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      From infants’ to children's appreciation of belief

      review-article
      1 , 2
      Trends in Cognitive Sciences
      Elsevier Science

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          Abstract

          Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to people's false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding. We defend the view that early sensitivity to false beliefs shown in ‘online tasks’ (where engagement with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will happen without a judgement that it will happen) reflects implicit/unconscious social knowledge of lawful regularities. The traditional false belief task requires explicit consideration of the agent's subjective perspective on his reasons for action. This requires an intentional switch of perspectives not possible before 4 years of age as evidenced by correlations between the false belief task and many different perspective-taking tasks.

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          Most cited references49

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          Folk Psychology as Simulation

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            Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm.

            Recently, several studies have claimed that soon after their first birthday infants understand others' false beliefs. However, some have questioned these findings based on criticisms of the looking-time paradigms used. Here we report a new paradigm to test false belief understanding in infants using a more active behavioral response: helping. Specifically, the task was for infants to help an adult achieve his goal - but to determine that goal infants had to take into account what the adult believed (i.e., whether or not he falsely believed there was a toy inside a box). Results showed that by 18 months of age infants successfully took into account the adult's belief in the process of attempting to determine his goal. Results for 16-month-olds were in the same direction but less clear. These results represent by far the youngest age of false belief understanding in a task with an active behavioral measure.
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              Development of theory of mind and executive control.

              Several recent studies have demonstrated a developmental link, in the age range of 3-5 years, between the acquisition of a 'theory of mind' and self control. In this review, we consider the existence of such a link in assessing five competing theoretical hypotheses that might help us to understand the nature of this developmental advance: (1) executive control depends on theory of mind; (2) theory of mind development depends on executive control; (3) the relevant theory of mind tasks require executive control; (4) both kinds of task require the same kind of embedded conditional reasoning; (5) theory of mind and executive control involve the same brain region. We briefly describe these theoretical accounts and evaluate them in the light of existing empirical evidence. At present, only account (3) can be ruled out with some confidence.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Trends Cogn Sci
                Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.)
                Trends in Cognitive Sciences
                Elsevier Science
                1364-6613
                1879-307X
                October 2012
                October 2012
                : 16
                : 10-10
                : 519-525
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Psychology and Centre for Neurocognitive Research, University of Salzburg, Hellbrunnerstrasse 34, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria
                [2 ]Department of Philosophy, Social Sciences Building, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
                Article
                TICS1120
                10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.004
                3460239
                22964134
                f70e36ee-bc8d-4b09-a189-83fbc4f4c42a
                © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.

                This document may be redistributed and reused, subject to certain conditions.

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                Neurosciences
                Neurosciences

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