Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind.

By P. Bloom, Tim P. German. Cognition, 2000

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d6d8fc6b3a930119864352157f560ca1daf5d8e

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation and understanding (2015, background): “Adopting an intentional stance, however, may not require having a full-fledged folk psychology (Bloom & German 2000, Gergely et al. 1995).”
Understanding Interpersonal Problems in Autism: Interaction Theory as An Alternative to Theory of Mind (2004, background): “Furthermore, Bloom and German (2000), who generally support a theory approach, suggest that the false-belief test is “an ingenious, but very difficult task that taps [only] one aspect of people’s understanding of the minds of others” (B30).”
Action Anticipation Through Attribution of False Belief by 2-Year-Olds (2007, background): “The standard false-belief task has the disadvantage that it requires abilities other than understandingmental states (Bloom & German, 2000), and Clements and Perner’s (1994) paradigm is not free from this problem either.”
Theory of Mind Development in Adolescence and Early Adulthood: The Growing Complexity of Recursive Thinking Ability (2015, background): “From this perspective, the classic false-belief tasks, considered as the core task to test theory of mind acquisition, but criticized and considered ineffective for studies with adults, may be re-evaluated (Birch & Bloom, 2004; Bloom & German, 2000).”
Psychological and Sociomoral Reasoning in Infancy (2014, positive): “Third, preschoolers’ failures at elicited-response false-belief tasks must therefore reflect performance limitations, such as inhibition difficulties 11 (e.g., Bloom & German, 2000; Leslie & Polizzi, 1998; Roth & Leslie, 1998; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, & Tidswell, 1991).”
Cognitive theories of autism (2007, background): “…transfer task on its own, as a measure of theory of mind, has been called into question (Marschark, Green, Hindmarsh, & Walker, 2000; Russell et al., 1998), and some authors (Bloom & German, 2000) have gone as far as arguing that it should be abandoned as a test of theory of mind altogether.”
Language and theory of mind: meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. (2007, background): “…the fact that most false-belief tasks are verbal tasks or the fact that the domain-general cognitive operations that underlie false-belief understanding require language for their implementation (e.g., Bloom & German, 2000; Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Fodor, 1992; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995).”
Belief attribution despite verbal interference (2011, background): “…Call & Tomasello, 2008; Wimmer & Perner, 1983), it is still debated whether it constitutes an appropriate test of the ability to attribute beliefs (Bloom & German, 2000): Much more is needed to solve the task than attributing beliefs, as shown by the developmental gap between early signs of…”
The Direct-Perception Model of Empathy: a Critique (2011, background): “Bloom and German 2000; Leslie 2000, 2005; Baillargeon et al. 2010) have emphasized, there is more to successfully passing a standard false belief task than the ability to represent another’s false belief.”