As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children's media), they may be more…

Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children's intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a "performance = effort + skill" theory), but younger…

Divergent cultural, religious, and ideological beliefs and practices are often challenging to contemplate and difficult to accept when they conflict with an individual's own convictions and way of life. The recognition that children and adolescents grow up in an increasingly diverse world has led to a general interest in fostering tolerance. In…

In Study 1, 103 children ages 4 through 10 answered questions about their concept of and belief in luck, and completed a story task assessing their use of luck as an explanation for events. The interview captured a curvilinear trajectory of children's belief in luck from tentative belief at age 4 to full belief at age 6, weakening belief at age 8,…

In a longitudinal study (N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children's implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to…

Children learn about the world through others' testimony, and much of this knowledge likely comes from parents. Furthermore, parents may sometimes want children to share their beliefs about topics on which there is no universal consensus. In discussing such topics, parents may use explicit belief statements (e.g., "Evolution is real") or…

Institutions make new forms of acting possible: Signing executive orders, scoring goals, and officiating weddings are only possible because of the U.S. government, the rules of soccer, and the institution of marriage. Thus, when an individual occupies a particular social role (president, soccer player, and officiator), they acquire new ways of…

Parental engagement in stimulating activities and support in both formal and informal learning environments are important for early childhood development. However, little is known about how parental mental health and beliefs about early childhood development shape such investments. We draw on a sample of young children and their primary caregiver…

Children learn about the world through others' testimony, and much of this knowledge likely comes from parents. Furthermore, parents may sometimes want children to share their beliefs about topics on which there is no universal consensus. In discussing such topics, parents may use explicit belief statements (e.g., "Evolution is real") or…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

Effective category-based induction requires understanding that categories include both fundamental similarities between members and important variation. This article explores 4- to 11-year-olds' (n = 207) and adults' (n = 49) intuitions about this balance between within-category homogeneity and variability using a novel induction task in which…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

Understanding that other people hold different mental states and that they may be changed is the core of persuasion. Thus, theory of mind (ToM) abilities are fundamental to generate persuasive arguments. To date, only the relation between false belief and false belief-emotion understanding and persuasion has been investigated, ignoring other…