Children's Strategy Use in Playing Strategic Games

Abstract

Strategic games require to reason about other peoples and one’s own beliefs or intentions. Although they have clear commonalities with psychological tests of theory of mind, they are not clearly related to these tests for children between 9 and 10 years old [6]. We study children’s (5 – 12 years of age) individual differences in playing a strategic game by analyzing the strategies that they apply in a zero, first, and second-order reasoning tasks. For the zero-order task, there were two subgroups with different accuracy. For the first-order task subgroups apply different suboptimal strategies or an optimal strategy. For the second-order task only different suboptimal strategies were present. Strategy use for all tasks was related to age. For the 5 and 6 years old children strategy-use was related to working memory, and not to theory of mind, after correction for age, verbal ability and general IQ