Ruse and representations: On children's ability to conceal information.

This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children's ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29% of 3-year-olds knew to influence the competitor's mental state, 87% knew to physically exclude the competitor. There was no difference between children's performance when trying to obtain the object for themselves or predicting what a story character would do. The success of the older children in concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence another's behavior, one must influence that person's mental state. Jeremy (aged 3): Mommy, go out of the kitchen. Mother: Why, Jeremy? Jeremy: Because I want to take a cookie. Recent research on children's understanding of mental representations suggests that until 4 to 5 years of age, children do not understand that someone's action is dependent on his or her epistemic state (Flavell, 1988; Gopnik Hartl Perner, 1988a). If children cannot represent the beliefs of another person, they cannot use these representational states to predict the behavior of that person. Consequently, when they do come to recognize that a person's behavior is mediated by the person's beliefs, whether those beliefs are true or false, they should begin to recognize that an important means of changing that behavior is to change the other's beliefs. The choice to inform, to conceal information, or to misinform presupposes an understanding that if someone is ignorant of the true state of affairs or holds a false belief, his or her response will differ from someone who has the appropriate knowledge. This may be a key cognitive underpinning of new behaviors such as children's ability to conceal information. Now one can make sense of the above anecdote. What this 3-year-old seems to know is that mother's physical presence is an inhibiting factor. He must ensure that mother is out of the kitchen. What the young child does not realize, however, is that it is the mother's informational state that will prevent the taking of the cookie. At 3 years of age, providing or depriving mother of knowledge is seen as irrelevant to the mother's actions.