Unsuccessful replication attempts of paradigms assessing children's implicit tracking of false beliefs have instigated the debate on whether or not children have an implicit understanding of false beliefs before the age of four. A novel multi-trial anticipatory looking false belief paradigm yielded evidence of implicit false belief reasoning in 3-…

The metarepresentational aspect of early pretend play (make-believe activities where children create or participate in creating a new situation different from a real one) has been theoretically debated. In the present longitudinal study of N = 83 children, we tested for predictive relations of shared attention at 12-18 months, implicit false…

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…

It has been argued that the distinction between factivity and non-factivity is more fundamental to mental state understanding than that between false beliefs and reality. The present study examined children's growing understanding of all possible contrasts between the factive verb "know" and the non-factive verbs "think" and…

First-order theory of mind (ToM) development has shown to conform to a Guttman scale, with desire reasoning developing before belief reasoning. There have been attempts to test for internal consistency and scalability in advanced ToM, but not over a broad age range and only with a limited set of tasks. This 2-year longitudinal study (N = 155;…

The reluctance of children to revise their prior beliefs is a prominent phenomenon in the reasoning literature. One way to facilitate belief change is offering explanations, and this study examined whether highlighting (counter) evidence with diagrams leads to belief revision to the same extent. Altogether 134 preschoolers and second-graders (5-…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with…

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about…

Two studies tested whether first and second graders can differentiate between the concepts of hypothesis and evidence. Results indicate that young elementary school children distinguish between the two concepts. Most children demonstrated understanding of the goal of testing a hypothesis as opposed to the goal of producing a positive effect. (GLR)

Two experiments tested two, three, and four year olds' ability to understand false beliefs. Results of both experiments support earlier claims that an understanding of false beliefs and deceptive ploys emerges at around age four. Two and three year olds can be led to produce such ploys but show no clear understanding of their effect. (GLR)