The curious case of adults' interpretations of violation-of-expectation false belief scenarios

The interpretations of infants' non-verbal responses in violation-of-expectation (VOE) false belief scenarios are subject to intense theoretical debate. In Experiment 1, adults provided online narratives for VOE scenarios meant to tap understanding of false beliefs about object location, perception and identity. Adults provided cognitively-oriented narratives for the location scenario when instructed to track beliefs and, for this scenario only, participants evaluated the unexpected outcome as unexpected and the expected outcome as expected. Adults had mixed views about the perception scenario, and judged the identity scenario where the agent acted in violation of his belief as being reasonable. Experiment 2 confirmed that when the identity scenario was turned into an action task that was time-pressured, adults failed to act in a belief-based manner. We should be cautious in drawing firm conclusions about mentalizing in infancy when adults' narratives and estimates of the expectedness of outcome events suggest that only certain VOE scenarios were interpreted in their intended fashion.