تاثیر شکار - اجتناب: یک محدودیت تکامل یافته در مورد تئوری ذهن در حال ظهور

The present research examined whether children's ability to impute false belief is overridden or impaired by content that activates an early-developing, prepotent motivational system: predator avoidance. In three studies, children aged 3 to 8 years completed variants of a false-belief test, including analogous predator-avoidance and playmate-avoidances scenarios, in which passing the test meant having the focal character get caught by the pursuer. The proportion of correct answers in the playmate-avoidance scenario was reliably greater than in the predator-avoidance scenario, though this effect largely dissipated by 7 to 8 years of age. Enhanced predatory stimuli significantly increased the frequency of false-belief errors in the predator-avoidance scenario (Study 3). Analysis of children's justifications revealed that predator-avoidance false-belief errors were overwhelming motivated by a desire for the prey to avoid the predator (Study 2). The predator-avoidance effect was not an artifact of children generally performing better in playmate than predator–prey scenarios (Studies 1 and 3), the predator-avoidance scenario simply evoking strong emotions (Study 3), or differences between children in their knowledge of predator–prey relationships (Study 1) or executive-function abilities (Study 2). Findings support the hypothesis that activation of the predator-avoidance system generates prepotent response patterns that impair or override full consideration of the mental states of the prey characters in false-belief stories.