In many cultural contexts, judging another as conscious or not has profound practical, legal, and philosophical consequences. However, little research focuses on how our ability to make such judgements arises. Thirty years ago a classic set of studies by Flavell et al. demonstrated that children do not develop a complex understanding of conscious…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

Individuals in many cultures believe in omniscient (all-knowing) beings, but everyday representations of omniscience have rarely been studied. To understand the nature of such representations requires knowing how they develop. Two studies examined the breadth of knowledge (i.e., types of knowledge) and depth of knowledge (i.e., amount of knowledge…

In this study the authors investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a significant role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants belonging to two age groups (3 and 4 years old) were randomly…