The developmental paradox of false belief understanding: a dual- system approach

In our article we explore the developmental paradox of false belief understanding. This paradox follows from the claim that young infants already have an ‘implicit’ notion of false belief, despite the fact that they consistently fail tests assessing ‘explicit’ forms of false belief understanding. First, we argue that recent dual-system proposals to solve this paradox are unsatisfactory because they either lack the conceptual resources to deal with the differences between implicit and explicit false belief understanding, or ignore questions about system interaction. Second, we discuss a number of problems dual-system approaches have to address in order to account for the development of false belief understanding, and propose a model that combines a layered model of perspective taking with an inhibition-selectionrepresentation mechanism operating on different levels.