Children's understanding of the subjectivity of intentions – Masked by linguistic task demands?

Abstract

One crucial form of advanced Theory of Mind that is foundational for our everyday social lives is the understanding of the subjective intentionality behind people’s actions. Intentions can be subjective in the following sense: an agent may do many things at once but which of these she does intentionally depends on the description under which she represent these acts (Anscombe, 1979; Searle, 1983). For example, a chef may simultaneously serve an exquisite dinner decorated with nuts, thereby impress the guests, while also triggering an allergic reaction in one guest – and only perform the former two intentionally (serve dinner, impress guests) but not the latter (cause allergic reaction). From a developmental perspective, a crucial question is when such complex action understanding emerges. Previous research indicated that children’s understanding of subjective intentions emerges relatively late (Kamawar & Olson, 2011; Proft et al., 2019; Schünemann, Proft, et al., 2021). The present studies investigated whether these difficulties might have been due to linguistic task demands. We developed a new task that did not require subtle linguistic understanding of complex test questions. Instead, children judged whether some behavior was brought about by an intentional action given an agent’s (false) beliefs and desires. Four-to-seven-year-olds (N = 246) participated in two preregistered studies. Despite the fact that the tasks were linguistically much simplified, we found comparable results to previous studies: Children proficiently ascribed subjective intentions only from around age five to six years. These results provide converging evidence for a protracted development of advanced Theory of Mind and raise questions, for future research, regarding the foundations of such developmental trajectories.