Under Pressure: Processing Representational Decoupling in False-Belief Tasks

Several studies (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Surian et al. 2007) demonstrated that children younger than 3years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false-belief task, can anticipate others' actions based on their attributed false beliefs. This gave rise to the so-called "Developmental Paradox”. De Bruin and Kästner (2012) recently suggested that the Developmental Paradox is best addressed in terms of the relation between coupled (online) and decoupled (offline) processes and argued that if enactivism is to be a genuine alternative to classic cognitivism, it should be able to bridge the "cognitive gap”, i.e. to provide us with a convincing account of how low-level sensorimotor practices transform into higher-order representational skills. This paper defends, against De Bruin and Kästner, an enactive response to the Developmental Paradox. I argue that 3-year olds' failure to verbally report their false-belief understanding does not arise from stronger decoupling demands. Rather, they fail because the elicited response false-belief trials involve representational decoupling tout court and what is more, under pressure