The emerging ability to maintain lies in pre-school aged children
Written by Zach Hamzagic
By the time children are two-to-three years old, they discover lying (Evans & Lee, 2013; Newton, et al., 2000; Williams, et al., 2017; Wilson, et al., 2003), a wonderful trick that gets them out of all sorts of trouble. Or so they may think. At this age, children have yet to master the art of deception and may think, “mom and dad will never know I ate those cookies if I say it wasn’t me”. They simply don’t realize that the chocolate smeared all over their face says otherwise.
Research has shown that by the age of seven-to-eight, children are able to successfully maintain a lie. This ability is attributed to the development of cognitive abilities like verbal working memory, inhibition, and planning (Alloway et al., 2015; Evans & Lee, 2011, Talwar & Lee, 2002; Talwar & Lee, 2008).
Verbal working memory is the ability to hold linguistic information in mind (e.g., remember hearing your mother say “no cookies before dinner”). Perhaps, keeping a verbal representation of the truth (e.g., remembering that you should have told your mother “Yes, I did eat a cookie”) and the lie (e.g., remembering telling your mother “No, I didn’t eat a cookie”) in mind helps children distinguish between the two, and maintain their lies. Inhibition is the ability to resist a temptation or dominant response. To be able to maintain a lie, children should be able to resist the urge to tell the truth. Lastly, planning is the ability to come up with a strategy to achieve a certain goal. Planning ways to hide the truth may play an important role in maintaining a lie. Researchers are interested in whether these three cognitive abilities are associated with young children’s emerging ability to successfully maintain a lie.
A recent study by O’Connor and Colleagues (2020) examined whether verbal working memory, inhibition, and planning, influence pre-school aged children’s ability to successfully maintain a lie. The sample included 93 children between the ages of three-and-four-years-old. Children completed a temptation-resistance task to test their ability to maintain a lie. In this task, children tried to guess the identity of a hidden toy based on the sound it made (e.g., a barking dog). After two trials, the researcher pretended that they forgot something in another room and left to retrieve it. Before leaving the video recorded testing room, the researcher asked the children not to peek at the last hidden toy (an elephant). Upon their return, the researcher asked the children whether they peeked, then asked them to guess what the toy might be (without hearing the sound). Children who lied about peeking at the toy and were able to maintain their lie by not successfully guessing that the toy was an elephant were deemed successful liars.
Following the temptation-resistance task, the children completed the cognitive tasks that measured verbal working memory, inhibition, and planning. To measure verbal working memory, children completed the backwards digit span task where they heard a series of numbers that they had to repeat aloud in reverse order. To measure inhibitory control, children completed the day/night task, where they were instructed to say “day” when presented with an image of the night and vice versa. Children also completed the bear/dragon task where they were instructed to follow the instructions of one of the puppets and not the other (e.g., children might touch their head if the bear asked them to, but not if the dragon asked them to). To measure planning, children completed a simplified version of the Tower of London task. Children saw the end goal of a specific pattern of rings across three pegs. The task involved moving the rings one at a time from one peg to another to achieve the desired pattern.
Overall, of the 53.8% of children (50) who lied about peeking at the toy, only 19.4% (18 children) were able to successfully maintain their lie. The researchers found that children who did well on the backwards digit span task (good verbal working memory) were not more successful at lie maintenance. However, better performance on the day/night (rather than the bear/dragon task which indicated inhibition) and better performance on the Tower of London task (planning) were related to successful lie maintenance.
Although these results are tantalizing, there are some limitations to this study. The results were obtained from a small sample of 50 children, only 18 of whom were able to successfully maintain their lie. Follow up studies with more children should attempt to replicate these findings to provide stronger evidence to support the results of this study. Moreover, the study did not examine lie maintenance developmentally. A developmental study could examine the change in cognitive abilities and lie maintenance over time (e.g., two years). This approach would better answer the questions of whether change in cognitive abilities influences better lie maintenance. Lastly, some of the tasks may not have been ideal to measure the cognitive abilities. For example, the researchers measured planning by the time and number of moves it took to complete the Tower of London task, neither of which directly examines planning. Overall, the researchers found that inhibition and planning (two emerging cognitive abilities in pre-school aged children) are associated with better lie maintenance.
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References
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2015.03.013
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The blog posts are for informational and educational purposes only. The posts should not be considered as any type of advice (medical, mental health, legal, and/or religious advice). All blog posts have been researched, written, and edited by the undergraduate students and alumni of the Lifespan Cognition Lab. As a teaching and research-based lab, we encourage all lab members to help make knowledge more accessible to all communities through these posts.
