Children’s comprehension of deceptive points Nicole L. Couillard and Amanda L. Woodward* Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, USA This study investigated children’s ability to comprehend deceptive point gestures. Thirty 3–4 1 2-year-olds participated in a game in which a sticker was hidden under one of two containers. A confederate provided misleading clues about the location of the sticker by either pointing to or placing a marker on the container without the sticker. Across ages, children performed less well when the clue was the point than when it was the marker. They were able to use the misleading marker cue, learning to look under the unmarked container. However, they could not do this for the misleading point. These results concur with those from studies of point production (Carlson, Moses & Hix, 1998) in indicating that deceptive pointing may be a misleading measure of children’s abilities. At a very early age children learn the communicative value of the point gesture. This knowledge may become so entrenched that children have difculty interpreting points in a novel manner. A challenge facing developmental psychologists is nding behaviours to index children’s underlying knowledge. This issue has come to the foreground in research on children’s theories of mind. Finding problems with the classic ‘Maxi’ task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), several researchers have argued that children’s ability to deceive another person may be a more sensitive indicator of whether children understand false beliefs (e.g. Chandler, Fritz & Hala, 1989; Hala, Chandler & Fritz, 1991; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe & Tidswell, 1991; Sullivan & Winner, 1993). By deceiving, the argument goes, a child deliberately tries to make another person think something that is not true, thereby showing a tacit understanding of false beliefs. However, researchers disagree on the age at which children can rst deceive. Some report that children as young as 2 1 2 years of age employ deceptive strategies (Chandler et al., 1989). In contrast, others have found that young preschoolers fail to deceive opponents, even when strongly motivated to do so. Russell et al. (1991) presented children with a game in which chocolate was hidden in one of two boxes. The boxes had windows allowing the children to see which box contained the chocolate. The windows were positioned so that their opponent could not see into the box. Children were instructed to indicate the box they wanted the opponent to take. They would get to keep what was in the other box. Thus, in order to win the chocolate, children had to point to the empty box. Three-year-olds pointed to the baited box at the start of * Requests for reprints should be addressed to Amanda L. Woodward, Department of Psychology, 5848 South University Avenue, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA (e-mail: ALW1@cp.uchica- go.edu). 515 British Journal of Developmental Psychology (1999), 17, 515–521 Printed in Great Britain © 1999 The British Psychological Society