The term ‘Theory of Mind’ refers to the way in which people are able to attribute mental states to ourselves and to others in order to explain and predict behavior. Much of the research on Theory of Mind has centered on whether children possess this understanding, using tasks which are designed to assess whether children can comprehend their own beliefs and the beliefs of others. The question that consistently arises is whether children’s failure on false belief tasks before the age of 4 can really be attributed to a lack of Theory of Mind or whether it is due to a limitation in false belief tasks to reveal an earlier ability? It was claimed that standard false belief tasks may have underestimated children’s theory of mind ability by not taking into account their conversational skills. The research aimed to look at how the repeated questioning can impact negatively on performance. It was hypothesized that young children may think that a question is repeated because the experimenter has rejected their first response and this can cause them to switch their initial correct response and give an incorrect answer. The research was also looking for how children often provide a response to a question without first generating a plan, and before they have heard the whole of the request. This was hypothesized that the early response is often based on what is in the child’s view, and instead of listening to the whole question young children tend to rush in and respond based on what they see. This research conducted a false belief task with Iranian 3-and 4-year olds and used three different test conditions: a repeated question condition, a single question condition and a turned around condition. This investigation examined whether repeated questioning and the context of questioning negatively impact on children’s performance in false belief tasks. 3-and 4-year olds’ performance on these conditions was being compared. Results found that 4-year olds performed better than 3-year olds in all conditions. There were no significant differences in both age groups performing on the different conditions. These results indicated that repeated questioning and context of questioning did not impact negatively on performance in false belief tasks. Accordingly, the findings support those theories claiming that 3-year-olds’ difficulty on false belief tasks reflect more their conceptual deficiency than performance limitations.

The term ‘Theory of Mind’ refers to the way in which people are able to attribute mental states to ourselves and to others in order to explain and predict behavior. Much of the research on Theory of Mind has centered on whether children possess this understanding, using tasks which are designed to assess whether children can comprehend their own beliefs and the beliefs of others. The question that consistently arises is whether children’s failure on false belief tasks before the age of 4 can really be attributed to a lack of Theory of Mind or whether it is due to a limitation in false belief tasks to reveal an earlier ability? It was claimed that standard false belief tasks may have underestimated children’s theory of mind ability by not taking into account their conversational skills. The research aimed to look at how the repeated questioning can impact negatively on performance. It was hypothesized that young children may think that a question is repeated because the experimenter has rejected their first response and this can cause them to switch their initial correct response and give an incorrect answer. The research was also looking for how children often provide a response to a question without first generating a plan, and before they have heard the whole of the request. This was hypothesized that the early response is often based on what is in the child’s view, and instead of listening to the whole question young children tend to rush in and respond based on what they see. This research conducted a false belief task with Iranian 3-and 4-year olds and used three different test conditions: a repeated question condition, a single question condition and a turned around condition. This investigation examined whether repeated questioning and the context of questioning negatively impact on children’s performance in false belief tasks. 3-and 4-year olds’ performance on these conditions was being compared. Results found that 4-year olds performed better than 3-year olds in all conditions. There were no significant differences in both age groups performing on the different conditions. These results indicated that repeated questioning and context of questioning did not impact negatively on performance in false belief tasks. Accordingly, the findings support those theories claiming that 3-year-olds’ difficulty on false belief tasks reflect more their conceptual deficiency than performance limitations.

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