Until recently, it was generally assumed that the ability to attribute false beliefs did not emerge until about 4 years of age. However, recent reports using spontaneous- as opposed to elicited-response tasks have suggested that this ability may be present much earlier. To date, researchers have employed two kinds of spontaneous-response…

Prior research suggests that infants attend to a variable in an event category when they have identified it as relevant for predicting outcomes in the category, and that the age at which infants identify a variable depends largely on the age at which they are exposed to appropriate observations. Thus, depending on age of exposure, infants may…

Research over the past 20 years has revealed that even very young infants possess expectations about physical events, and that these expectations undergo significant developments during the first year of life. In this article, I first review some of this research, focusing on infants' expectations about occlusion, containment, and covering events,…