This study explores the development of theory of mind, operationalized as recursive thinking ability, from adolescence to early adulthood (N = 110; young adolescents = 47; adolescents = 43; young adults = 20). The construct of theory of mind has been operationalized in two different ways: as the ability to recognize the correct mental state of a character, and as the ability to attribute the co...

Behavioral studies indicate that theory of mind and counterfactual reasoning are strongly related cognitive processes. In a neuroimaging study, we explored the common and distinct regions underlying these inference processes. We directly compared false belief reasoning (inferring an agent's false belief about an object's location or content) and counterfactual reasoning (inferring what the obje...

The focus of studies on second-order false belief reasoning generally was on investigating the roles of executive functions and language with correlational studies. Different from those studies, we focus on the question how 5-year-olds select and revise reasoning strategies in second-order false belief tasks by constructing two computational cognitive models of this process: an instance-based l...

The understanding that another person's belief can differ from reality and that behaviour is guided by beliefs and not by reality reflects an important cornerstone in the development of a Theory of Mind. The present event-related potential (ERP) study had two aims: first, to reveal ERPs that distinguish between false- and true-belief reasoning and second, to investigate the neural changes in th...

BACKGROUND Previous studies in the literature report that deaf individuals who experience late access to language perform poorly on false belief tests of Theory of Mind (ToM) compared with age-matched deaf and hearing controls exposed to language early. METHODS A group of 22 deaf Nicaraguans (aged 7 to 39 years) who learned Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) at different ages were tested on a fal...

The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under 4 years old fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, whereas more recent studies have revealed that infants are able to pass nonverbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artifact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: N...