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• Four- to five-year-olds know when their own past belief was incorrect. • We found that 3-year-olds know their own current belief might be incorrect. • Given peer disagreement, they rechecked their evidence. • False belief understanding is present significantly earlier than classic tasks suggest. By 4 or 5 years of age, children understand when their own past beliefs were incorrect, or when others' current beliefs are incorrect. In the current study, we asked whether young children understand when their own current belief might be incorrect. 3- and 5-year old children (N = 77) made a judgment and then experienced a puppet making a judgment about the same situation. Children of both ages rechecked their evidence more often when the puppet disagreed with them than when it agreed with them (and the nature of their rechecking was different in the two conditions as well). These results suggest that already by 3 years of age children understand that they might currently be wrong, and they know that rechecking the evidence can resolve their uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Effortful control was positively associated with preschool children's instrumental lie-telling behavior. • False belief had no significant relationship with instrumental lie-telling behavior. • Sympathy was negatively associated with lie-telling behavior for older children but had no effect among younger children. • None of the study variables predicted instrumental lie maintenance. This study aimed to examine the predictors of instrumental lies in preschool children, specifically focusing on false belief, effortful control, and sympathy. Instrumental lies are intentional falsehoods used to achieve personal goals such as avoiding punishment and obtaining an undeserved reward. A total of 192 preschool children (age range = 32–73 month-olds), along with their mothers and fathers, participated in the study. The Temptation Resistance Paradigm, an experimental task, was employed to elicit instrumental lies from the children. The children also completed first-order false belief measures, and their parents filled out questionnaires assessing their children's effortful control and sympathy skills. Results revealed a positive association between children's effortful control and their decisions to tell instrumental lies. However, no significant relationship was found between false belief and instrumental lying. Age moderated the link between sympathy and the decision to tell instrumental lies, with sympathy being negatively associated with lie-telling behavior among older children but showing no effect among younger children. The study variables did not predict the maintenance of instrumental lies. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the role of effortful control and sympathy as underlying temperamental and emotional processes influencing children's decisions to engage in instrumental lie-telling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of mind (ToM) gradually develops during the preschool years. Measures of ToM usually target visual experience, but auditory experiences also provide valuable social information. Given differences between the visual and auditory modalities (e.g., sights persist, sounds fade) and the important role environmental input plays in social-cognitive development, we asked whether modality might influence the progression of ToM development. The current study expands Wellman and Liu’s ToM scale (2004) by testing 66 preschoolers using five standard visual ToM tasks and five newly crafted auditory ToM tasks. Age and gender effects were found, with 4- and 5-year-olds demonstrating greater ToM abilities than 3-year-olds and girls passing more tasks than boys; there was no significant effect of modality. Both visual and auditory tasks formed a scalable set. These results indicate that there is considerable consistency in when children are able to use visual and auditory inputs to reason about various aspects of others’ mental states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we examined young children’s performance on the paper-and-pencil version of the Sandbox task, a continuous measure of false belief, and its relations with other false belief and inhibition tasks. In Study 1, 96 children aged 3 to 7 years completed three false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, and Appearance/Reality) and two inhibition tasks (Head–Shoulders–Knees–Toes and Grass/Snow). Results revealed that false belief bias—a measure of egocentrism—on the Sandbox task correlated with age but not with the Unexpected Contents or Appearance/Reality task or with measures of inhibition after controlling for age. In Study 2, 90 3- to 7-year-olds completed five false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, Appearance/Reality, Change of Location, and a second-order false belief task), two inhibition tasks (Simon Says and Grass/Snow), and a receptive vocabulary task (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). Results showed that false belief bias on the Sandbox task correlated negatively with age and with the Change of Location task but not with the other false belief or inhibition tasks after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. The Sandbox task shows promise as an age-sensitive measure of false belief performance during early childhood and shows convergent and discriminant validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Villiers ( Lingua , 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858–1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker’s epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4 years of age ( N = 64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., “ I think the sticker is in the red box” or “ The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box”, respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others’ false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others’ false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children’s comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children’s false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others’ beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 76) or typical development ( n = 113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 76) or typical development ( n = 113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current longitudinal study examined the roles of theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function in children’s pre-reading skills, reading awareness, and reading comprehension. It is the first to examine this set of variables with preschool and school-aged children. A sample of 31 children completed language comprehension, working memory, cognitive flexibility, first-order false belief, and counterfactual reasoning measures when they were 3 to 5 years of age and completed second-order false belief, cognitive flexibility, reading comprehension, and reading awareness measures at 6 to 9 years of age. Results indicated that false belief understanding contributed to phrase and sentence comprehension and reading awareness, whereas cognitive flexibility and counterfactual reasoning accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension. Implications of the results for the development of reading skill are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The impacts of social interactions on moral development were experimentally tested. • Experiences of being disagreed with promoted children's moral development. • Experiences of being asked to justify oneself promoted children's moral development. • False belief competence predicted children's allocation decisions and reasoning. • Social interactions may facilitate cognitive disequilibrium and moral development. Although theorists agree that social interactions play a major role in moral development, previous research has not experimentally assessed how specific features of social interactions affect children's moral judgments and reasoning. The current study assessed two features: disagreement and justification. In a brief training phase, children aged 4–5.5 years (N = 129) discussed simple moral scenarios about issues of fairness (how to allocate things between individuals) with a puppet who, in a between-participants factorial design, either agreed or disagreed with the children's ideas and either asked or did not ask the children to justify their ideas. Children then responded to another set of moral scenarios in a test phase that was the same for all children. Children in the "agree and do not justify" baseline condition showed an inflexible equality bias (preferring only equal allocations regardless of context), but children who had experiences of disagreement or experiences of being asked to justify themselves shifted toward making equitable decisions based on common ground norms and values. Furthermore, false belief competence was related to children's decisions and justifications. These findings support the classic Piagetian hypothesis that social interactions are a catalyst of cognitive disequilibrium and moral development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study found that 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and young adults identified prosocial lies as lies less frequently and evaluated them less negatively than selfish lies (liar intention effect); lies about opinions were identified as lies less frequently and evaluated less negatively than those about reality (lie content effect). The lie content effect was more pronounced in the prosocial lies than in the selfish lies for both identification and evaluation. Overall, the older participants considered liar intention more than the younger participants in lie evaluation. For the child participants, second-order belief understanding correlated marginally with sensitivity to liar intention in the opinion lies, but not with content sensitivity. Finally, lie identification correlated with evaluation in the prosocial–opinion lies for all of the children. The independent effects of intention and content could potentially explain children’s development in “white lie” understanding demonstrated in the literature. Although the content effect appears to stem from a more general concern for whether communication is about objective reality, the intention effect may involve theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Three- to 5-year-olds attended to behavioral cues more than affective cues. • The tendency to use behavioral cues to make trait inferences increased with age. • Four- and 5-year-olds rated helpful characters as more likable than unhelpful ones. • False belief correlated with a tendency to rate helpful characters more positively. • False belief did not mediate relationship between age and trait attribution. Children as young as 3 years can make trait attributions based on behavioral and emotional cues, but such skills continue to develop across childhood. ​Theory of mind understanding, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, may provide a foundation for early development of trait attributions. The purpose of the current study was to explore the impact of behavioral and affective cues on children's trait attributions, if their attributes changed incrementally across five repeated instances of an observed behavior, and to what extent such patterns of attributions are related to false belief, a key concept of theory of mind. A total of 115 3- to 5-year-olds completed theory of mind tasks and two trait attribution tasks with affect and the nature of behavior (helpful/unhelpful) varied. Use of a quantitative histogram enabled identification of subtle changes in attributions across episodes. Results indicated that preschool-aged children rated characters as less likable with repeated instances of unhelpful behavior, with meaningful changes occurring after a second case of behavior. The 5-year-olds were more sensitive to differences in helpfulness than the other two age groups. In addition, the 4-year-olds rated smiling helpful characters more positively across time, suggesting a potential impact of emotional cues. Moreover, false belief was related to, yet did not account for, children's attributions. Factors affecting young children's formation of trait attributions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Accent manipulation was used in three experiments to define a protagonist's group membership. • Accent group membership did not consistently influence false-belief attribution. • The fourth experiment used gender group membership to investigate its effect on different Theory of Mind tasks. • Gender group membership did not influence Theory of Mind task performance. The ability to infer beliefs and thoughts in interaction partners is essential in social life. However, reasoning about other people's beliefs might depend on their characteristics or our relationship with them. Recent studies indicated that children's false-belief attribution was influenced by a protagonist's age and competence. In the current experiments, we investigated whether group membership influences the way children reason about another person's beliefs. We hypothesized that 4-year-olds would be less likely to attribute false beliefs to an ingroup member than to an outgroup member. Group membership was manipulated by accent (Experiments 1–3) and gender (Experiment 4). The results indicated that group membership did not consistently influence children's false-belief attribution. Future research should clarify whether the influence of group membership on false-belief attribution either is absent or depends on other cues that we did not systematically manipulate in our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Mothers’ mind-mindedness and attachment were examined in relation to 4-years-olds’ ToM. [•] Preschoolers’ understanding on both ToM tasks was related to maternal mind-mindedness. [•] More securely attached boys performed better on a task requiring visual perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Eighteen-month-olds demonstrate false-belief understanding in an unexpected-contents task. [•] They decide how best to help others by taking into account others’ goals and beliefs. [•] Thus infants use their theory of mind flexibly in a variety of tasks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: To address the question of whether young children are differentially sensitive to referential opacity, an advanced Theory of Mind skill, we assessed 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds on three types of opaque contexts: epistemic, quotational, and intentional. Children’s performance improved as a function of age and varied significantly by opacity type. Performance was best for epistemic opacity (using the verb “know”) and poorest for intentional opacity (using “mean to”), with quotational opacity (using “said”) falling in-between. Importantly, the current results suggest that children’s sensitivity to referential opacity is not an all-or-nothing competence but rather one that varies across the contexts examined. Possible reasons for this variability are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The purpose of the current study was to examine further the relationship between counterfactual thinking and false belief (FB) as examined by Guajardo and Turley-Ames (Cognitive Development, 19 (2004) 53–80). More specifically, the current research examined the importance of working memory and inhibitory control in understanding the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB. Participants were 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N =76). Counterfactual thinking statements generated accounted for significant variance in FB performance beyond age and language. Working memory and inhibitory control each partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB performance. The maturation of executive functioning skills is important in children’s developing understanding of counterfactual reasoning and FB. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this study, we examined whether sociolinguistic awareness and false belief were uniquely related in 3- and 4-year-old Cantonese-speaking children learning English as a second language. The English-use background of these children varied so that they possessed sociolinguistic awareness to different degrees. Results indicated that sociolinguistic awareness predicted false belief uniquely after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, English vocabulary, and family income for both the second language learners and the more balanced bilinguals. The group difference in false belief was adequately explained by the corresponding difference in sociolinguistic awareness over and above the other variables. Such findings provide evidence for the claim that false belief understanding is critically related to sociolinguistic awareness, which in turn is influenced by how a second language is learned. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children’s false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children’s false belief understanding. Independent tasks were used to measure verb meaning, complements, and false belief understanding such that the verbs in question were present only in the verb meaning test, and no linguistic devices biased toward false belief were used in the false belief test. We focused on (a) some mental verbs that obligatorily affirm or negate what follows and (b) sentential complements, the content of which is to be evaluated against the mind of another person, not reality. Results showed that only (a) predicted false belief understanding in a group of Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds, controlling for nonverbal intelligence and general language ability. In particular, children’s understanding of the strong nonfactive semantics of the Cantonese verbs /ji5-wai4/ (“falsely think”) predicted false belief understanding most strongly. The current findings suggest that false belief understanding is specifically related to the comprehension of mental verbs that entail false thought in their semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Two experiments tested whether 4- and 5-year-olds follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.” Following this rule should lead children to infer that a character who is ignorant about some situation will also have a false belief about it. This rule should sometimes lead children into error because ignorance does not imply false belief. In Experiment 1, children and adults were told about a girl who is looking for her dog but does not know which of two boxes it is under. Most children predicted that the girl would look in the box with the dog and not in the empty box; adults chose both boxes equally. Experiment 2 used a similar story but varied whether the girl wants to approach or avoid her dog. Again, most children predicted that the girl would succeed. These findings suggest that children do not follow the rule “ignorance means you get it wrong.” [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code metarepresentation contribute uniquely to the language–false belief relation. In three studies, attempts were made to correlate Cantonese-speaking children’s false belief with their general language comprehension and understanding of certain structures that explicitly express metarepresentational knowledge. Results showed that these structures failed to predict false belief after age, nonverbal intelligence, and general language comprehension were considered. In contrast, general language remained predictive of false belief after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, and language structures. The current findings are more consistent with a general language account than a language structure account. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Five- and 6-year-olds (N=51) heard stories in which a character sorted items into two locations. Either the character had a false belief about one of the items (e.g., thought a tin contained biscuits, not Lego), or was only partially informed of an item’s dual identity (e.g., did not know that a tie was a present). Children found it easier to reject a report of the character’s belief that described the true state of affairs when the character had a false belief (e.g., Is Fred’s uncle thinking “where shall I put this Lego?”), than to reject one in which an object known to the character was described using a term of which she was ignorant (e.g., Is Mum thinking “where shall I put this present?”). Similarly, children found it easier to predict the character’s incorrect sorting of the target items for false belief (with food not toys) than for dual identity (in the wardrobe not with things to take on a visit). Correct reasoning about beliefs and reports of beliefs that misrepresent an object does not imply mastery of the fact that beliefs represent an object in a particular way. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The study investigated a link between theory of mind and episodic memory involving autonoetic consciousness (). Eighty-nine Japanese 4- to 6-year-olds received two versions of a false belief task, a task of aspectuality or knowledge origins, and four memory tests. After controlling for age, most theory of mind abilities showed no interrelations, and own and other’s belief understandings in deceptive appearance tasks were solely related to source memory, but not to free recall, temporal ordering, or working memory. Moreover, even when age and verbal intelligence were controlled, the association between representational change and source memory was highly significant in 6-year-olds but not in 4- and 5-year-olds. Results suggest that during development only a particular kind of theory of mind ability is integrated with episodic memory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Employed a novel interaction-based lying paradigm without verbal instruction. • Three-year-olds spontaneously informed a friend and misinformed a competitor. • Children lied with egocentric and prosocial motivations. • They were less proficient to lie in an analogue explicit version. • Passing an explicit false belief task was related to spontaneous lying. Previous research has investigated children's lying and its motivational and social-cognitive correlates mostly through explicit tasks. The current study used an anticipatory interaction-based paradigm adopted from research with preverbal infants. We investigated 3-year-olds' spontaneous lying within interaction and its motivational basis and relations to explicit skills of lying, false belief understanding, inhibitory control, and socialization. Children interacted with puppets to secure stickers that were hidden in one of two boxes. Either a friend or a competitor puppet tried to obtain the stickers. Nearly all children helpfully provided information about the sticker's location to the friend, and about half of the sample anticipatorily provided false information to the competitor. Children misinformed the competitor significantly more often than the friend, both when the reward was for themselves and when it was for someone else. Explicitly planning to lie in response to a question occurred significantly less often but predicted spontaneous lying, as did passing the explicit standard false belief task. Thus, by 3 years of age, children spontaneously invoke false beliefs in others. This communicative skill reveals an interactional use of false belief understanding in that it requires holding one's perspective to pursue one's goal while providing a different perspective to distract a competitor. Findings support the view that practical theory of mind skills emerge for social coordination and serve as a basis for developing explicit false belief reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing evidence suggests that counterfactual reasoning is involved in false belief reasoning. Because existing work is correlational, we developed a manipulation that revealed a signature of counterfactual reasoning in participants' answers to false belief questions. In two experiments, we tested 3- to 14-year-olds and found high positive correlations (r =.56 and r =.73) between counterfactual and false belief questions. Children were very likely to respond to both questions with the same answer, also committing the same type of error. We discuss different theories and their ability to account for each aspect of our findings and conclude that reasoning about others' beliefs and actions requires similar cognitive processes as using counterfactual suppositions. Our findings question the explanatory power of the traditional frameworks, theory theory and simulation theory, in favor of views that explicitly provide for a relationship between false belief reasoning and counterfactual reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Adults and 6-year-olds showed better understanding of visual perception than knowledge or false belief. • Prospection and retrospection did not affect children's performance. • Children showed to be more competitive and adults more cooperative. • Women competed better against another adult than against their own child. Our capacity to attribute mental states to others, or theory of mind (ToM), affects the way in which we manage social interactions. Likewise, the social scenario in which we find ourselves probably influences our use of ToM. In this study, 6-year-old children and adult women participated in pairs in a task where participants needed to infer their partner's behavior considering the partner's visual perception (Experiment 1), knowledge (Experiment 2), and false belief (Experiment 3) regarding the placement of rewards under cups. The results were analyzed according to the temporal direction of the inference (past or future behavior of the partner), the social context (competition or cooperation), and—in the case of women—the type of social relationship with their partner (another adult or their own child). Children solved only the visual perception task, and adults solved the three tasks but performed better in the visual perception task than in the false belief task, suggesting that not only developmental issues but also differences in the intrinsic difficulty of the tasks underlie children's results. The temporal direction of the inference, in contrast, did not influence their results. Whereas children performed better in the competition context, adults performed better in the cooperation context in one experiment. Moreover, women avoided competing against their own child, and even cooperated with her or him when this was against their own interest, suggesting that cooperation between mothers and children might have been a key driving force in the evolution of ToM in our species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]