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Why Do Young Children Hide

by Closing Their Eyes? Self-
Visibility and the Developing
Concept of Self
a a a
James Russell , Brioney Gee & Christina Bullard
a
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
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To cite this article: James Russell, Brioney Gee & Christina Bullard (2012): Why Do
Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept
of Self, Journal of Cognition and Development, 13:4, 550-576
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JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 13(4):550–576
Copyright # 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1524-8372 print=1532-7647 online
DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2011.594826
Why Do Young Children Hide by

Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and
the Developing Concept of Self
James Russell, Brioney Gee, and Christina Bullard

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
In a series of four experiments, the authors begin by replicating Flavell,

Shipstead, and Croft’s (1980) finding that many children between 2 and 4 years
of age will affirm the invisibility both of themselves and of others—but not of
the body—when the person’s eyes are closed. The authors also render explicit
certain trends in the Flavell et al. work: that invisibility of the eyes is the cru-
cial factor, not lack of a subject’s visual experience, and that young children
assume that the eyes must be visible if there is visual experience. They show
that children of this age often explicitly judge that hiding by covering the eyes
is an appropriate thing to do and that this error is not rooted in problems with
understanding that seeing leads to knowing. In their final study, they report
that a clear majority of children who equate personal invisibility with eye
occlusion also judge that people whose eyes are open, but who are not making
eye contact with the viewer, are not visible to the viewer. They argue that these
data can be explained on the hypothesis that young children’s natural tendency
to acquire knowledge intersubjectively, by joint attention, leads them to
undergo a developmental period in which they believe the self is something
that must be mutually experienced for it to be perceived.
It has been commonly observed that young children, in particular those

between 2 and 4 years of age, sometimes play hide-and-seek in a peculiar
way: by simply closing their eyes rather than by hiding behind an object. Does
this mean that they believe that doing this makes the body literally invisible? A
Correspondence should be sent to James Russell, Department of Experimental Psychology,

University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ED, United Kingdom. E-mail:
jr111@cam.ac.uk
550
CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF PERSONAL VISIBILITY 551
landmark study by Flavell and colleagues (Flavell, Shipstead, & Croft, 1980)
showed that they do not. This is because the 2.5- to 4-year-old children in their
study, while denying that the experimenter could see them when they had their
eyes closed, would affirm that parts of their body were visible.
This intriguing result has received remarkably little attention from
researchers (though see McGuigan, 2009; McGuigan & Doherty, 2007), per-
haps through being submerged in the tide of theory-of-mind studies which
followed it in the early 1980s. The result does, however, raise interesting
issues about the early development of the self-concept, at least as expressed
through the use of personal pronouns and proper names. At its most gen-
eral, the question can be posed of whether preschool children pass through
a period in which they have an essentially un-adult-like concept of the self
(not counting those adults who are profound radical dualists in everyday
life). This in turn spurs the question of whether this view of selfhood is
the result of some form of ‘‘growth error,’’ caused by the over application
of an earlier-developing capacity.
In this article, we address a number of issues that naturally arise from this
phenomenon, the first two of which received some attention in the original
Flavell et al. (1980) study. In the first place, we ask whether children in this
age range are also inclined to say that other people are rendered invisible
when they shut their eyes. If they are, then the first-person error cannot have
been due to their equating their own lack of visual experience with lack of
self-visibility. If, however, the error is made in relation to others as well
as to the self, then it is likely that children are operating with something like
a general principle or ‘‘theory’’ about the conditions under which persons
become invisible. In the second place, if children judge that other people,
as well as they themselves, are rendered invisible by shutting their eyes then
one can go on to ask whether it is: a) the fact that the eyes are occluded from
viewers, or b) the fact that the subject has no visual experience that renders
the self invisible.
From Flavell et al.’s (1980) data, it seems that the error is nearly as com-
mon in third person as it is in first person. For example, in their first study,
while 63% of the 3-year-olds said that they were invisible with their eyes
closed, a comparable percentage of 56% said that a second experimenter
was invisible with her eyes closed. Second, from the Flavell et al. study, it
also seems likely that children are not affirming invisibility due to the sub-
ject’s lack of visual experience. This can be concluded from the condition
included in the study in which children wore silvered ski goggles (rendering
eyes invisible but affording visual experience). In this case, only 31% of the
3-year-olds, for example, correctly affirmed their own visibility. It seems
then that visibility of the eyes—one’s own or another’s—makes the crucial
difference between visibility and invisibility.
552 RUSSELL, GEE, AND BULLARD
In our first study, we attempt to replicate Flavell et al.’s (1980) finding

that the error spreads across first- and third-person conditions, including
a condition in which the child judges what the experimenter can see of a
second adult. In our second study, we look systematically at the role of lack
of visual experience versus lack of eye visibility. Later experiments will
examine the following questions:
a. Do children tend to make the appropriate kinds of judgments about how

hide-and-seek should be played, despite their tendency to hide with their
eyes closed? In other words is eye closing only something they tend to do
‘‘in the heat of the moment,’’ or is it something they can take a measured
judgment about when being asked about the behavior of dolls?
b. Are the inappropriate judgments evoked in the first question related to
children’s well-documented difficulties with understanding that seeing
leads to knowing?
c. Is mutuality of gaze central to judgments about self-visibility and others’
visibility?
We now turn to our first study in which we look at the tendency to equate
self-visibility with open eyes in both first- and third-person cases.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Participants
Thirty children recruited from nursery schools in the East and the South of
England participated in Experiment 1. Five children were excluded from our
data on account of answering one or more of the familiarization questions
incorrectly. The remaining participants were 14 girls and 11 boys (age
range ¼ 2;6–4;3; median age ¼ 3;9).
Design and General Procedure

Each child was asked at least six questions. When three of these questions
were asked, the child or the adult wore transparent goggles, and when the
other three were asked, they wore opaque goggles. One question concerned
the visibility of the child and of his or her head to the experimenter; one con-
cerned the visibility of an adult to the experimenter and of her head; and one
concerned the visibility of an adult to the child, and the visibility of her
head. The questions about head visibility were only asked if an error was
made on the personal visibility question.
Materials
The transparent and the opaque eye covers are shown in Figure 1. One was
constructed from opaque yellow foam; the other was constructed from
transparent plastic. Each eye-cover covered the eye area and bridge of the
nose and was held in place by a length of elastic.
Detailed Procedure
The study was conducted within the child’s nursery in the general play area.
The child and two experimenters sat in a triangular formation on the floor
or on low chairs. One experimenter took the role of questioner; the other
(the ‘‘model’’) acted as the target individual for questions concerning the
third person.
Familiarization phase. The procedure began with a brief familiarization

phase in which the experimenters chatted with the child, introduced him or
her to the two ‘‘special masks,’’ and asked him or her to try on each one.
The children were then asked eight familiarization questions (see Table 1)
designed to check participants’ understanding of the masks’ properties,
comprehension skills, and level of engagement. The five children who failed
to answer all eight questions correctly were excluded from the data.
FIGURE 1 The masks worn by child and model in Experiment 1. (Color figure available
online.)
TABLE 1
The Postfamiliarization Questions Asked in Experiment 1
Does individual wear Does individual wear

a transparent mask? an opaque mask? Question asked
A Child: Yes Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can you see?’’

Model: No Model: No
B Child: Yes Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can I see your eyes?’’
Model: No Model: No
C Child: No Child: Yes ‘‘[Child’s name], can you see?’’
Model: No Model: No
D Child: No Child: Yes ‘‘[Child’s name], can I see your eyes?’’
Model: No Model: No
E Child: No Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can [model’s name] see?’’
Model: Yes Model: No
F Child: No Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can I see [the model]’s eyes?’’
Model: Yes Model: No
G Child: No Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can [model’s name] see?’’
Model: No Model: Yes
H Child: No Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can I see [the model’s] eyes?’’
Model: No Model: Yes
Note. Child and model either did or did not wear a mask. If they did not, their eyes were open
and they looked at the questioner.
Test phase. In the next stage of the procedure, children were asked
three questions twice: once in the ‘‘eyes hidden’’ condition (opaque eye cover
worn) and once in the ‘‘eyes visible’’ condition (transparent eye cover worn).
If a child answered one of the questions incorrectly in the eyes-hidden con-
dition, he or she was immediately asked the relevant follow-up question
about the visibility of the head. Accordingly, each child was asked a mini-
mum of six and a maximum of nine questions during the test phase. The
questions and follow-up procedures follow.
1. [Child wears relevant eye cover] ‘‘[Child’s name], my eyes are open and
I’m looking in your direction. Can I see you?’’
Follow-Up 1: ‘‘Can I see your head?’’
2. [Model wears relevant eye cover] ‘‘[Child’s name], my eyes are open and
I’m looking in [model’s name]’s direction. Can I see [model’s name]?’’
Follow-Up 2: ‘‘Can I see [model’s name]’s head?’’
3. [Model wears relevant eye cover] ‘‘[Child’s name], can you see [model’s
name]?’’
Follow-Up 3: ‘‘Can you see [model’s name]’s head?’’
TABLE 2
Percentage of Children Who Correctly Answered ‘Yes’ to Each Question in Experiment 1
Eyes hidden Eyes visible
Question 1: (‘‘Can I see you?’’) 4 (1) 92 (23)

Follow-Up 1: ‘‘Can I see your head?’’ 83.3 (20) —
Question 2: ‘‘Can I see [model’s name]?’’ 8 (2) 92 (23)
Follow-Up 2: ‘‘Can I see [model’s name]’s head?’’ 95.7 (22) —
Question 3: ‘‘Can you see [model’s name]?’’ 16 (4) 96 (24)
Follow-Up 3: ‘‘Can you see [model’s name]’s head?’’ 85.7 (18) —
Note. The number of children represented by each percentage is given in parentheses. N ¼ 25

for Questions 1, 2, and 3. Because only children who gave an incorrect answer to one of the
questions in the eyes-hidden condition were asked the corresponding follow-up question,
N ¼ 24 for Follow-Up 1, N ¼ 23 for Follow-Up 2, and N ¼ 21 for Follow-Up 3.
The questions and conditions in which they were asked were fully
counterbalanced.
Results and Discussion

The percentage of children who answered each of the questions correctly in
the two conditions is given in Table 2. The following facts are clear from the
table: a) While the children were clearly able to affirm that they and the
model were visible when wearing the transparent eye cover, they typically
denied that both they and the model were visible when wearing the opaque
eye cover; and b) they had no difficulty in correctly affirming that they and
the model’s heads remained visible.
Note that only one child (representing 4% of the sample) affirmed his
visibility when wearing the opaque eye cover, while only 8% of the sample
(two children) affirmed the model’s visibility to the experimenter under this
condition and 16% (four children) affirmed her visibility to them under that
condition. The differences between first-person performance and the two
third-person performances were not statistically reliable:1 McNemar tests,
Question 1 versus Question 2, p ¼ .50; Question 1 versus Question 3,
p ¼ .125.
This experiment has, then, confirmed Flavell et al.’s (1980) observation
that children between the ages of 2 and 4 years are nearly as likely to affirm
the invisibility of other people with occluded eyes as they are to affirm their
1
Where the expected frequency for the McNemar test was < 5, an alternative version of the
test based on the binomial distribution was used (Siegal & Castellan, 1988). Where this was the
case, the exact p values, but no v2 value (because none was obtained in such cases), are reported.
own invisibility in this situation, while they are very likely to affirm the
visibility of a body part (the head) at the same time. Given this, we now
investigate whether it is the invisibility of the eyes to others or the fact that
the occlusion of the eyes negates visual experience that is responsible for this
error. In other words, do children believe that if a person’s eyes are not vis-
ible then the self referred to by the personal pronoun=proper name is not
visible either, or do they believe that if there is no visual experience in the
person being looked at then there is no person to see? In the latter case, they
would be equating the existence of object of vision with being an experiencer
of the visual world. On this view, the error is caused by children thinking
that closing the eyes makes people invisible because it obliterates visual
experience.
We tested these two possibilities in the following way. Children were
introduced to two kinds of spectacles. These clearly differed in the color
and shape of the frame, while both contained a highly mirrored film in
the eye cavity that occluded the eyes of the wearer. However, it was possible
to see out of one of these pairs. After a training period during which the chil-
dren were made aware of the properties of each kind of spectacle (e.g., that
one can see through the yellow ones), they were asked questions similar to
those posed in Experiment 1. If children equate visibility of the self with vis-
ual experience, then they should be more likely to say the wearer is visible
when he or she is wearing the spectacles through which the world is visible.
If, however, they equate visibility of the self with visibility of the eyes, then
they should be equally likely to say the wearer is invisible with each pair of
spectacles, as each was equally opaque from the point of view of the
observer.
Recall that Flavell et al. (1980) had given the children silvered ski goggles
to wear, through which the wearer could see, although his=her eyes were
invisible, and recall that they reported that this did not mitigate the error.
That is, a high proportion of the children still maintained that the wearer
was not visible. This suggests that the second alternative (above) does not
hold: Children do not think that closing the eyes makes people invisible
because it obliterates visual experience. However, the authors cautioned,
‘‘Once the reflective glasses were put on them, a number of the younger chil-
dren in Study 1 seemed to have trouble maintaining their just-established
recognition that others cannot see the wearer’s eyes through the glasses’’
(Flavell et al., 1980, pp. 380–381). Given this, we used a thorough checking
procedure to ensure that the children understood the properties of the
glasses and indeed made a complete understanding of these a necessary con-
dition for inclusion in the data set. We also asked, this time, about the visi-
bility of the body rather than of the head. This was done in order to increase
the generality of the conclusions. Some children may have thought that
because heads are the organs of experiencing and cogitating that their visi-
bility was central to personal visibility in the way that visibility of the, say,
legs was not.
EXPERIMENT 2
Method
Participants
Thirty-seven children (age range ¼ 2;10–4;5; median age ¼ 3;9), none of
whom had been involved in Experiment 1, took part in the experiment. They
were attending nursery schools in the East or South of England.

Children experienced the properties of the two kinds of spectacles and were
tested on their understanding of these. They then received questions similar
to those in Experiment 1, when they and the model wore one or the other
kind of spectacles.
Materials
Two pairs of spectacles were used in the study (see Figure 2).2 The lenses of
both were covered with a highly mirrored film, such that from the point of
view of an onlooker, they appeared completely opaque. The lenses of one
pair were transparent from the point of view of the wearer; those of the
other had been made completely opaque using small ovals of black foam.
Colorful foam frames—blue and curved in the case of the opaque glasses,
yellow and angular in the case of the transparent—were attached to each
pair so that the two could be distinguished by an onlooker.
Detailed Procedure
The experiment was conducted within nurseries, as in Experiment 1. The
child and two experimenters (questioner and model) sat in a triangular
formation on the floor throughout the experiment.
Familiarization procedure. Children were tested with one kind of

spectacles at a time. That is, familiarization with opaque-only spectacles
2
These spectacles were kindly lent to us by Dr. Christoph Teufel and were previously used in
experiments reported in his doctoral dissertation. We are very grateful to Dr. Teufel for his help.
FIGURE 2 The spectacles used in Experiment 2. (Color figure available online.)
preceded test questions with opaque-only spectacles, and similarly for trans-
parent. This blocking by spectacles type was done because it had proved
extremely difficult to familiarize the children with the spectacles when they
had experience with both kinds before the test questions wereasked.3
The child was first asked to try on one of the pairs and to take note of the
effect of the glasses on their visual experience. The experimenter asked,
‘‘Can you see?’’ The experimenter then wore the spectacles the child had just
worn and said: ‘‘Now I’m wearing the [blue=yellow] glasses. Can I see?’’ If
the child answered incorrectly, he or she was asked to try on the spectacles
once more before the question was repeated. Next the experimenter pointed
out that the glasses prevent the wearer’s eyes from being seen and tried them
on herself to demonstrate this property. The child was then asked to try
them on the glasses themselves, while the experimenter said: ‘‘Now you’re
wearing the [blue=yellow] glasses. Can I see your eyes?’’ If the child answered
incorrectly, the experimenter tried the glasses on a further time, again point-
ing out that her eyes were hidden, before repeating her question.
Test phase. The children were asked eight questions (listed below):
once in each of the opaque and transparent conditions blocked by familiar-
ization phase, as described above. Four of the questions (Questions 1, 2, 5,
and 6) were included as checks of the children’s understanding of the rel-
evant properties of the two pairs of spectacles. It was determined that only
3
Seventeen children in a similar age range had been familiarized, unsuccessfully, before we
embarked on this familiarization regimen. The lack of success was probably due to our not
blocking training by the type of spectacles.
children who answered all four of these check questions correctly would be
included in the analysis.
First-person questions.
1. Can you see?

2. Can I see your eyes?
3. [TEST] My eyes are open and I’m looking in your direction. Can I see
you?
4. [TEST] My eyes are open and I’m looking in your direction. Can I see
your body?
Third-person questions.
5. Can [model’s name] see?

6. Can I see [model’s name] eyes?
7. [TEST] My eyes are open and I’m looking in [model’s name]’s direction.
Can I see [model’s name]?
8. [TEST] My eyes are open and I’m looking in [model’s name]’s direction.
Can I see [model’s name]’s body?
Whether the first- or third-person questions were asked first and the con-
dition in which they were asked was counterbalanced. The order in which
Questions 1 through 4 and 5 through 8 were asked was randomized, with
the exception that Question 4 was always the last of the first-person questions
to be asked and Question 8 always the last of the third-person questions.

Of the 37 participants, only 7 successfully answered all four check questions
correctly in both conditions. These children were all 4 years old, with a mean
age of 4;3 (range ¼ 4;1 – 4;4). The reason why these check questions proved
to be so difficult is highly informative about the nature of the challenge
facing the children, and it replicates difficulties reported by Flavell et al.
(1980). But before we examine this, we will look at the trend present in
the children who passed the questions. See Table 3.
What is of interest here is the question of whether the children were more
likely to affirm the visibility of self and other when the transparent specta-
cles were being worn. It will be noted that no children affirmed their
visibility with the opaque spectacles, but only one did so when wearing
the transparent ones (McNemar test, p ¼ .5). Similarly, only two children
affirmed the visibility of the model when she was wearing both the opaque
TABLE 3
Correct Positive Answers to the Test Questions of the Seven Children Who Answered All
Four Check Questions Correctly
Opaque spectacles Transparent spectacles

worn worn
Question 3: ‘‘Can I see you?’’ (‘‘Yes’’ correct; 0 (0) 14.3 (1)

child wears)
Question 4: ‘‘Can I see your body?’’ (‘‘Yes’’ 85.7 (6) 85.7 (6)
correct; child wears)
Question 7: ‘‘Can I see [model’s name]?’’ (‘‘Yes’’ 28.6 (2) 28.6 (2)
correct; model wears)
Question 8: ‘‘Can I see [model’s name]’s body?’’ 85.7 (6) 85.7 (6)
(‘‘Yes’’ correct; model wears)
Note. The absolute number represented by each percentage is given in parentheses.
and the transparent spectacles. Despite the small number of children then,
the trend is clear: Children were no more likely to say that people (self or
other) were visible when the eyes are occluded but there is visual experience.
We now turn to the reason why the other 30 children were challenged by
the familiarization questions.
The percentages of children who correctly answered each of the four
check questions are presented in Table 4. These percentages represent the
responses of all 37 children. It is evident from the table where the difficulty
lies: with affirming the visibility of the wearer’s eyes when the transparent
goggles were being worn. That is to say, the tendency was to say, incorrectly,
that the wearer’s eyes were visible when she was wearing the one-way
TABLE 4
The Performance, as Percentage Correct of the Children (N ¼ 37), on the Questions That
Checked for Their Understanding of the Properties of the Spectacles
Opaque spectacles worn Transparent spectacles worn
Question 1: ‘‘Can you see?’’ Child 100 (37) ‘‘No’’ correct 94.6 (35) ‘‘Yes’’ correct
wears
Question 2: ‘‘Can I see your eyes?’’ 97.3 (36) ‘‘No’’ correct 32.4 (12) ‘‘No’’ correct
Child wears
Question 5: ‘‘Can [model’s name]’s 83.8 (31) ‘‘No’’ correct 86.5 (32) ‘‘Yes’’ correct
see?’’ Model wears
Question 6: ‘‘Can I see [model’s 81.1 (30) ‘‘No’’ correct 56.8 (21) ‘‘No’’ correct
name]’s eyes?’’ Model wears
Note. The numbers of children are in parentheses.

goggles. We are, then, finding evidence for the same kind of error that Fla-
vell et al. (1980) reported: that of saying that the eyes of somebody wearing
mirror ski goggles are visible.
Testing these impressions statistically, all of the check questions were
answered correctly significantly more frequently than chance in the opaque
condition: Q1, v2(1) ¼ 37; Q2, v2(1) ¼ 33.2; Q5, v2(1) ¼ 16.89; Q6, v2(1) ¼
14.3; all ps < .001). This was also true of Question 1 and Question 5 (about
whether they or the model could see) in the transparent condition: Q1,
v2(1) ¼ 29.43; Q5, v2(1) ¼ 19.7; both ps < .001). Question 2 (about whether
their own eyes were visible wearing transparent spectacles) was answered
at a below-chance level, v2(1) ¼ 4.57, p < .05, while performance on Question
6 (about the model’s eye visibility wearing transparent spectacles) was no
better than chance, v2(1) ¼ 0.68, ns). Also, there was a significant difference
between the number of correct answers given to Question 2 (visibility of own
eyes, transparent spectacles) in the opaque and transparent conditions,
McNemar test, v2(1) ¼ 22.04, p < .001, and a difference between the two
conditions, which approached significance in the case of Question 6 (about
visibility of the model’s eyes with transparent spectacles), McNemar test,
v2(1) ¼ 2.72, p < .1; p > .05.
Finally, the tendency to affirm that somebody who can see has visible
eyes (though the eyes are clearly not visible) was actually stronger when it
was one’s own visual experience; comparing correct answers to Question 2
and Question 6: McNemar test, v2(1) ¼ 6.125, p < .05.
Two results have emerged from this study. First, despite the fact that only
19% of the sample was fully able to appreciate the properties of the specta-
cles, the small sample that emerged showed no sign of being more likely to
say that people were visible if their eyes were occluded but they could see.
The second result concerns the reason why 81% of the sample struggled with
the questions about the spectacles’ properties. This time, we are replicating a
more informal report by Flavell et al. (1980): Children had clear difficulty
with denying that people who can see, but whose eyes are not visible, have
visible eyes. This tendency was stronger in the first-person condition.
With regard to the latter finding, why should children affirm the visibility
of eyes—especially their own eyes (67.6% of the sample)—only on the
grounds of having visual experience, while ignoring the fact that the eyes
were obviously obscured by a reflecting film? We will suggest an explanation
for this result now and return to its assumptions in the context of our final
study. It might be said that children take eye visibility to be established by
mutuality of gaze—by the eyes ‘‘meeting.’’ So if two people make eye con-
tact, notwithstanding the fact that the eyes of one of them are not visible,
then eye seeing has taken place. This account might explain why children
responded as they did in the first-person case, but what about the 43% of
them who did the same thing in the third-person case? Here, one might say
that the children assumed that eye contact had taken place as the exper-
imenter was looking directly at the model and that this assumption would
be more prevalent in the children who happened to have received the
first-person question before the third-person one.
Be that as it may, we now return to the central result, which is that chil-
dren affirm the visibility of bodies, while denying the visibility of persons,
when the eyes are occluded. This result makes the fact that they sometimes
play hide-and-seek by shutting their eyes even harder to explain. After all,
when playing hide-and-seek, the idea is for the seeker to try to find the body.
Perhaps this anomalous behavior is no more than something that children
do in the heat of play, something one might call a performance error? If
it is a performance error, however, then one would expect children appropri-
ately to judge the hiding behavior of others. Given this, in our next study,
we had children observe the hiding behavior of glove puppets (hiding by
putting their hands over their eyes vs. hiding behind an object) after which
they had to judge whether what was done was ‘‘silly’’ or ‘‘OK.’’ This kind of
questioning technique has been used with this age group by a number of
other workers such as Hughes and Grieve (1980), Dias and Harris (1988),
and Pratt, Tunmer, and Nesdale (1989). Would children around 3 years
of age tend to say that hiding by covering the eyes was ‘‘OK’’?
If children do indeed judge that hiding by closing your eyes is a rational
(‘‘OK’’) thing to do, why do they do so? One possibility is that it is a mani-
festation of their well-documented difficulties with understanding the
relation between seeing something and having knowledge about it. Wimmer,
Hogrefe, and Perner (1988) were the first of many (e.g., Perner & Ruffman,
1995) to show that 3-year-old children, and sometimes older ones too, fail to
appreciate that people can acquire knowledge of an object by looking at it.
The two phenomena (anomalous judgments about hiding and see–know
difficulties) may be related in the following way. Because young children
struggle with see–know, they do not appreciate how seeing a person’s body
can cause the knowledge of where the body is. They do not appreciate that
seeing can be a kind of information pick-up that ‘‘stays behind’’ as knowl-
edge. So the seeker will see the hider’s body but not know that it is there, and
given this, it will not matter how the hiding is done: ‘‘Hiding’’ in which the
body remains visible will suffice. But why hide the eyes? Because these are
the central and most attended to part of the body.
In our next experiment then, we asked: a) whether children within the age
range previously studied will judge the hiding behavior of glove puppets inap-
propriately (saying it is ‘‘OK’’ rather than ‘‘silly’’ to hide by covering the
eyes), and b) how performance on this task is related to knowledge of the
see–know relationship. For our see–know test, we borrowed the procedure
used by Pratt and Bryant (1990), as their work suggested that this principle is
something that 3-year-olds can appreciate so long as the question is posed in
a sufficiently simple form. Indeed, we lowered the bar for passing the task
somewhat, as many of our participants were 2 years of age: Three correct
answers out of four were required for success rather than the four out of five
that Pratt and Bryant required.
With regard to the relation between the two tasks, because we wanted to
test the possibility that see–know understanding was necessary for success
on the hiding task, our concern was not with the correlation between the
tasks but with the conditional probability of passing one of them if the other
one had been passed.
EXPERIMENT 3
Method
Participants
The 60 children who took part in the study were attending nursery schools
in the East of England. The range in ages was between 2;5 and 3;11, and the
median age was 3;3. None of the children had taken part in the previous
experiments.
Materials
The materials used were two clearly distinguishable glove puppets of differ-
ent genders, two cardboard boxes big enough to contain the puppets, six
small toy objects (a dog, a pig, a Lego man, a car, a rabbit, and a dinosaur),
and four small boxes in which one of the toy objects could be hidden.

All children were tested on both a hide-and-seek task and a see–know task,
which was based on the procedures used by Pratt and Bryant (1990). The
order in which these two tasks were presented was completely randomized,
as was the order in which the component questions were asked. In both
tasks, child and experimenter sat side by side at a low table.
Detailed Procedure
The hide-and-seek task. The children were initially told that they
would be playing a game in which they had to tell the experimenter whether
things that happened were either ‘‘silly’’ or ‘‘OK.’’ Once it was confirmed
that the child knew the correct names of the objects, they were then
presented with a number of clearly false and clearly true statements about
the six toy objects. The experimenter selected one toy at a time and then
made a true or false statement about it. For example, the experimenter
showed the child a toy car and said: ‘‘This is an apple. Is that OK or is that
silly?’’ If children answered incorrectly, they were prompted up to two times
with statements such as, ‘‘Are you sure it is OK to say that this is an apple?’’
before their answer was marked as incorrect. This was repeated for the six
different objects, with three ‘‘OK’’ and three ‘‘silly’’ statements. If a child
scored at least 5 out of 6 correct answers with two or fewer prompts, then
he or she received the main test.
In the hide-and-seek task, which then followed, the child was first asked
to say how the game of hide-and-seek is played. All children were familiar
with the game. The experimenter then produced the two puppets and told
the children that these two would play hide-and-seek. Those children who
had not encountered the puppets before were told that the puppets’ names
were Sally and Joe. For the children who received the ‘‘OK’’ condition first,
one puppet chose to hide in a box. One puppet—either Sally or Joe—left the
scene, and the other puppet hid. A box was present for the puppet to hide in.
The puppet climbed into the box and said: ‘‘Joe=Sally will not know I am
here.’’ The experimenter then asked the child: ‘‘Is what Sally=Joe said
OK, or is that silly?’’ The seeker puppet eventually found the hider, and
the roles were reversed. In the case where ‘‘silly’’ was the correct answer,
the hider covered his or her eyes and said, as before, ‘‘Joe=Sally will not
know I am here.’’
A correct answer was scored as saying both ‘‘OK’’ to box hiding and
‘‘silly’’ to hiding by covering the eyes.
The see–know task. The two puppets were produced, and the child was
told that their names were Joe and Sally if he or she had not seen them
before.
The children were then tested for their knowledge of the names of the toy
objects to be used in the experiment. For example, the experimenter would
say: ‘‘I am giving Joe a toy car and Sally a toy dog.’’ The child was then
asked: ‘‘Who has the toy car, Joe or Sally?’’ Answers were accepted as cor-
rect if the child pointed to or named the correct puppet. This was done six
times. Children who answered at least five of these questions correctly were
given the main test.
In the see–know task, the child was shown four boxes, which were shaken
to demonstrate that they had something inside (one of the toys used in the
pretest). The child was not shown the contents but was then told that he or
she would be shown one box at a time and that one puppet would look into
the box and the other would pick it up. They also heard that they had to
decide which of the puppets knows what is inside the box. In the first trial,
for example, Joe would lift the lid and look inside the box and Sally would
pick it up. This process was accompanied by commentary of the following
kind from the experimenter: ‘‘This time, Joe can look and Sally can pick
up the box.’’ The child was then asked, ‘‘Who knows what is in the box,
Joe or Sally?’’ Again, pointing correctly was accepted as a correct answer.
This was repeated for all four boxes, with the two puppets alternating as
lookers and lifters. Each child was assigned a score out of 4. A score of at
least 3 was the criterion for passing the task.

Performance on the Hiding Task
Of the 60 children who performed on the hiding task, 29 were correct
(48.3%), answering ‘‘OK’’ to the box hiding and ‘‘silly’’ to the eye hiding.
The most common form of error was to judge that both forms of hiding
were ‘‘OK,’’ and this was observed among 23 children (38.3%). The rest
of the children affirmed that it was ‘‘silly’’ to hide in the box (8 children,
13.3%), of whom 7 children said ‘‘silly’’ to both kinds of hiding.
We see then that more than a third of these 2- and 3-year-olds judge that
hiding by concealing the eyes is not an absurd thing to do. This allows us to
conclude that a substantial, though not overwhelming, proportion of chil-
dren younger than 4 years of age not only hide by closing their eyes but
judge of other persons that such hiding is appropriate.
Performance on the See–Know Task

Twenty-four of the 60 children (40%) passed see–know. Recall that our
criterion for passing was being correct on three out of four trials, whereas
Pratt and Bryant’s (1990) criterion was being correct on four out of five
trials. Applying this criterion (four correct out of four trials), 12 (20%) of
our children ‘‘passed’’ the task. Given that our criterion for understanding
the relation between seeing and knowledge is a relatively liberal one, we are
therefore increasing the probability of our finding that passing see–know is a
necessary condition for passing the hiding task.
The Relation Between the Two Tasks

Table 5 is a contingency table describing the relation between passing or fail-
ing one of the tasks and passing or failing the other. The two tasks seem,
from the table, to have been of approximately equal difficulty; and indeed
TABLE 5
Performance on the Two Tasks in Experiment 3
Pass see–know Fail see–know
Pass hiding 19 11
Fail hiding 5 25
a McNemar test resulted in no significant difference between the tasks,

v2(1) ¼ 1.78; p > .05. A phi test showed that the correlation between the
two tasks was .17. This correlation is not impressive, especially given the fact
that understanding the word ‘‘know’’ was a crucial factor in both tasks.
Our central theoretical question, however, was whether passing the see–
know task was a necessary condition for passing the hiding task. Table 6,
which gives the probability of passing or failing one task given that the other
was passed, provides the crucial descriptive data on this question. From the
table, it can be seen that if a child passed the hiding task, there was a 0.41
chance that he or she would fail or had failed the see–know task. This coun-
terindicates see–know understanding being a necessary condition for mak-
ing appropriate judgments about hiding with the eyes closed. It can also
be seen that there was a 0.21 chance of a child who has passed see–know
failing the hiding task, and so the evidence is also weak for see–know ability
being a sufficient condition for passing the hiding task.
A Possible Locus of Difficulty

At this point, we can be said to have established the following about young
children’s tendency to equate eye occlusion with invisibility of the self:
1. They do not believe that eye occlusion brings about invisibility of the
body (replicating Flavell et al., 1980).
2. The tendency to equate eye occlusion with invisibility of the self is
equally pronounced when children are asked about the invisibility of
others (also found by Flavell et al., 1980).
TABLE 6
Conditional Probabilities of Passing=Failing One Task Compared With
Passing=Failing the Other, in Experiment 3
Probability of a child who passed hiding task passing see–know (N ¼ 17) .57
Probability of a child who passed hiding task failing see–know (N ¼ 12) .41
Probability of a child who passed see–know passing hiding task (N ¼ 19) .79
Probability of a child who passed see–know failing hiding task (N ¼ 5) .21
3. The tendency is grounded in assumptions about the lack of eye visibility

in the subject, not about the subject’s lack of visual experience (also
found by Flavell et al., 1980). (They do not think people are invisible
because they cannot see.)
4. There is a further tendency to say that the subject’s eyes are visible if he
or she can see—particularly when it is the child who is reporting on his=
her visibility.
5. A substantial proportion of children younger than 4 years old (more
than a third in Experiment 3) will say it is acceptable to hide by simply
covering the eyes.

6. There is no good reason to believe that the above tendency (#5) is rooted
in failure to appreciate the relationship between seeing an object and
knowing about it.
Given all this, the puzzle essentially remains of why many young children
think that occluding the eyes prevents the perception of the person. One
possibility—to be explored in a final experiment—is that children believe that
person seeing is essentially a joint activity. To be more precise, one does not,
on this view, truly see somebody unless the see-er can be confident that the
observed person is also seeing them; and the way this confidence can be estab-
lished is by eye contact. An analogy here is with the sense of touch in that you
cannot touch another person’s skin without their touching your skin. (A dis-
analogy is with the sense of hearing.) Recall that an appeal to mutuality in the
child’s early concept of person seeing was made earlier in response to Result 4
above (and see McGuigan & Doherty, 2006)—the tendency to assume that if
somebody can see, then their eyes are visible. We argued that the underlying
assumption here is that if there is eye contact (i.e., the subject looking into the
experimenter’s eyes), then the subject’s eyes must be visible.
The mutuality-of-person-seeing hypothesis (henceforth: mutual regard
hypothesis) explains much of the data, but it does struggle to explain Find-
ing 5 above and the widely reported fact that young children do indeed hide
by shutting their eyes when playing hide-and-seek. One might assume here
that by being ‘‘caught’’ in a game of hide-and-seek, young children mean
not the fact of the seeker seeing the hider’s body, so they can physically
be caught, but the fact of seeker and hider being in mutual visual contact.
The mutual regard hypothesis inspires a clear prediction, which is that
young children should affirm their own and another person’s invisibility if
the eyes are visible but there is no eye contact. That is, they should say that
they themselves cannot be seen when they are looking past somebody, rather
than looking into their eyes, and they should say that another person is not
visible to them when he or she is looking past them but the person’s eyes are
visible. We tested this prediction in a final experiment.
EXPERIMENT 4
Method
Participants
Thirty-two children took part in this experiment, all of whom were attend-
ing nursery schools in the East of England. Their ages ranged between 2;5
and 3;11, with a median age of 3;1. Many of the children had served as part-
icipants in Experiment 3.

Each child performed under all conditions. The main division was between
whether the child or the experimenter was being looked at: ‘‘Can I see you?’’
versus ‘‘Can you see me?’’ Within each of these conditions, three questions
about visibility were asked: 1) with the child’s=experimenter’s eyes open,
2) with child’s=experimenter’s eyes closed, and 3) with the child=
experimenter looking past the observer at a target object behind the
observer.
Detailed Procedure
Child and experimenter sat across from each other at a low table. The child
was told that he or she would be asked some questions about when people
can see other people. The order in which the ‘‘Can you see me?’’ and the
‘‘Can I see you?’’ questions were asked was balanced, as was the order in
which the three component questions were posed.
‘Can you see me?’ questions. In the eyes-open question, the exper-
imenter looked into the child’s eyes and said, ‘‘Can you see me?’’ In the
eyes-closed question, the same question was posed with the eyes closed.
For the looking-past question, the experimenter faced the child, but her eyes
were looking behind the child at a toy car on a shelf, which was behind the
child’s left or right shoulder. This necessitated her orienting her eyes upward
and at 45 angle away from the child. Again, the question was, ‘‘Can you see
me?’’.
‘Can I see you?’ questions. In this condition, experimenter and child

changed seats. In the eyes-open condition, the child was told to look into
the experimenter’s eyes after which he or she was asked, ‘‘Can I see you?’’
In the eyes-closed condition, he or she was asked to shut his or her eyes,
after which the same question was posed. In the looking-past condition,
the child was told to face the experimenter but to look at the little car on
the shelf behind the experimenter. In this case, the child heard: ‘‘Look up at
this car now and I will look at your eyes while you do . . . Can I see you?’’

The data from two of the children (both aged 2;6) were discounted because
they denied that either the experimenter or they themselves were visible with
their eyes open, suggesting the presence of confusion. Thirty children
remained.
In the ‘‘Can I see you?’’ condition, 57% (17 children) affirmed they were
invisible with their eyes closed, while in the ‘‘Can you see me?’’ condition,
50% (15 children) said the experimenter was not visible when her eyes were
closed. Twenty-seven percent (8 children) showed this pattern in both
conditions.
If children affirm invisibility of self and other not because the eyes cannot
be seen but because there is no mutual visual regard, then one should find a
high proportion of children who both affirm invisibility of self and other
with eyes closed and invisibility of self and other when the eyes do not
meet—when the target individual looks past the viewer. In other words,
the conditional probability of affirming invisibility in the looking-past case,
given a negative answer in the eyes-closed case, should be high. More
centrally, it should be higher than the conditional probability of affirming
invisibility in the looking-past case, given a positive answer to the eyes-
closed case. In other words, children should be more likely to say that some-
body is not visible when the target individual is looking past the viewer if
they also deny that people are invisible with their eyes closed than if they
correctly affirm that people are still visible when they have their eyes closed.
If this is not the case, then one is entitled to say that the pattern of affirma-
tions and denials shows no pattern that is interpretable in the present terms.
In the ‘‘Can you see me?’’ condition, the conditional probability of
affirming invisibility of the experimenter in the looking-past condition,
given a denial of her visibility in the eyes-closed condition, was .67 (see
Table 7a). The conditional probability of doing this given their correctly
affirming the experimenter’s visibility with her eyes closed was .07 (one
child). This difference was significant, v2(1) ¼ 11.62, p < .001. A similar,
but weaker, trend was evidenced in the case where the child was being
looked at by the experimenter—the ‘‘Can I see you?’’ condition (Table 7b).
The conditional probability of saying ‘‘no’’ to the looking-past question
given a negative answer to the eyes-closed question was .64, whereas the
conditional probability of saying ‘‘no’’ to the looking-past question given
a positive answer to the eyes-closed question was .38. This was a nonsigni-
ficant difference, v2(1) ¼ 2.08, p > .05.
TABLE 7
The Contingency Between Affirming=Not Affirming That the Person Being Looked at
(Self or Other) is Visible With Eyes Closed and Denying=Not Denying That the
Person Being Looked at is Visible When the Viewer Looks Past, in Experiment 4
Saying ‘No’ to the Saying ‘Yes’ to the

visibility question when E visibility question when E
(a) ‘Can you see me?’ looks past the child looks past the child
Saying ‘‘no’’ to visibility question 10 5

with E’s eyes closed
Saying ‘‘yes’’ to visibility question 1 15

with E’s eyes closed
Saying ‘No’ to the Saying ‘Yes’ to the

visibility question when visibility question when
(b) ‘Can I see you?’ being looked past by E being looked past by E
Saying ‘‘no’’ to visibility question 11 6

with own eyes closed
Saying ‘‘yes’’ to visibility question 5 8
with own eyes closed
The raw data are presented in the Appendix to illustrate how the
double-negative error (‘‘no’’ to both the eyes-closed and the looking-past
questions) fades with age. To analyze the effect of age, the participants were
divided at the midpoint between ‘‘young’’ and ‘‘old’’ (15 children in each
group). In the ‘‘Can you see me?’’ condition, the younger group was signifi-
cantly more likely to make the double-negative error, v2(1) ¼ 5.4, p < .05.
However, the age difference was not significant in the ‘‘Can I see you?’’
condition, v2(1) ¼ 1.3, p > .05.
Note that the proportion of children equating eye visibility with personal
visibility is lower than in Experiment 1 (50% or 57% as compared with
around 90%), presumably because in Experiment 1, people wore masks over
their eyes rather than simply having the eyes closed. However, a clear
majority of the children who made this error also affirmed the invisibility
of persons whose eyes were open but who were not making eye contact with
the viewer.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
We have confirmed that: a) Children are just as likely to deny the visibility
of other persons when the person’s eyes are occluded as they are to deny
their own visibility in that situation; b) they do not think that this holds
for bodily visibility; and c) occlusion of the eyes from the viewer seems to be
the determining factor in this judgment rather than lack of visual experience
in the observed person. In addition, we have enriched our knowledge of this
phenomenon in the following further directions. It turns out that young chil-
dren tend to assume that if there is visual experience, then the eyes are vis-
ible. Also, they not only hide by closing their eyes but judge that it is
appropriate for others (puppets) to do so too, suggesting that their own
anomalous hiding is not simply something they do in the heat of play. These
judgments about hiding do not seem to be explicable in terms of difficulties
with understanding the relation between seeing and knowing. But perhaps
our most striking finding is the final one: There is a tendency not only to
affirm personal (self and other) invisibility when the eyes are occluded but
to do so also when the eyes are visible but not locking with the eyes of
the viewer.
Although what we have found is a tendency and not an absolute lack of
understanding common to nearly all children of a certain age, this tendency
stands in need of explanation. Why should some children—the clear
majority of those who take eye occlusion to imply invisibility of the
person—believe that for a person, not the person’s body, to be visible to
another, the two people must make eye contact?
Perhaps we should turn to the phenomenon of joint attention for an
explanation. Since the early work of Werner and Kaplan (1963), it has
become widely accepted in developmental and philosophical psychology
that joint attention must be a crucible of mental development, the thought
being that lexical development (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2005; Tomasello,
Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005), social development (Carpenter,
Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), and communication (Franco, 2005), the con-
cept of other minds (Heal, 2005), not to mention truth concepts and think-
ing itself (Davidson, 2001), would be impossible without this process taking
place, or without a capacity for it being in place. For joint attention to carry
so much weight, it is clear that we need what Eilan (2005, p. 5) calls a ‘‘rich’’
interpretation of it, in which, ‘‘Each subject is aware, in some sense, of the
object as an object that is present to both subjects. There is, in this respect, a
‘meeting of minds’ between both subjects, such that the fact that both are
attending to the same object is open or mutually manifest.’’
There are philosophical and empirical issues aplenty (see Eilan, 2005;
Franco, 2005; Peacocke, 2005; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2005) surrounding the
question of what it means exactly for two people to share attention to a
physical object, but these are relatively tractable compared with the question
of what it might mean to give an intersubjective account of knowledge of, or
perceptual acquaintance with, a person. If we simply equate personhood
with the physical body, then much of this difficulty melts away: We assume
that the referent of personal pronouns and proper names is the person’s
body. The difficulty with doing this, however, is that often in everyday dis-
course, we do not equate personhood with the physical body, but with a
mental entity. Indeed this person–body equation is probably rarely made
in the language to which children are exposed. For example, in the sentences
‘‘Do you want pizza?’’; ‘‘What did you watch on TV?’’; and ‘‘Did granddad
make you laugh?’’ the subject of the sentences is a center of, respectively,
desire, experience, and agency. This is not always the case of course. In
the sentence ‘‘Are you too small for the T-shirt?’’ ‘‘you’’ refers to the per-
son’s body.
Given this, how is the child to extend the project of grounding intersub-
jective truth in joint attention if the physical body is not the usual referent of
personal pronouns? The natural suggestion would seem to be that children
apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for some-
body to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to
be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet. It is as if the famous triangle
of joint attention were truncated to a dyad by removing the physical object
and retaining mutuality of gaze.
Before we consider the empirical implications of this suggestion, we need
to confront a possible impediment to it. On this account, the ‘‘concept of
personhood’’ and ‘‘self’’ is a highly mentalistic affair dependent upon the
immediate mutuality of gaze. But if so, then we should expect congenitally
blind children to experience profound difficulty in learning the personal
pronouns. Although some researchers have reported considerable delay
in the productive use of personal pronouns (Fraiberg & Abelson, 1973=
1977), more recent research has uncovered essentially normal development
(Perez-Pereira, 1999). Do we have to conclude from this that the referent
for the personal pronouns in the congenitally blind child is the person’s
body? Not necessarily, for as we said earlier, vision is not the only sense
in which there can be immediate mutuality. Touch—of the skin-to-skin var-
iety—is another. Just as looking into another’s eyes means that they in turn
become an observer of you, so touching another person’s skin means that
they are touching you. On this view, the congenitally blind child will have
access to a form of immediate mutuality of perception by holding some-
body’s hand. However, it has to be admitted that this kind of experience will
carry mutuality less powerfully than mutual gaze, and this may be one of the
factors underlying the ‘‘autistic-like’’ traits found in the congenitally blind
by Hobson and his colleagues (Brown, Hobson, Lee, & Stevenson, 1997).
Hobson (1989) is noted for arguing that autism is rooted in the lack of inter-
subjective experience.
Indeed, in the context of testing the present account of why young chil-
dren often equate personal visibility with invisibility of the eyes, we turn
to autism itself. Given that lack of joint attention is one of the core features
of autism (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Leekam & Ramsden, 2006), it is necessary to
predict that individuals with autism of mental ages between 2 and 4 years of
age should not produce the kind of anomalous judgments about personal
visibility reported here.
With regard to normally developing children, the hypothesis linking
anomalous invisibility judgments to a joint-attention ‘‘growth error’’ could
be tested by asking whether children who overapply a joint-attention prin-
ciple when answering questions about sharing visual regard are particularly
likely to make the kind of errors reported here. What might ‘‘overapply’’
mean in this context? Let us consider the following passage from a dis-
cussion of joint attention by the philosopher Christopher Peacocke (2005,
p. 299):
Consider two people who are standing facing each other, separated by a thick
pane of glass. Suppose each person falsely believes that this glass is a one-way
mirror, allowing him to see the other but preventing the other from seeing
him . . . . [W]e can suppose that in this situation both are attending to some-
thing—an animal say—in their common field of view off to one side of the
glass between them. Each may have a genuine perception of the other attend-
ing exactly to the same thing that he is attending to viz, the animal. But
because each believes the other cannot see him, this . . . is far from having
the openness present in paradigm cases of joint attention.
If one of these persons was asked whether the other can ‘‘see’’ or is ‘‘look-
ing at’’ the animal, the answer should clearly be ‘‘yes.’’ But for somebody,
such as a young child, who takes all cases of co-looking to be ‘‘paradigm
cases of joint attention’’—to somebody, that is, who is overapplying the
joint-attention principle—the answer will be ‘‘no.’’ It is of some relevance
here that children as young as 14 months old can make correct judgments
about which object an adult has seen, as long as the adult has seen the object
in a context of joint engagement with the child (Moll & Tomasello, 2007).
Given this, one may say that the principle of joint engagement, which leads
to success in toddlers, may cause anomalous judgments about person seeing
in somewhat older children.
To operationalize the above as an experimental task, the pane of glass
would indeed be a one-way mirror, with the child placed on the see-through
side and with an experimenter on the mirrored side. The child would be
made aware of the properties of the one-way mirror and made aware that
although she can see the experimenter, the experimenter cannot see her.
Both visually orient toward an object, animal, or person on one side of
the mirror. According to the current hypothesis, children who deny that
the experimenter can see the object=animal=person will tend to be those who
affirm that they are invisible to viewers with their eyes closed.
More generally, one could investigate the possibility that young pre-
school children hold a kind of ‘‘dualism,’’ insofar as they often affirm visi-
bility of the body but deny visibility of the person whose body is visible.
Further research could investigate the breadth and depth of this form of
dualism and perhaps find out whether it extends to other modalities. If
indeed further evidence for an early dualism were to be uncovered, it would
suggest that children have established a kind of mentalism before they come
to succeed on the canonical tasks that test explicitly for the understanding of
the mental (Wellman & Liu, 2004).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Experiments 3 and 4 were financed by an Undergraduate Research Bursary

from the Nuffield Foundation, United Kingdom, to whom we are most
grateful.
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APPENDIX
Raw Data: Children Saying ‘Yes’ (Y) and ‘No’ (N) to the Visibility
Questions in Experiment 4
‘Can you see me?’ ’Can I see you?’
Age (yr;m) Eyes open Eyes closed Looking past Eyes open Eyes closed Looking past
2;5 Y N N Y N N
2;6 N N Y N N N
2;6 Y Y Y N N Y
2;7 Y N N Y N N
2;7 Y N N Y N Y
2;7 Y N Y Y N Y
2;8 Y Y Y Y Y N
2;9 Y Y Y Y N Y
2;9 Y N N Y N N
2;10 Y N N Y N N
2;10 Y Y Y Y Y Y
2;10 Y N Y Y N Y
2;11 Y Y Y Y N N
3;1 Y N N Y N Y
3;1 Y N N Y N N
3;1 Y N N Y N N
3;2 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;3 Y N Y Y N Y
3;3 Y Y Y Y Y N
3;3 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;3 Y Y N Y Y N
3;4 Y N N Y N N
3;4 Y N Y Y Y Y
3;5 Y Y Y Y Y N
3;6 Y N N Y N N
3;6 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;7 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;9 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;9 Y Y Y Y N N
3;10 Y N Y Y N N
3;10 Y Y Y Y Y Y
3;11 Y Y Y Y Y Y
Age(yr; m) Experimenter object Child object
Eyes open Eyes closed Looking past Eyes open Eyes closed Looking past

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Journal of Cognition and

Why Do Young Children Hide

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Why Do Young Children Hide by

James Russell, Brioney Gee, and Christina Bullard

In a series of four experiments, the authors begin by replicating Flavell,

It has been commonly observed that young children, in particular those

Correspondence should be sent to James Russell, Department of Experimental Psychology,

In our first study, we attempt to replicate Flavell et al.’s (1980) finding

a. Do children tend to make the appropriate kinds of judgments about how

Design and General Procedure

Familiarization phase. The procedure began with a brief familiarization

Does individual wear Does individual wear

A Child: Yes Child: No ‘‘[Child’s name], can you see?’’

Eyes hidden Eyes visible

Question 1: (‘‘Can I see you?’’) 4 (1) 92 (23)

Note. The number of children represented by each percentage is given in parentheses. N ¼ 25

Results and Discussion

Design and General Procedure

Familiarization procedure. Children were tested with one kind of

FIGURE 2 The spectacles used in Experiment 2. (Color figure available online.)

1. Can you see?

5. Can [model’s name] see?

Results and Discussion

Opaque spectacles Transparent spectacles

Question 3: ‘‘Can I see you?’’ (‘‘Yes’’ correct; 0 (0) 14.3 (1)

Note. The absolute number represented by each percentage is given in parentheses.

Opaque spectacles worn Transparent spectacles worn

Note. The numbers of children are in parentheses.

Design and General Procedure

least 3 was the criterion for passing the task.

Results and Discussion

Performance on the See–Know Task

The Relation Between the Two Tasks

Pass see–know Fail see–know

a McNemar test resulted in no significant difference between the tasks,

A Possible Locus of Difficulty

3. The tendency is grounded in assumptions about the lack of eye visibility

covering the eyes.

Design and General Procedure

‘Can I see you?’ questions. In this condition, experimenter and child

Results and Discussion

Saying ‘No’ to the Saying ‘Yes’ to the

Saying ‘‘no’’ to visibility question 10 5

Saying ‘‘yes’’ to visibility question 1 15

Saying ‘No’ to the Saying ‘Yes’ to the

Saying ‘‘no’’ to visibility question 11 6

Experiments 3 and 4 were financed by an Undergraduate Research Bursary

Hobson, P. (1989). On sharing experiences. Development and psychopathology, 1, 197–203.

‘Can you see me?’ ’Can I see you?’

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