Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we investigate whether emotional expressionsprovide cues to knowledge sufficient for predicting others’behavior based on their true and false beliefs. We adapted theclassic Sally-Anne task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985)such that children (N = 62, mean: 5.58 years, range: 4.05-6.98years) were not told whether Sally saw Anne move the objector not. However, when Sally came back looking angry, evenfour-year-olds inferred that she had seen Anne move her toy;when she came back looking happy, children inferred that shehad not seen the transfer. Based on these inferences, five andsix-year-olds, although not four-year-olds, were able topredict where Sally would look for her toy.