined this potential strategy by adding correctly marked trials. Performance dropped so that it could not be distinguished anymore from random responding. These results call into question whether Call and Tomasello's task detects reasoning about false beliefs.