Cued-Recall Approach to 3-Year-Olds? Memory for an Honest Mistake

Three-year-olds find it difficult to recall a false belief that they have held immediately after they discover the true state of affairs. It has been argued that the children are genuinely amnesic and that they have deleted all memory of their false belief so it is no longer available for retrieval. We show that a retrieval cue aids recall, thus suggesting that the memory had merely been rendered inaccessible. In two experiments, one cue gave near ceiling performance in recall of a false belief stated by another person. A further three cues were weak. The effective cue was a picture of the contents of the belief. The weak cues were pictures of an irrelevant object, an associate of the contents of belief, and the informational source of the belief. In the third experiment the procedure involved separating the source of the false belief from the context in which disconfirmation of the belief occurred. The picture of the source of the belief became a strong cue under that condition. Three-year-olds have been much underestimated in their capacity to undertake intentional recall of a false belief.