Preschoolers represent others’ false beliefs about emotions

Modeling Developmental Transitions in Reasoning about False Beliefs of Others

Reasoning about false beliefs of others develops with age. We present here an ACT-R model in order to show the developmental transitions. These start from a child’s reasoning from his/her own point of view (zero-order) to taking into consideration another agent’s beliefs (first-order), and later to taking into consideration another agent’s beliefs about again other agents’ beliefs (second-order...

Monkeys represent others' knowledge but not their beliefs.

The capacity to reason about the false beliefs of others is classically considered the benchmark for a fully fledged understanding of the mental lives of others. Although much is known about the developmental origins of our understanding of others' beliefs, we still know much less about the evolutionary origins of this capacity. Here, we examine whether non-human primates - specifically, rhesus...

Infants' reasoning about others' false perceptions.

Prior research suggests that children younger than age 3 or 4 do not understand that an agent may be deceived by an object's misleading appearance. The authors asked whether 14.5-month-olds would give evidence in a violation-of-expectation task that they understand that agents may form false perceptions. Infants first watched events in which an agent faced a stuffed skunk and a doll with blue p...

Executive functioning and preschoolers' understanding of false beliefs, false photographs, and false signs.

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 (...

First and second-order false-belief reasoning: Does language support reasoning about the beliefs of others?