Making explicit 3-year-oldsʹ implicit competence with their own false beliefs

Three-year-olds usually fail to recall a previous false belief once they have discovered the true state of affairs. The failure is so dramatic that researchers have treated it as a case of functional retrograde amnesia. We found in a series of studies that the memory trace is indeed available but is inaccessible under traditional testing procedures. We also provided a new prediction that reminding children that they had briefly held a picture of an object would be a more powerful retrieval cue than a reminder that they had held the small object itself. It was further shown that an effective picture was one that reminded children of the content of the target belief and not one that would enable them to reconstruct the contextual cause of why they had held the belief - a case of “recall without insight”. However, there was evidence that successful recall was associated with either (a) an insight that the recall was of a thought rather than of a pretence (delayed post-test technique) or (b) a readiness to attach a mentalistic label to the recall (immediate post-test technique). The results serve to narrow an assessment of the competence gap between 3- and 4-year-olds in recall of their own false belief. Rather than a sudden ability to preserve the memory in association with insight into its informational origins, it is only the latter that comes on stream in 4-year-olds. Alternative explanations of the picture facilitation effect suggest different research strategies, each of which aims at a gap in current formulations of false belief recall.