Given that gestures may provide access to transitions in cognitive development, preschoolers' performance on standard tasks was compared with their performance on a new gesture false belief task. Experiment 1 confirmed that children (N45, M age54 months) responded consistently on two gesture tasks and that there is dramatic improvement on both the gesture false belief task and a standard task from ages 3 to 5. In 2 subsequent experiments focusing on children in transition with respect to understanding false beliefs (Ns34 and 70, M age48 months), there was a significant advantage of gesture over standard and novel verbal-response tasks. Iconic gesture may facilitate reasoning about opaque mental states in children who are rapidly developing concepts of mind.