TY - JOUR TI - Competence & performance in belief-desire reasoning DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3G162FQ PY - 2014 AB - Navigating the social environment requires us to understand and predict people’s actions. This ability, known as theory of mind, develops early in children. Typically, children’s theory of mind ability is assessed using the standard false-belief task in which children are asked to predict a character’s action given his/her outdated belief. A new wave of research measuring participants spontaneous reactions, such as looking time and anticipatory eye gaze, have revealed an early understanding of false belief, even in infants. This dissertation reports a series of studies that investigate the nature of early theory of mind ability and how this relates to the later developed ability in preschoolers and adults. The first two studies in chapter 2 suggest that children and adults are able to reason about false belief spontaneously, as measured by their anticipatory looking; but their anticipation is subject to the same processing demands observed in children’s performance in verbal false belief tasks, namely, a tendency to attribute to others a true belief derived from one’s own knowledge whenever that information is available. Two studies in chapter 3 report evidence that three- and four-year-old children can represent two distinct false beliefs and bind each belief to the correct agent when prompted explicitly in a verbal task, and two-year-olds can do the same spontaneously in a non-verbal task measuring anticipatory eye gaze. Early working memory therefore has the capacity to bind at least two distinct mental states to each of two agents. Finally, a study in chapter 4 reports that children around 39 months can predict a person’s behavior based on an understanding of the person’s second-order false belief in a task measuring children’s preferential looking time. Together, these studies suggest that the early understanding of mind cannot be reduced to perceptual or behavioral primitives, but instead reflect the developmental basis of genuine theory of mind. KW - Psychology KW - Desire (Philosophy) KW - Intentionality (Philosophy) KW - Philosophy of mind LA - eng ER -