Pandemic kids more likely to struggle identifying false beliefs

Changes in the cognitive and social capacity of young children since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic are often put down to the social impacts of lockdown — the closure of schools, lack of social contact, and increased time spent at home. Understanding of the cognitive impacts of Covid infection at a young age is also limited. As such, we still know fairly little about how the acute phase of the pandemic affected the development of social cognition in early childhood (in other words, how young people understand and process social information effectively).

A new study from Rose M. Scott and team, published recently in Scientific Reports, begins to fill this gap with a look at a specific facet of social cognition: the ability to recognise that others might hold false beliefs. This is an important part of child development; understanding that someone may hold false beliefs about the world is a key element of distinguishing between the mind and reality, and forms an important part of cooperation, communication, and learning. This study finds significantly worse false-belief understanding in young children who lived through the acute phase of the Covid pandemic.

The 96 children who took part in this study were participants in a larger study on the relationship between socioeconomic status and cognitive development. The young people, who were aged between 3 and a half and 5 and a half years old, completed various cognitive tasks in a lab over two days; some took part between July 2019 and March 2020, before the peak of the pandemic, while others took part later, between 2021 and 2023. Some tasks assessed false-belief understanding, while others looked at inhibition and language skills.

To measure false-belief understanding, children completed two tasks. In the first, they were shown a crayon box containing an unexpected item, and were then asked both what they had thought was in the box originally, and what a naive puppet would think was inside the box. In the second — a classic task used to measure Theory of Mind — they watched as two puppets, Piggy and Doggy, interacted. First, Piggy hid a toy in one container, before Doggy moved it to a different one without Piggy's knowledge. When Piggy returned to the scene, the child was asked where he would look for it.

If a child understands false beliefs, they'll know that Piggy is more likely to look for the toy in the original hiding spot, not knowing it had been moved. However, if they don't understand false beliefs, they're more likely to think that Piggy would look in the new location, failing to understand that he does not have the same knowledge as they do.

Inhibitory control was assessed using two tasks — 'Day/Night' and 'Grass/Snow' — where children had to say the opposite of what they were shown (i.e. saying "day" when shown a picture of a moon). This tested their ability to override their instinctive responses. Children also took part in a comprehensive measure of language development; here, the team focused on so-called 'receptive' language, or how well children react to spoken language such as following directions or understanding words and sentences.

The results suggest that the acute stages of the pandemic, including lockdown, had a significant impact on children's understanding of false beliefs. Across both tasks, children tested before the pandemic performed significantly better than those tested once public health measures had been lifted. Differences were, however, uneven by socioeconomic class — children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds performed significantly worse in the later cohort, while those from the highest brackets demonstrated no significant difference in performance.

The findings of this study did not suggest any significant decreases in performance of either inhibitory control or language skills between pre- and post-acute-pandemic children — the decline they found was specific to social cognition.

As for why this was the case, the team has several suggestions. One may be that fewer peer interactions led to limited opportunities to develop social skills, while increased screen time reduced real-life social play crucial to developing false-belief understanding. Parents, under stress, may also have spoken to their children less using fewer words about thoughts and emotions such as 'feel', 'think' or 'want'. (Further research may be needed into the language element of the study, though: other studies have found a decline in vocabulary development during this period, which wasn't the case here.) It's possible that covid infection, and differences in the ability of families of different socioeconomic classes to shield themselves from infection, may also have played a role — though this was not assessed by this study.

Read the study in full:
Scott, R.M., Nguyentran, G. & Sullivan, J.Z. (2024). The COVID-19 pandemic and social cognitive outcomes in early childhood. Scientific Reports. 14, 28939. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-80532-w

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