Date: Friday
18th April
Time: 11:30 am
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29,
rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Katharina Helming (IJN)
Title: “Making
sense of early false-belief understanding”
Abstract: The
topic of this talk is the puzzle about early belief-ascription: Young children
demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding, but they fail
elicited-response false-belief tasks. Based on recent converging evidence, a
pragmatic framework to solve this puzzle will be introduced. Young children do
understand the contents of others’ false belief, but they are overwhelmed when
they must simultaneously make sense of two distinct actions: the instrumental
action of a mistaken agent and the experimenter’s communicative action. I will
discuss predictions of this account and present preliminary data supporting it.
