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Cited by 1,117

The DOI matches its OpenAlex record; 21 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction

Alison Gopnik C, Janet Wilde Astington·1988·Child Development
DOI 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03192.x
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Abstract

This research concerns the development of children's understanding of representational change and its relation to other cognitive developments. Children were shown deceptive objects, and the true nature of the objects was then revealed. Children were then asked what they thought the object was when they first saw it, testing their understanding of representational change; what another child would think the object was, testing their understanding of false belief; and what the object looked like and really was, testing their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Most 3-year-olds answered the representational change question incorrectly. Most 5-year-olds did not make this error. Children's performance on the representational change question was poorer than their performance on the false-belief question. There were correlations between performance on all 3 tasks. Apparently children begin to be able to consider alternative representations of the same object at about age 4.

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Metadata

Authors
Alison Gopnik, C., & Astington, J. W.
Venue
Child Development
Publisher
Wiley
Published
1988-02-01
Volume
59
Issue
1
Pages
26-37
ISSN
0009-3920 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03192.x
OpenAlex
W2003650587
Cited by
1,117
References
21
FWCI
17.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03192.x
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Alison Gopnik, C., & Astington, J. W. (1988). Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03192.x

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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