The discovery that 3-year-old children have difficulties understanding false belief has fuelled two decades of research directed at understanding why children have this problem. One unresolved question is whether false belief problems are due to difficulties with mental or representational aspects of mental states. This question has implications…

Two experiments with 3 1/2- to 6 1/2-year-old children showed that theory-of-mind development is associated with the growth of episodic memory. Episodic memory was assessed by manipulating informational conditions such that they permit or prevent the formation of episodic memories in terms of re-experiencing the recalled event. Only experienced…

Contrasts Fodor's theory of children's Very Simple Theory of Mind, with the view that children's concepts cross-cut the adult conceptual system: young children do not distinguish between the state of affairs a belief is about and how this state of affairs is thought of, which puts a severe limit on their understanding of belief as distinct from…

In a training study, the authors addressed whether or not preschoolers' difficulty with false belief is due to a domain-specific problem with mental states. Following Slaughter's (1998) design, 57 children who failed a false-belief (FB) pretest received two sessions of training on either an FB, false sign (FS), or control task. All children were…

In the preschool years, there are marked improvements in theory of mind (ToM) and executive functions. And, children's competence in these two core cognitive domains is associated with their academic achievement. Therefore, training ToM and executive control could be a valuable tool for improving children's success in school. This article reviews…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between family size and "theory of mind." Results from an experiment with three- and four-year olds showed that children from larger families were better able than children from smaller families to predict a story character's mistaken (false-belief based) action. (MDM)

Autistic children were tested on three tasks that were within the capability of three-four-year-old normal children and that involved the abilities to understand a mistaken belief, infer contents of a container from looking or not looking inside, and adjust answers to provide new information. (PCB)

Two experiments examined whether the correlation between advances on theory-of-mind and executive function tasks results from the tasks posing the same executive demands among 3- to 6- year-olds. Findings indicated that performance on the dimensional change card-sorting task (a measure of executive function) was correlated with performance on the…

Two experiments with monolingual German-speaking 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. Correct answers emerged with mastery of the false-belief task. It was concluded that the observed gap constrains de Villiers's linguistic…