Young Children Treat Puppets and Dolls Like Real Persons in Theory of Mind Research: A meta-analysis of false-belief understanding across ages and countries

When young children are tested on social cognition tasks using puppets or dolls, do they exhibit similar, and similarly valid, results, as when they are tested for their understanding using real persons? We tested this question empirically by conducting a meta-analysis (aggregating data across 259 separate studies and 35,189 children) on false-belief theory of mind tasks. In our data, children were often tested with puppets and dolls (more than 70 % of the time) but performed essentially equivalently as when tested with real persons. This equivalence held in many countries (36), including English-speaking countries like the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, European countries like Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Portugal, non-western countries like Japan, China, Thailand, and the Philippines, plus South and Central American countries like Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. This equivalence also held in various age groups, focally children who were 2.5-6 years at the time they were developing their theory of mind. Young children in this age range were similarly incorrect at judging false beliefs with puppets and dolls just as with people, and older children were similarly correct.