Psychology› Developmental and Educational Psychology› Child and Animal Learning Development

Developmental psychology and theory of mind — Anticipatory-looking measures of spontaneous false belief sensitivity

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Psychology › Developmental and Educational PsychologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: developmental psychology and theory of mindTarget: Anticipatory-looking measures of spontaneous false belief sensitivityStage: replication

Hypothesis

Twenty-five-month-olds take an agent’s false belief into account in where they look in anticipation, as the original studies reported and as implicit theory-of-mind accounts require.

What failed

The effect failed to appear in 2- to 3-year-olds (N = 48) and again in an independent, tightly controlled, preregistered and adequately powered replication with 25-month-olds (N = 78); the same paradigm did work in adults (N = 115). In every sample a surprisingly large share of participants failed to anticipate the agent’s action during familiarisation, so applying the original exclusion criteria removed much of the data.

Broken assumption

Anticipatory looking is a dependable index of implicit false belief understanding in infants.

Why

The authors question the reliability of non-verbal anticipatory-looking paradigms themselves, noting that the exclusion rates strongly limit how the test phase can be read.

From the published paper: Schuwerk et al. Royal Society Open Science, 2018. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures (1)

Matched on shared genes, mechanisms and ways of failing as well as wording. Each shows why it matched — treat these as leads rather than verdicts.

developmental psychologySouthgate, Senju and Csibra (2007) anticipatory-looking false-belief paradigmdifferent research area
Two-year-olds would look in anticipation to where an agent with a false belief will act, as the widely cited 2007 eye-tracking study reported, showing implicit false-belief attribution.
A preregistered two-lab replication with 160 infants aged 24–26 months, run with two original authors and the original stimuli and analyses, found no action anticipation: only about half the infants looked to the correct location, both in the simple control condition and in the false-belief condition.
Why it matched: similar wording

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.