Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Oxford Handbooks Online

Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social
Understanding  
Janet Wilde Astington and Claire Hughes
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology, Vol. 2: Self and Other
Edited by Philip David Zelazo

Print Publication Date: Mar 2013 Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology

Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199958474.013.0016

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter begins with an explanation of key foundational concepts in theory of mind,
such as mental representation and false belief. We then discuss the history and current
broad scope of the term, proposing a developmental-componential view that incorporates
intuitive and reflective aspects of theory of mind. We continue with a comprehensive
description of the developmental progression of theory of mind: from infants’ intuitive
understanding of ordinary actions as reflecting others’ attention and intentions, through
toddlers’ appreciation of world-inconsistent goals and preschool developments in
understanding representational mental states, to school-age children’s mastery of an
interpretative and complex theory of mind. We consideren passantindividual differences
in development, as well as atypical development, such as in autism. Finally, new
directions for research are explored, in the areas of neurology, education, and deontic
reasoning.

Keywords: autism, deontic reasoning, education, executive function, false-belief understanding, interpretive
diversity, neurology, representational mental states, second-order mental states, social cognition, social
perception, theory of mind: developmental progres

Key Points
1. Theory of mind is a conception of people as mental beings whose actions and
interactions can be interpreted and explained by taking account of their mental
states. These mental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—are
representations that mediate people’s activity in the world.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

2. Theory of mind is best considered within a developmental framework that

recognizes both early-appearing, intuitive social skills and later-developing,
reflective social cognition.
3. Infants have an intuitive understanding of ordinary actions as reflecting others’
attention and intentions.
4. “Implicit” false-belief understanding is evident in infants and toddlers when
assessed indirectly, using violation-of-expectation or eye-gaze-direction paradigms.
5. “Explicit” false-belief understanding, assessed directly using standard false-belief
tasks, is evident at about 4 years of age.
6. In the early school years children understand second-order false-belief and
interpretive diversity, which allows them to appreciate irony, metaphor, white lies,
faux pas, and persuasion.
7. Although approximate age norms can be given, there is marked heterogeneity in
typical development. In addition, there are variations in development in atypical
populations, such as children with autism.
8. There are two distinct neurological substrates involved in intuitive (social-
perceptual) and reflective (social-cognitive) theory-of-mind activities.
(p. 399) 9. Schooling may play an important role in the development of reflective

theory of mind. This is an opportune time to make closer links between research in
theory of mind and education.
10. A richer framework for research on theory-of-mind development includes deontic
reasoning (about obligations, permissions, and prohibitions), which takes account of
social roles and rules that motivate and constrain people’s actions.

Introduction: What is Theory of Mind?

Theory of mind underlies the ability to explain, predict, and interpret actions and speech
by attributing mental states—such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions—to
oneself and to other people. As such, it is at the very heart of self-reflection and social
understanding. But why call it a “theory of mind”? This term was first used in the
psychological literature in an investigation of chimpanzee cognition, when Premack and
Woodruff (1978) defined theory of mind as a system that imputes mental states in order to
make inferences about behavior. It is a “theory,” they argued, because the system is used
to make predictions from unobservable states; and it is a theory of “mind” because these
unobservable states are mental states. Their study focused on the chimpanzee’s ability to
infer desires or intentions in order to predict the behavior of a human actor. However,
several commentaries (Bennett, 1978; Dennett, 1978; Harman, 1978) maintained that the
litmus test for a theory of mind is the attribution of belief, rather than desire or intention
—in particular, when observer and observed have different beliefs about a situation. Only
in this case can one be certain that observers are actually attributing mental states to the
observed and not merely responding as they themselves would do in the same situation.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

This view led to an intense research focus on children’s performance on false-belief tasks.
The first section of this chapter therefore begins with an account of the rationale for
these tasks and a summary of the key differences between mental states such as beliefs
and other mental states (e.g., desires, intentions, emotions). Next we reflect on the range
of constructs encompassed by the term “theory of mind” and the methodological issues
that contribute to the broad scope of this term. In the second section, we outline four
discrete stages within the development of theory of mind: from infants’ intuitive
understanding of ordinary actions as reflecting others’ attention and intentions, through
toddler and preschool developments, to school-age children’s mastery of an interpretative
and complex theory of mind. Finally, in the third section, we trace out some promising
new directions for research.

False-Belief Understanding

The commentaries (Bennett, 1978; Dennett, 1978; Harman, 1978) on Premack and
Woodruff’s (1978) paper led Wimmer and Perner (1983) to develop the now well-known
“false-belief” task that assesses whether children can make inferences about mental
states in order to predict behavior (i.e., whether they have a theory of mind in the
Premack and Woodruff sense). In the task children are told a story (illustrated with
pictures or acted out with toys) in which a character places an object in a certain place
and then leaves the scene before it is moved to another location (see example in Fig.
16.1). Children are then questioned about the character’s subsequent action: “Where will
[the character] look for [the object]?” To check that they have understood and
remembered the story, children are also asked where the character put the object and
where it now is.

Numerous studies have shown that around 4 to 5 years of age children say that the
character will look where he put the object (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001), whereas
younger children say that he will look where the object is now, even though they
remember where he put it at the beginning of the story. The critical point is that children
have to recognize that the story character’s belief about the location of the object is
different from their own. That is, this is one of those cases where the observer (the child)
and the observed (the character in the story) have different beliefs about a situation.
Thus, children can respond correctly only by attributing to the character a belief that is
different from their own, and false from their point of view. They also have to recognize
that the character’s belief, even though it is false, is what guides his actions.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Some researchers (e.g.,

Perner, 1991) argue that
children who correctly
predict that the character
will look for the object
where he put it recognize
that people’s relationship
to the world is mediated by
their mental
representations—that is,
people act not on the basis
of the way things actually
are in the world but on the
basis of the way they think
that they are. These
Click to view larger
children understand that
Figure 16.1 . Example of false-belief task. (Adapted
from Wimmer and Perner, 1983 (Astington, 2009).) the world is represented in
mind and that people’s
actions are based on their mental representation of it—even when this is a
misrepresentation of the actual situation in the world. To be precise, they are capable
(p. 400) of “metarepresentation”—that is, they not only represent a situation but they can

also represent their own and another person’s different relationships to this situation
(Perner, 1991).

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Representational Theory of Mind

On this view, mental states like beliefs and desires are representations that mediate our
activity in the world. Representational mental states are always about something
(Brentano, 1874/1960; Dennett, 1987)—this is the content, or propositional content, of
the mental state. Further, a person has a certain attitude toward the propositional
content—such as holding it to be true or wanting it to happen—and this attitude denotes
what type of mental state it is. A person can hold different attitudes to the same
propositional content, resulting in different mental states (e.g., belief vs. desire: “I think
it’s sunny today” vs. “I want it to be sunny today”).

There is obviously a difference between thinking something is true and wanting it to be

true, even when the propositional content of the belief and the desire is the same. This
difference is due to a contrast in the nature of the representational relation. Belief-type
states are true or false, whereas desire-type states are fulfilled or unfulfilled (Table 16.1).
If the propositional content of a belief corresponds to the way things actually are in the
world, then the belief is true. If it does not correspond, then it is false, but can be made
true by changing the belief—by making the mind fit the world. This is described as a
mind-to-world “direction of fit” (Searle, 1983). Desires (and also intentions) are different
from (p. 401) beliefs because they are neither true nor false. They are fulfilled or
unfulfilled. If the propositional content of a desire does not correspond to the way things
actually are in the world, then the desire is unfulfilled. However, it cannot be fulfilled by
changing the desire. To fulfill the desire, things in the world have to change to fit the
representation that is held in mind. That is, desires and intentions have a world-to-mind
direction of fit (Searle, 1983). In contrast, emotions are neither true or false, nor are they
fulfilled or unfulfilled. Emotions have no independent direction of fit, but rather they lead
to and result from beliefs and desires.

Table 16.1. Two Basic Types of Mental State

Beliefs Desires and Intentions

True or false Fulfilled or unfulfilled

Caused by events in the world Bring about changes in the world

Changed to fit the world:“mind- World has to change to fit them:“world-to-mind”

to-world” direction of fit direction of fit

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

These mental state concepts

—belief, desire, intention,
emotion—are used to explain
and predict behavior. The
basic premise is that people
act to fulfill their desires in
light of their beliefs (Perner,
1991; Wellman, 1990) (Fig.
16.2a). This is why false
beliefs lead to misguided
actions. If a person’s belief
and desire are known, one
can predict how the person
will act (as in the false-belief
task). Alternatively, if the
Click to view larger
desire is known, a misguided
Figure 16.2 . The representational theory of mind.
action may be explained by
attributing a false belief to
the person. Further, intentions mediate between desires and actions. If someone desires
something he may form an intention to obtain it, which causes him to act in a way that
will lead to fulfillment of the desire (Fig. 16.2b). Then again, the desire may be fulfilled
even if the person does not act so long as the outcome is achieved in some other way.
However, importantly, intentions are fulfilled only if the person’s intention causes the
action that brings about the outcome (Astington, 2001). This is known as intentional
causation (Searle, 1983). Emotions may result from basic physiological drives, which lead
to desires that motivate action (e.g., hunger → want to get food; the arrow indicates the
direction from cause to consequence). Emotions may also result from the satisfaction or
frustration of desires (e.g., get food → happy; not get food → angry or sad) or from the
confirmation or disconfirmation of beliefs (e.g., fridge is empty → surprise).

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Broad Scope of Theory of Mind

Following Premack and Woodruff (1978), developmentalists soon applied the term “theory
of mind” to children. From the beginning, this term had broad scope—from studies of
infants’ communicative abilities (Bretherton, McNew & Beeghly-Smith, 1981) to Wimmer
and Perner’s (1983) first description of young children’s performance on the false-belief
task and their discussion of the metarepresentational ability that the task required.
Nowadays, however, “theory of mind” has even broader scope and, although
commonplace and widely used in the developmental literature, it is a somewhat eclectic
term (Astington & Baird, 2005a).

From the outset, some researchers took the “theory” part seriously, claiming that theory-
of-mind development in children is analogous to theory development in science (the so-
called “theory-theory” view). On their view, theory of (p. 402) mind is a domain-specific,
psychologically real structure, incorporating an integrated set of mental-state concepts
employed to explain and predict behavior, which is reorganized over time when faced
with counter-evidence to its predictions (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). The term was
also used by simulation theorists, who disagreed with the theory-theory view, arguing
that mental-state concepts are not theoretical postulates but are derived from experience
(e.g., Harris, 1992). And it was used by modularity theorists, who argued that the theory
is not developed by a process of theorizing but is innate and matures (Baron-Cohen, 1995;
Leslie, 1994).

More recently the scope of the term has further increased, with researchers who do not
hold theory-theory, or simulation-theory, or modularity-theory views using it generally in
reference to social understanding. It is now applied across the developmental spectrum—
to refer to intersubjectivity in infancy, to social reasoning in adulthood, and to many
aspects of social understanding in the intervening years. And it may be used narrowly to
designate false-belief understanding in particular, or widely to denote social
understanding in a most general sense. All told, theory of mind appears to be a
multifaceted and somewhat loosely defined system. Before describing its development,
it’s therefore important to clarify what, on our view, is encompassed by the term “theory
of mind.”

Developmental-Componential Theory of Mind

On our view it is not helpful to argue that the abilities that really matter for theory of
mind are inborn or that they develop at such-and-such a particular age. Rather, it is
essential to consider theory of mind within a developmental framework that recognizes
both the changes and the continuities in self-reflection and social understanding from
infancy to adulthood. An important start to this endeavor is found in Tager-Flusberg and
Sullivan’s (2000) proposal of a componential theory of mind, comprising distinct social-
perceptual and social-cognitive subsystems. Analogous distinctions have been made in

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

various ways by different researchers—for example, early-versus later-developing theory

of mind; broad versus narrow; nonverbal versus verbalizable; procedural versus
declarative; minimal versus higher levels of consciousness; implicit versus explicit;
spontaneous versus elicited; intuitive versus reflective; and so on (Apperly & Butterfill,
2009; Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Dienes & Perner, 1999; Filippova & Astington, 2010;
Frith, 2004; Hughes, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; San Juan & Astington, 2012; Singer,
2006; Tager-Flusberg & Joseph, 2005; Zelazo, 2004). These are not all exactly the same
distinction although there is a family resemblance among them, as indicated by the
contrasting pairs of terms. For us, the essential distinction is between social intuition and
social cognition, and thus we will use the contrasting terms “intuitive” versus “reflective.”

Social intuition refers to a set of socioperceptual skills that make immediate online
appraisals of people’s mental states from information conveyed in facial expressions,
gestures, movements, and vocal tone (Tager-Flusberg, 2001). This provides implicit social
“know-how” within the mental domain (Hughes, 2005). In contrast, social cognition is
reflective, reasoning about people’s mental states and behaviors by integrating the
perceptual online appraisals and sequences of events over time (Tager-Flusberg, 2001).
This entails an explicit conceptual domain that involves a set of interconnected principles
stating how the mental world works (Hughes, 2005), described above as
“representational theory of mind.” Some of the social-perceptual skills are evident in
infancy, as described later in the chapter. Social cognition begins to develop in the toddler
and preschool years, also described later. The two together constitute theory of mind
through childhood and into adulthood.

Evidence for these two components of theory of mind is provided by data substantiating
two distinct neurological substrates for social-perceptual and social-cognitive processes
(Saxe & Powell, 2006; Singer, 2006) and their differential impairment/sparing in different
populations (Frith, 2004; Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 2000). There is also evidence for
developmental continuity between social-perceptual and social-cognitive skills from
infancy to age 4 in typical development (Charman et al., 2000; Wellman, Phillips, Dunphy-
Lelii, & LaLonde, 2004; see also Low, 2010).

Conceptualizing theory of mind in this way allows us to recognize the authentic nature of
infants’ social skills without dismissing the importance of the developmental changes that
occur toward the end of the preschool years, when representational theory of mind
becomes apparent. An important issue is how we get evidence for the initial skills as well
as for the developmental changes. Although it may be revealed in their talk and behavior,
even verbal 4-year-olds cannot articulate (p. 403) their theory of mind, and certainly
prelinguistic infants cannot do so.

Methodological Issues

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

“What is baby thinking?” This question is a source of wonder both for new parents and
for developmental psychologists, who must also ask “How can we find out what baby is
thinking?” Answers to the first question span the entire spectrum of “rich” to “lean”
interpretations of infant behavior. Importantly, the componential view of theory of mind
allows us to move between these two perspectives. The rich view credits infants with
significant levels of awareness from a very early age and so highlights continuities rather
than change in development. The lean view is driven by the principle of parsimony and
highlights differences in understanding between infants and older children. A casual
glance at the literature suggests that each of these views derives from a different
methodological approach: rich accounts of infants’ mental lives are typically associated
with detailed observations of babies interacting in familiar contexts (Reddy, 2008;
Trevarthen, 1985), whereas lean accounts are generally associated with laboratory-based
studies that adopt rigorous experimental designs to exclude confounding variables. A
closer look, however, suggests greater methodological overlap: early observational
studies emphasized age-related changes in infants’ and young children’s social skills
(e.g., Jean Piaget’s [1936/1952] observations of his baby daughter; Mildred Parten’s
[1933] nursery-based observations), while many experimental studies have been used to
support nativist views of development (e.g., Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004).

Over the past few decades, however, researchers within each methodological camp have
developed increasingly child-friendly approaches to the question of what babies think of
the world around them. For example, Reddy and Trevarthen (2004) have criticized
traditional observational measures (e.g., frequency counts of particular acts in particular
contexts), arguing that understanding infants requires emotional engagement: the
experience of interacting with a much-loved child is full of moments of recognition and
insight, moments that are simply not available to the detached observer. This engaged
approach has led to radical revisions in our understanding of infants’ social skills,
including, for example, the construct of a proto-conversation in which babies are viewed
as active participants, who are sensitive to both the contingency and emotional nature of
their partners’ responses. Likewise, laboratory-based studies have been greatly assisted
by technological inventions, such as eye-trackers, that provide new ways of tuning into
infants’ expectations about the world. So what has been learned through these new
approaches? Below we adopt a developmental perspective to summarize the key findings
from theory-of-mind studies of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children.

Developmental Progression of Theory of Mind

This summary is structured by four key milestones: (1) infants’ intuitive understanding of
ordinary actions as reflecting others’ attention and intentions; (2) older infants’ and
toddlers’ implicit understanding of goals that appear at odds with the real world; (3)
preschoolers’ reflective understanding of representational mental states; and (4) school-

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

age children’s further-developed understanding of interpretation and multiple recursions

of mental states (Table 16.2).

Table 16.2. Developmental Progression of Theory of Mind

Period Age Range Key Milestone

Infancy Birth–18 Understand attention and intention underlying

months action

Later Infancy & 9 months–3 Understand world-inconsistent goals (“implicit”

Toddler years false belief)

Preschool 4–5 years Understand representational mental states

(“explicit” false belief)

School Age 6 years Understand interpretive diversity and recursive

onward mental states (second-order false belief)

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

(p. 404) Understanding of Attention and Intention in Infancy

Social information is available to babies even before birth. By 5 months gestation, for
example, the auditory system is almost fully developed, leaving 4 months for learning
about the mother’s voice. As a result, infants show a clear preference for their mother’s
voice from the first few hours of life (Mehler et al., 1988) and also appear sensitive to key
features of speech, showing stronger brain responses to natural speech than to speech
signals with impoverished prosody (Sambeth, Ruohio, Alku, Fellman, & Huotilainen,
2008). Similar examples of fetal learning can be found for other sensory systems,
including taste or olfaction (Abate, Pueta, Spear, & Molina, 2008), and even vision
(Kiuchi, Nagata, Ikeno, & Terakawa, 2000), exemplified by newborns’ sensitivity to light/
dark contrast—such as the strong contrast between the iris and the sclera in the human
eye. Thus, from the very start of life outside the womb, infants orient toward their
mothers and fixate on the eye region of the face. These strong preferences facilitate
engagement and interaction, from which infants continue to learn about their social
worlds. For example, they rapidly learn to expect contingent responses from caregivers,
such that even very young infants display dissatisfaction during the still-face paradigm
(Mesman, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2009).

The first chief milestone in the journey toward a fully fledged theory of mind is the ability
to recognize goals in others’ actions (see Table 16.3 for a summary of the key
achievements in this period of development). Thirty years after Premack and Woodruff’s
(1978) seminal paper, the consensus view is that while chimpanzees don’t understand
false beliefs, they do arrive at this first milestone of “perception-goal” psychology (Call &
Tomasello, 2008). There is now good evidence that human infants master this
“teleological reasoning” in the first year of life (Woodward, 2003); indeed, one recent
study has reported detection of goals from as early as 5 months of age (Luo &
Baillargeon, 2005). However, most researchers agree that between 9 and 12 months
babies begin to show uniquely human sociocognitive skills (Tomasello, 1999a) that are
particularly clear in their understanding of intentional actions and of others’ perceptions.
Thus, evidence from experimental studies that compare how long babies look at different
stimuli to assess how well they discriminate between different stimuli indicates that,
around this age, most babies distinguish agents from inanimate objects (Mandler, 2004)
and attribute appropriate perceptual, attentional, and dispositional properties to agents.
For example, when an adult expressed interest and then made an ambiguous request for
one of three toys, 12-month-olds gave the adult the particular toy she had not previously
seen or played with, even though all three toys were equally familiar to the infants
themselves (Tomasello & Haberl, 2003). That is, as early as 12 months of age infants
behave in ways that suggest an awareness of others’ perceptions and desires.

Table 16.3. Infancy—Key Achievements in Theory of Mind

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

• Orient to mother, fixate on eye region

• Distinguish agents from inanimate objects
• Expect contingent responses from agents
• Offer objects to others
• Follow others’ point and gaze to objects
• Direct others’ attention with point and gaze
• Aware of others’ perceptions, goals, and desires

Other researchers have argued that the onset of mental-state awareness occurs even
earlier in infancy. For example, Legerstee (2005) has proposed that very early self-
knowledge underpins social understanding. This proposal builds on the finding that a
common neural substrate (the mirror neuron system) underpins production and
observation of goal-directed action in nonhuman primates (e.g., Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998)
and human adults (e.g., Grèzes & Decety, 2001; Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, &
Prinz, 2001). A similar coupling of perception and action has also been reported for
human infants (Meltzoff, 2002), suggesting that infants’ own goal-directed actions may
facilitate their ability to detect goals in others’ actions (cf., Meltzoff, 2002; Tomasello,
1999b). Recent empirical support for this proposal comes from studies by Woodward and
colleagues in which (i) giving 3-month-olds Velcro mittens with which to retrieve objects
led to significantly longer looking times on the first habituation trial (indicating
heightened sensitivity to an actor’s goal) (Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005)
and (ii) only planful 10-month-olds (but all 12-month-olds) could identify others’ goals in
complex action sequences (Sommerville & Woodward, 2005). Importantly, for Legerstee,
infants have innate first-person knowledge that provides a useful bootstrap for their early
understanding of intention but depends upon maternal “affective mirroring.” Conversely,
infants exposed to low levels of affective mirroring appear (p. 405) to show reduced social
competence (i.e., reduced ability to coordinate their attention with another, or to use
emotional cues to predict action).

A rather different argument leads Reddy (2008) to a similar conclusion. Reddy’s account
gives prominence to second-person knowledge. For example, emotions are described as
“intensely shared, because it is in the nature and function of emotions to stir up
sympathetic responses in others” (Reddy & Trevarthen, 2004). As a result, rather than
“discovering” attention between 9 and 12 months of age (as suggested by the cognitive
literature), infants begin life immersed in the emotional experience of being the object of
attention. The pleasure of these interactions motivates further engagements that expand
their awareness of the different kinds of objects of others’ attention:

1. The self. Between 2 and 4 months infants respond to others’ attention to self in a
range of ways (e.g., smiling, coyness, distress); they also start to display attention-
seeking behavior (e.g., “calling”).

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2. Other people. Between 3 and 5 months, infants respond to others’ attention to a

third person, and make alternating bids for attention from two people (cf., the
primary intersubjective triangle).
3. Objects in others’ hand. Between 4 and 7 months infants will follow others’ gaze to
objects in front, nearby, or in another’s hand.
4. Objects in own hand. Between 8 and 11 months infants start to offer objects to
others.
5. Faraway objects. Between 12 and 14 months infants become skilled at both
following others’ gaze and pointing to faraway objects.
6. Nonvisible objects. Between 15 and 20 months infants will turn around to follow
others’ gaze to an object behind them and also start to report past events and future
plans.

By Reddy’s (2008) account, from birth infants can perceive others’ intentions through
their actions in the world. In addition, the kind of teasing and mucking about that is such
a feature of caregivers’ interactions with infants (e.g., games of peek-a-boo, tickling,
bouncing, blowing raspberries) provides emotionally rewarding and fertile contexts for
expanding infants’ awareness of intentions. The argument is therefore that infants learn
about intentions from the first person (feeling the shape of an action in one’s own body)
and from the second person (feeling actions directed at self and in response to self) long
before they begin to adopt a third-person perspective toward others and themselves.

At least two interesting conclusions emerge from Reddy’s account. First, the emotional
acts typically described as self-conscious (e.g., showing off, displays of pride,
embarrassment, or coyness) precede rather than result from a concept of self, which
typically emerges at about 18 months of age (e.g., as evident in toddlers of this age
touching their own noses when presented with a mirror showing their reflection with a
rouge mark on the nose; Amsterdam, 1972). That is, these emotional acts (of showing off
or coyness, etc.) are rooted in perceptions of the other’s attention and emotion, rather
than in thoughts about the self, and so might be better renamed “other-conscious
emotions.” Second, children with autism pass the mirror test by the appropriate
developmental age but appear to lack this experiential base of the first- and second-
person views, in that they fail to display self/other-conscious emotions (for similar results
and conclusions, see Hobson, Chidambi, Lee, & Meyer, 2006). If this is the case,
interventions that provide alternative means of engaging infants in dyadic interactions
may well prove useful for children with autism; interestingly, recent studies with robots
provide some empirical support for this proposal (Bird, Leighton, Press, & Heyes, 2007;
Kozima, Nakagawa, & Yasuda, 2007; Robins, Dautenhahn, Boekhorst, & Billard, 2005).

Understanding of World-Inconsistent Goals in Infant/Toddler Years

Continuing the infant’s journey to a fully fledged understanding of mind, the next key
development (indeed, for many researchers, the single most important milestone) is the
understanding of goals that are at odds with real-world situations. The infant studies

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

described above all involved actions with obvious outcomes (e.g., reaching for an object).
Detecting goals in actions that don’t appear to achieve anything is much more
challenging, but pivotal to acquiring a representational understanding of mind. For
example, a crucial aspect of false-belief tasks, the benchmark test for representational
theory of mind, is the need to infer actions that are based on an actor’s belief, rather than
the actual state of affairs. So when do infants first start to recognize world-inconsistent
goals?

Until recently, the most plausible answer given to this question was that this recognition
is first apparent when toddlers begin to engage in pretend play—that is, between 18
months and 2 years of age (Leslie, 1987). That said, the onset of pretend play clearly also
depends on performance factors, such as the need to plan and control actions. (p. 406)
Once these performance factors are removed, key milestones in theory of mind may be
apparent at much earlier ages than traditionally thought. A clear example of this comes
from a recent study by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005). This study recapitulated the
standard change-of-location paradigm used to test preschoolers’ false-belief
understanding (Wimmer & Perner, 1983, discussed earlier) but with two different
conditions: false-belief, in which the protagonist did not witness the object transfer, as
well as true-belief, in which the protagonist did witness the transfer. In addition, in each
condition there were two different endings—the protagonist reached into the original
box, or into the other box, where the object really was. In this way, contrasts in looking
times could be used to index infants’ expectations. In the false-belief conditions, 15-
month-olds looked longer when the protagonist reached into the box that currently hid
the object. In the true-belief conditions, infants showed the opposite pattern (looking
longer when the protagonist reached into the original box that no longer held the object).
That is, 15-month-olds’ looking times reflected the violation of an expectation based on
the protagonist’s belief states rather than the actual location of the object. Similarly, in a
recent study (Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007), 13-month-olds viewing animations of
caterpillars searching for food hidden (in or out of their view) looked for longer (perhaps
indicating surprise) when an uninformed caterpillar was successful, or an informed
caterpillar was unsuccessful. That is, as early as 13 months of age (or even 7 months;
Kovács, 2009), infants behave in ways that suggest an awareness of how knowledge
states guide actions (see also He, Bolz, & Baillargeon, 2011).

Recently, this violation-of-expectation paradigm has been applied to examine 15-month-

olds’ understanding of pretense. Specifically, a series of experiments by Onishi,
Baillargeon, and Leslie (2007) demonstrated that 15-month-olds look for longer when an
adult pretends to pour a liquid into one cup and then pretends to drink from another cup.
In other words, infants can detect violations in the consistency of pretend action
sequences before they start to display pretend play themselves. Convergent support for
this result comes from another study in which experimenters’ efforts to elicit pretend play
in infants showed a steep age-related increase in success from about 16 months of age
(Bosco, Friedman, & Leslie, 2006).

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Song, Onishi, Baillargeon, and Fisher (2008) have built upon the above findings to
demonstrate that 18-month-olds understand that an agent’s false belief can be corrected
by an appropriate, although not an inappropriate, communication. Specifically, infants
watched while, during a character’s absence, a ball was moved from a box to a cup; the
character then received an informative communication (The ball is in the cup!) or a
noninformative one (I like the cup!) before reaching for the ball in the box or the cup. In
the informative-intervention condition, infants who saw the character reach into the box
looked reliably longer than those who saw her reach into the cup; in the uninformative-
intervention condition, the reverse pattern was found (and in a second experiment in
which a pointing gesture replaced the verbal communication the results were
unchanged). That is, by 18 months of age children not only appear able to attribute a
false belief to another, but also appear to recognize that beliefs are changed in response
to appropriate verbal or nonverbal interventions.

However, these violation-of-expectation studies have been criticized on a number of

grounds—for example, ambiguity in interpretation of the results due to the limited
number of familiarization trials or the possibility that looking times may be based on
other perceptual variables that vary between familiarization and test events (Cohen,
2004; Sirois & Jackson, 2007). This criticism, coupled with the striking contrast with 3-
year-olds’ failure on standard false-belief tasks, has led to several challenges. One
alternative account is that the looking-times measure reflects infants’ ability to attribute
ignorance rather than a specific false belief to an agent (Southgate, Senju, & Csibra,
2007). Logically, ignorance should lead to chance performance, but in reality young
children expect ignorant agents to get the answer wrong (Ruffman, 1996—but see
Friedman & Petrashek, 2009, for a counterview). Thus, it is possible that the 15-month-
olds in Onishi and Baillargeon’s (2005) study may have looked longer in the incongruent
condition simply because they did not expect an ignorant agent to find the object.

If looking times are too indirect, are there other nonverbal means of assessing false-belief
attribution in very young children? To address this challenge, Southgate and colleagues
(2007) used an eye-tracker to measure anticipatory looking in 25-month-olds who were
asked to watch actions on a computer monitor. The question is: In anticipating a
protagonist’s return to search for an object that has been moved from one location to
another, will they look toward the entry point by the new location where the (p. 407)
object actually is, or toward the entry point by the old location where the protagonist last
saw it? Some time ago, Clements and Perner (1994) showed that from 2 years 11 months
(but no younger), children’s anticipatory looking indicated false-belief understanding. In
the study by Southgate and colleagues, unlike in the Clements and Perner study, the
object disappeared from the scene, and rather than using Clement and Perner’s verbal
prompt (“I wonder where he’s going to look?”), familiarization trials involving a light/
sound cue were included to elicit anticipatory looking. In addition, numerous controls
were adopted to ensure that the 25-month-old children were not simply responding to
low-level cues (e.g., the object’s actual or last location), and the eye-tracker (unlike

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Clement and Perner’s video data) gave detailed information about where the children
looked, which included their careful monitoring of the protagonist’s eye gaze. Southgate
and colleagues’ (2007) results indicate that 25-month-olds show an implicit
understanding of others’ false beliefs.

Toddlers’ sensitivity to others’ mental perspectives is also seen in their ability to

recognize intention distinct from action, to respond to desires different from their own,
and to differentially respond to others’ emotions (see Table 16.4 for a summary of key
achievements). For example, if 18-month-olds watch an individual attempt to perform a
task but fail (e.g., attempt to push a recessed button with a stick, but miss the button)
and are then given the opportunity to imitate the adult, they will perform the intended
action rather than copy the movements that led to failure (i.e., they will push the button
with the stick) (Meltzoff, 1995). That is, children this age can recognize intention in
behavior; they also know that trying is not the same as pretending (Rakoczy, Tomasello, &
Striano, 2004). They also recognize desire in behavior; for example, if an experimenter
shows pleasure toward one food and disgust toward another, 18-month-olds understand
that they should give the experimenter the food toward which she showed pleasure, even
if they themselves prefer the other food (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). Further, Repacholi
and Meltzoff (2007) demonstrated 18-month-olds’ ability to respond to emotion directed
at another person when this is relevant to their interests but otherwise to disregard it.
They also showed that children this age will take the other’s perspective into account in
regulating their behavior in response to the other’s expressed emotion; for example, if
one adult expressed anger toward another adult for acting on an object, the toddler
avoided acting on the object if the person who had been angry (but no longer was angry)
could see them.

Table 16.4. Later Infancy/Toddler—Key Achievements in Theory of Mind

• Aware of and engage in pretend

• Recognize desires different from their own
• Recognize intention distinct from action
• Aware of and respond to emotions
• “Implicit” understanding of false belief
• Understand role of communication in changing belief

Thus, in various ways, by 18 months of age children show considerable ability to take
others’ mental perspectives into account, as evidenced by their clear understanding of
pretend, desire, intention, and emotion and their implicit understanding of actions guided
by false beliefs. For caregivers these findings may come as no surprise—after all, even
before the age of 12 months, babies show amusement when others engage in pretend
acts (e.g., making animal noises, or pretending to gobble baby up), and make great
efforts to communicate what they want when a parent appears to misunderstand them

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

(Lock, 1980). Interestingly, this observation provides a valuable pointer toward the
ontogeny of theory of mind: what babies know about others’ minds may well be rooted in
their experience of social interactions with caregivers and others close to them. That is,
rather than (or perhaps as well as) emerging from the use of language as a symbolic tool,
such knowledge may be shaped by social interactions from the very beginning of life. For
example, Lillard and Witherington (2004) have shown that caregivers provide numerous
cues that help infants recognize the distinction between pretend and real-life events. In
their elegantly simple study, caregivers were filmed engaging with their 18-month-old
toddlers in real versus pretend snack scenarios. Interestingly, caregivers did not use
mental-state terms (e.g., “pretend”) more often during the imagined snack, but they did
talk more about their “actions” (drinking, eating); caregivers also showed much higher
rates of smiling, eye contact, and amusing sound effects during the imaginary snack than
during the real snack. Each of these features of caregivers’ interactions was associated
with increased toddler understanding of the pretend situation. As we shall see later, these
results also anticipate the findings from transcript-based analyses of home-based
interactions between 2-year-olds and their caregivers, in which conversational
“connectedness” (i.e., semantic relatedness of (p. 408) speech to the previous turn—a
linguistic equivalent of establishing eye contact) predicted improvements in children’s
performance on theory-of-mind tasks between the ages of 2 and 4 years (Ensor & Hughes,
2008), or even 2 to 6 years (Ensor, 2009).

Understanding of Representational Mental States in Preschool Years

A tremendous amount of interest has been generated recently by the reports, discussed
above, concerning 1- and 2-year-olds’ apparent understanding of false belief. This is not
least because, for a long time, false-belief understanding was taken to be the hallmark of
a representational theory of mind, appearing around 4 years of age. Indeed, in the 1980s
research into the development of children’s theory of mind focused almost exclusively on
the preschool period (ages 3 to 5) and primarily on preschoolers’ understanding of false
belief, which began with Wimmer and Perner’s (1983) task (described earlier in the
chapter). One early criticism of this “change-of-location” false-belief task was that
children have to follow a complicated story narrative and attribute beliefs to dolls. Perner,
Leekam, and Wimmer (1987) attempted to make false-belief understanding easier by
having the children experience a false belief themselves, and then asking them about
another person’s belief in the same situation (Fig. 16.3). In this so-called “unexpected-
contents” false-belief task, they showed children a familiar candy box, for example, and
let them find out that it contained pencils, not the expected candy. Then they put the
pencils back and asked what another person, who had not seen inside the box, would
think was inside it. Most 3-year-olds claimed that the other person would think there
were pencils in the box, but many 4- and most 5-year-olds realized that the other person
would think, as they themselves had done, that it contained candy.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Moreover, 3-year-olds’ difficulty is more profound than just not understanding that
another person may have beliefs different from their own. Children were also asked what
they themselves had thought was in the box before it was opened (Gopnik & Astington,
1988) (see Fig. 16.3). Three-year-olds found it as difficult to remember their own previous
false belief as to predict the other person’s false belief. In addition, they found it equally
difficult to recognize that the appearance of an object may be misleading as regards its
real identity—for example, a sponge painted to look like a rock, or a wax candle shaped
and colored like an apple (Flavell, 1986). Once 3-year-olds discovered that an apparent
“rock” was really a sponge, they said it looked like a sponge, but 4- and 5-year-olds
understood that it looked like a rock but was really a sponge. Note also that the difficulty
shown by the 3-year-olds on false-belief tasks appears quite specific, in that it can be
accompanied by success on tasks that require children to ascribe incompatible desires or
even incompatible desire-dependent emotions (Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2007,
though see Perner, Zauner, & Sprung, 2005, for a counterview).

Children’s performance on standard false-belief and appearance-reality tasks is an

extremely robust, much-replicated finding. In a meta-analysis involving 178 separate
studies, Wellman and colleagues (2001) determined that there were no age differences in
children’s ability to attribute false beliefs to others or to themselves in the past. In
addition, children’s success did not differ based on the experimental procedures used—
for example, the change-in-location story task, the unexpected-contents box task, or the
unexpected-identity (e.g., sponge rock) task. Notably, 3-year-olds’ consistent failure on
these type of tasks stands in striking contrast to infants’ abilities to take others’ mental
perspectives into account, as described in the previous section. An explanation is urgently
required for why 3-year-olds answer incorrectly in a verbal false-belief test while infants
correctly anticipate the actor’s behavior in a nonverbal test. Actually, the contrast may be
better expressed as direct versus indirect tests of false-belief understanding (Perner,
2009), because 3-year-olds fail some nonverbal tests (Astington & Baird, 2005b).

For some researchers (e.g., Csibra & Southgate, 2006; Leslie, 2005; Leslie, Friedman, &
German, 2004; Southgate et al., 2007) the recent findings simply invalidate the earlier
ones, which are dismissed as methodological artifacts. That is, these researchers argue
that 3-year-olds fail standard false-belief tasks not because of deficits in their theory of
mind, but because of the difficulties raised by peripheral task demands, such as language
skills, planning ability, and inhibitory control. For example, they maintain that in the
standard false-belief task, children’s competence is masked by their failure to inhibit a
prepotent response to answer on the basis of true belief (Fodor, 1992; Leslie, Friedman, &
German, 2004; Leslie, German, & Polizzi, 2005).

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Other researchers (e.g.,

Perner & Ruffman, 2005;
Ruffman & Perner, 2005)
defend the earlier findings
and explain the recent
findings without assuming
that infants have
knowledge about the mind.
One suggestion is that
neuronal activation
(p. 409) creates an

association between the

actor, object, and location
that is more similar in
Click to view larger true-belief than false-belief
Figure 16.3 . Example of unexpected-contents false- trials, resulting in longer
belief task (Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, looking times in the latter
Leekam & Wimmer, 1987).
case. Alternatively, they
argue that the infants’
behavior can be explained on the basis of behavioral rules to which any added assumption
of mentalistic understanding adds nothing in explanatory power or theoretical parsimony
(Povinelli & Vonk, 2004). Admittedly, 4-year-olds’ performance on the standard false-
belief tasks can be explained in the same way, but 4-year-olds can also respond flexibly in
nonstandard situations (e.g., Perner et al., 1987) that cannot easily be explained by
behavioral rules (Perner, 2009).

Perhaps, however, there is no fundamental conflict. Even though the striking results from
the indirect tests suggest that an intuitive understanding of mind is present in infancy,
the failure shown by 3-year-olds on standard false-belief tasks suggests that a reflective
understanding of mind is not achieved until considerably later in development (San Juan
& Astington, 2012). Moreover, this understanding is probably only gradually acquired, as
shown by 3-year-olds’ success on some manipulations used in the false-belief tasks—for
example, in change-of-location tasks when a deceptive motive for moving the object is
included, or the object’s salience is decreased by removing it from the scene (Wellman et
al., 2001). Three-year-olds also appear to understand false beliefs in word-learning tasks
(Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2002; Happé & Loth, 2002); that is, when acquiring a novel
word for an unfamiliar object, they take account of a person’s false belief in a situation
where the object was moved while the person was off the scene (though see Houston-
Price et al., 2011, for a counterview).

If we accept the idea that it is an early intuitive understanding of false belief in the
toddler or even infancy years that gives rise to reflective understanding later in the
preschool years, then an urgent question is: How does this come about? It seems most
likely that language plays an important role (Astington & Baird, 2005c; San Juan &
Astington, 2012). Language development in the second and third year brings about
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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

dramatic transformations in children’s abilities not only to reflect on the world around
them, but also to engage in conversations about things out of sight. As a result, children’s
mental horizons expand rapidly; rather than being captive in the here and now, children
(p. 410) can think about past events and make plans for the future. Thus, language

development emerges hand in hand with advances in young children’s executive function
(i.e., their ability to inhibit prepotent responses and to engage in flexible and goal-
directed acts) as well as with children’s growing understanding of mind. Alongside this
developmental synchrony between these three domains (of language, executive function,
and social understanding) are significant, independent, and asymmetric associations
between individual differences in each domain. Specifically, individual differences in
language skills and executive function each predict improvements in children’s
performance on explicit theory-of-mind tasks (e.g., Hughes & Ensor, 2007). These
predictive relations are discussed elsewhere in this volume (see the chapter by Carlson et
al.) and so will not be described in detail here.

Once children acquire reflective false-belief understanding at the end of the preschool
years, they soon recognize the emotional consequences of a person’s holding a false
belief—for example, a person who is misinformed about a situation may feel happy
because he thinks he is getting what he wants, even though he may be sad after he
discovers the true state of affairs (Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews, & Cooke, 1989).
Children of this age also appreciate the distinction between real and apparent emotion;
that is, they recognize that a person may dissemble, displaying a facial expression
different from his real feelings, to avoid being teased or to protect someone else’s
feelings (Harris & Gross, 1988). Table 16.5 provides a summary of the key achievements
attained by the end of the preschool period.

Individual Differences in Development in Preschool Years

Considerable research effort has gone into investigating precursors, sequelae, and
consequences of the development of explicit false-belief understanding in the preschool
years. It has been found that both parenting style and disciplinary strategy are associated
with children’s false-belief understanding (Ruffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999). As might be
expected, children whose parents explain and discuss, rather than only punish,
unacceptable behavior score more highly on false-belief tasks. Evidence from the
attachment literature also highlights the importance of parenting style for theory-of-mind
development. Securely attached infants go on to develop false-belief understanding at an
earlier age than children with less secure attachments (Fonagy, Redfern, & Charman,
1997); this developmental advantage may reflect the contribution of individual
differences in maternal “mind-mindedness” to individual differences in both attachment
security and children’s developing awareness of other minds (Meins et al., 2002).

Table 16.5. Preschool—Key Achievements in Theory of Mind

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

• “Explicit” false-belief understanding in standard tasks

• Remember own previous false belief
• Distinguish between appearance and reality
• Understand belief-based emotion
• Distinguish between apparent and real emotion

Related to this point, the findings from a number of studies indicate that children’s
engagement in family talk about mental states predicts theory-of-mind development. An
important early paper (Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991) showed
that children whose mothers had talked to them about people’s feelings and about causal
relations at 2 years 9 months were more likely to give satisfactory explanations of
behaviors premised on false beliefs at age 3 years 4 months. In addition, children whose
mothers use more mental terms in their conversations acquire false-belief understanding
at an earlier age than children whose mothers use fewer such terms, even when the
children’s own language ability is taken into account (Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002).
However, it is possible that it is not the use of mental-state terms per se that is important,
but rather that this provides an easily countable measure of mothers’ propensities to
introduce varying points of view into conversations with their children (Harris, 2005).
Likewise, Ensor and Hughes (2008) found that mothers’ connected talk (i.e., turns that
are semantically related to the child’s speech and so indicate an awareness of the child’s
point of view) with children at age 2 predicted their theory-of-mind performance at age 4,
even when predictive effects of mental-state reference were controlled; indeed, mental-
state reference predicted theory of mind only when it occurred in the context of
connected talk. Also worth noting are two findings from a recent longitudinal study that
compared 3- to 6-year-old children’s conversations with mothers versus younger siblings
(Hughes, Marks, Lecce, & Ensor, 2010). First, mental-state talk was significantly more
strongly associated with conflict (p. 411) in conversations with mothers than with
younger siblings. Second, across the 12 months between time points there was a
developmental shift in the function (rather than the frequency) of mental-state talk, with
a rise in mental-state reference within explanations. Together, the findings from these two
studies indicate that the significance of mental-state talk is likely to vary across
relationships, pragmatic contexts, and development.

There is also some evidence that children from larger families develop false-belief
understanding sooner (McAlister & Peterson, 2007; Perner, Ruffman & Leekam, 1994—
but see also Cole & Mitchell, 2000; Cutting & Dunn, 1999; Hughes & Ensor, 2005;
Hughes, Fujisawa, Ensor, Lecce, & Marfleet, 2006, for negative findings). Perhaps this is
because they have more experience of tricks, jokes, and teasing among their siblings, or
perhaps because they are more exposed to talk about thoughts and wants as parents try
to settle disputes among the children. Other studies have shown a similar effect for
children who interact with more adults and who interact with older children, including
both siblings and peers (Lewis, Freeman, Kyriakidou, Maridaki-Kassotaki, & Berridge,

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

1996). Furthermore, the relation between family size and performance on theory-of-mind
tasks is stronger in the case of children with poorer language skills (Jenkins & Astington,
1996). This suggests that while verbally able children are able to benefit from verbal
exchanges with caregivers—for example, storybook-based talk about inner states (Adrián,
Clemente, Villanueva, & Rieffe, 2005; Slaughter, Peterson, & MacKintosh, 2007) or
shared narratives about past events (Nelson & Fivush, 2004)—verbally less able children
may acquire an understanding of false belief through less verbal interactions with
siblings (e.g., playful teasing, pretend play). Once again, however, longitudinal findings
highlight the developmentally dynamic nature of these contrasts across relationships. In
particular, in a longitudinal study of 99 preschoolers filmed with older siblings, Marks
(2010) found that, on average, children referred to cognitions 12 times as often at age 6
than at age 3. In contrast, mean frequencies of older siblings’ references to cognitions
were similarly high at both time points. As a result, older and younger siblings’ cognitive
talk differed markedly at the first time point but only modestly at the second time point.
These findings highlight the danger of relying on cross-sectional data, which can provide
only a single snapshot view of children’s interactions.

Understanding Recursion and Interpretation in School-Age Years

The standard false-belief tasks used to assess the development of representational theory
of mind in the preschool years are concerned with false beliefs about situations in the
world. But social understanding requires more than understanding people’s interactions
with the physical world of objects: it requires understanding social interactions within
human relationships, and for this, one needs to think about one’s own and others’ mental
states in relation to each other. In the early school years children become aware that
people have beliefs about the content of others’ minds (e.g., about what others think or
want) and recognize that these beliefs may be different or wrong. Such beliefs about
other mental states are referred to as “second-order mental states.” Perner and Wimmer
(1985) showed that around 7 to 8 years of age children are able to represent and reason
from second-order beliefs: X believes that Y believes that p. A simplified task (Sullivan,
Zaitchik, & Tager-Flusberg, 1994), with probe questions giving corrective feedback and a
memory aid just before the test question, scaffolded 5- and 6-year-olds’ performance, but
even without these aids, a simplified storyline showed genuine second-order belief
attribution by 7 years of age (Astington, Pelletier, & Homer, 2002) (Fig. 16.4). Somewhat
earlier, children acquire the ability to understand second-order representations involving
desires and intentions, such as understanding that someone wants to make another
person believe something (Leekam, 1991). Somewhat later, children acquire the ability to
deal with third-order representations involving beliefs, desires, intentions, and attitudes
(Filippova & Astington, 2008).

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Such recursive ability

underlies the more mature
understanding and use of
complex language,
particularly indirect
speech acts such as irony
and metaphor, that
develop during the school-
age years. In indirect
speech there is a
distinction between what a
person means and what his
or her words appear to
mean; that is, what is
actually said is not really
Click to view larger
what is meant. In verbal
Figure 16.4 . Example of second-order false-belief
task (Astington, 2009). irony, for example,
someone says something
that is false but does not intend the listener to believe it to be true, but rather to
recognize the falsity and interpret the statement as funny or sarcastic (Filippova &
Astington, 2010). Likewise, metaphors are not intended as statements to be literally
interpreted but are used to create poetic images (Winner, 1988). Children’s
understanding of irony and metaphor develops gradually during the school (p. 412) years;
for example, by 7 years of age children understand that an ironic speaker does not mean
what he says, yet even at age 9 they may not yet recognize what he wants the listener to
believe (Filippova & Astington, 2008).

The ability to comprehend recursive mental states also underlies an increasing sensitivity
to the interpersonal dynamics of social situations. For example, by age 7 children
understand “white lies,” where something untrue is said to protect a person’s feelings
(Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007). Children of this age also recognize when someone has
produced a faux pas and unintentionally revealed secret information or created hurt
feelings (Baron-Cohen, O’Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999). In addition, they can
invent or select persuasive strategies, which require the manipulation of a person’s
mental states in order to get him or her to believe or do something (Bartsch & London,
2000; Bartsch, London, & Campbell, 2007).

Thus, in the early school years theory of mind depends on the ability to understand
multiple embeddings in higher-order mental states. However, that is not all there is: it
also depends on the recognition of interpretive diversity—that is, the understanding that
even given the same external stimulus, two people may make legitimate but different
interpretations of it, which requires more than understanding the possibility of true
versus false beliefs (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). This

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

ability also develops around 7 years of age and is correlated with the development of
second-order false-belief understanding (Comay, 2009).

At this age, children show increasing understanding of knowledge acquisition and of the
mind as an (p. 413) active interpreter of information, which is related to understanding
the dynamic nature of mental activity. Until the early school years children are unaware
of the stream of consciousness that fills the waking mind, and they are not able to
introspect about their own thinking (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995). Preschool children
can report the content of their mental states, but without recognizing that it is produced
by the mind’s activity. Participation in formal school activities may facilitate children’s
introspective abilities (Astington, 1995).

Table 16.6 provides a summary of the key achievements attained during the early school
years (see also Miller, 2012). In addition, we should note that recent studies show age-
related improvements in theory of mind continuing beyond the early school years (e.g.,
Devine & Hughes, in press; Dumontheil, Apperly, Blakemore, 2010).

Perspectives on Development

For its first decade, theory-of-mind research appeared to be very narrowly fixated on a
“watershed” period between the ages of 3 and 4 years. However, as we have outlined
above, recent years have seen a long-awaited expansion of the developmental scope of
this research field. Current studies are making great strides in developing nonverbal
paradigms for assessing mentalizing skills in infancy. Recently, there has also been a
surge of interest in mentalizing skills in adults. While some researchers have developed
tasks that are appropriate for adults because they require relatively complex reasoning
(e.g., the faux-pas task; Baron-Cohen et al., 1999) or a rich vocabulary (e.g., the Eyes
task; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), others have developed
multitrial tasks that tap how quickly adults process information about others’ inner states
(e.g., Apperly, Back, Samson, & France, 2008; Dumontheil et al., 2010; Keysar, Lin, &
Barr, 2003). Findings from this last approach indicate that, in adults, simple forms of
mindreading (e.g., visual perspective taking) are, in their implicit form at least, automatic
and mandatory. Specifically, when presented with visual scenes containing an avatar
(virtual person) and variable numbers of blobs, adult participants were slower and less
accurate in answering “How many blobs can you/he see” when the avatar’s perspective
conflicted with their own. This kind of interference effect suggests that adults cannot
help but process information about others’ visual perspectives. Indeed, as highlighted in a
recent review of the adult literature (Apperly, Samson, & Humphreys, 2009), executive
function (but not grammar) appears crucial to mature reasoning about beliefs.

Table 16.6. Primary School Years—Key Achievements in Theory of Mind

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

• Understand second- and higher-order mental states

• Recognize interpretive diversity
• Understand indirect speech (e.g., irony and metaphor)
• Aware of white lies, faux pas, and persuasion
• Aware of stream of consciousness, introspect

Interestingly, convergent conclusions are also emerging from recent studies of children.
For example, Sebanz and colleagues (Sebanz, 2008) gave pairs of children simple
judgment tasks to complete in parallel (e.g., red stimuli are answered by child A, blue
stimuli are answered by child B, green stimuli are ignored) and then told them that really
what was wanted was a recall of all the stimuli seen. They found that children’s recall for
their partners’ stimuli was significantly better than their recall for the irrelevant stimuli,
indicating that, like adults, children automatically process information about the objects
of others’ attention. This result provides a means of reconciling the rich and lean
perspectives on mindreading that were presented in opposition to each other earlier in
this chapter. Specifically, rich accounts highlight developmental continuities while lean
accounts highlight developmental changes. If we accept that there are diverse forms of
mindreading (and in particular intuitive vs. reflective forms), it is possible that both
accounts are correct: striking developmental continuities in intuitive mindreading may be
found hand in hand with equally striking developmental change in reflective mindreading.
One fruitful avenue for future research would be to test this hypothesis by developing
indirect (i.e., intuitive) and direct (i.e., reflective) paradigms that can be used across a
wide range of ages (Perner, 2009).

New Research Directions

The developmental account outlined above highlights a new-found tension between
studies of young children’s abilities to make intuitive versus reflective (i.e., implicit vs.
explicit) judgments about others’ minds. This distinction is well captured in a metaphor
used by de Vignemont (2008) at a recent workshop held to celebrate 30 years of theory-
of-mind research: private detectives rely on rapid but implicit mentalizing skills in order
to focus their investigations on individuals with (p. 414) sufficient motives and knowledge
to commit a crime, but these hunches need to be made coherent and explicit by a
barrister before they can be presented to the jury at a court trial. Examining the
relationship between implicit and explicit forms of social understanding is clearly an
important avenue for future research.

Below we outline two different perspectives (neurological and educational) from which
future research might usefully address this relationship between implicit and explicit

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

forms of social understanding. Then we examine recent efforts to broaden the base of
children’s social understanding and self-reflection by considering normative explanations
and interpretations of human action.

The Neurological Perspective

In 1996, an accidental discovery in Rizzolatti’s neuroscience laboratory in Italy spawned

an extraordinary field of research: while recording the patterns of neuronal firing in the
motor cortex of macaque monkeys evoked by acts of reaching for a peanut, an
investigator noted that his own reaching gestures evoked the same firing response
(Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996). Building on this chance observation, studies
using image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce temporary brain
lesions in humans have mapped out a complex “mirror neuron system” that underpins
both the execution and the observation of goal-directed acts and displays of emotion
(Enticott, Johnston, Herring, Hoy, & Fitzgerald, 2008). Interestingly enough, this mirror
neuron system overlaps heavily with several language areas in the human brain. Coupled
with the observations that social interactions often involve imitation, and that imitation is
closely linked to empathy, this finding has led to the view that empathy may be based on
sensory–motor mirroring (e.g., Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeaut, Mazziotta, & Lenzi, 2003;
Dapretto et al., 2006).

In turn, this proposal has led to the “broken mirror” hypothesis for autism. This idea fits
neatly with the absence in autism of self/other-conscious emotions noted earlier and has
an attractive simplicity: studies of dancers (e.g., Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grèzes,
Passingham, & Haggard, 2005) show that the mirror neuron system responds more
strongly when participants witness familiar rather than unfamiliar dance moves,
suggesting that the mirror neuron system can learn from experience. So an initial mirror
neuron system deficit among children with autism could impede sensory-motor mirroring
and empathic responses; furthermore, the consequent lack of social experiences could
magnify autism-related deficits in the mirror neuron system. However, it appears that this
account is overly simple in several respects, as summarized below.

First, the function of the mirror neuron system must extend beyond imitation (macaque
monkeys have an mirror neuron system but rarely imitate each other); one plausible
function for the mirror neuron system is the prediction and/or understanding of others’
goals—but children with autism can do this (Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2001).
Second, when prompted, children with autism are able to imitate; their problem seems to
be a difficulty in knowing when and what to imitate. For example, Southgate and
Hamilton (2008) found that when typically developing infants and children with autism
were presented with an adult performing a novel action (switching on a light with a head
movement) in two conditions (hands busy/hands free), children with autism were equally
likely to imitate the head movement in both conditions, whereas 14-month-old typically
developing infants imitated the odd head movement only in the hands-free condition; in
the condition in which the adult’s hands were busy holding a blanket, the infants simply

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

switched on the light with a conventional hand movement. In other words, imitation
deficits in autism appear to reflect problems in top-down processing, rather than a deficit
in the mirror neuron system. Third, evidence for a defective mirror neuron system in
autism is only indirect, hinging on reduced mu-theta suppression in
electroencephalogram studies; this reduced mu suppression might equally reflect deficits
in earlier visual processing (e.g., reduced attention to social stimuli, impaired processing
of biological motion). The lesson here is that it is dangerous to link brain regions directly
to behaviors. Clearly, more work needs to be done before any firm conclusions can be
drawn about the significance of the mirror neuron system for accounts of impaired social
interactions in autism specifically. Moreover, generally, much more work is also required
to establish the neurological bases of theory of mind in implicit and explicit form. Below
is a brief review of current research in this area.

Theory of Mind and Imaging Research

Prompted by findings of highly specific social-cognitive impairments in autism, some
theorists have argued that theory-of-mind development is at least partly determined by
maturational changes in specific neural circuitry (e.g., Gallagher & Frith, 2003; Saxe,
Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004). At the same (p. 415) time, others (e.g., Corina & Singleton,
2009) have argued that because social phenomena cut a broad path through human
experience, they are likely to be underpinned by neural systems that are highly entwined
with more basic sensory-perceptual, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive components.
Broadly speaking, however, social processes involve two types of mental inferences: (1)
those concerning goals and intentions (i.e., transitory states) and (2) those that concern
inferences about personality traits and social scripts (i.e., enduring characteristics). As
summarized earlier, developmental research indicates that the first type of mental
inference appears as early as infancy, whereas it is only in school age that children start
to apply information about personality traits and social scripts to predict people’s actions
(Apperly, Samson, & Humphreys, 2009; de Vignemont, 2009).

Interestingly, imaging studies indicate that two cortical regions are consistently activated
in mental inference tasks: the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the medial
prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Findings from a recent meta-analytic review of more than 100
fMRI studies of human social cognition indicate that these two regions correspond well
with these two types of mental inferences (Van Overwalle, 2009). That is, the TPJ (which
extends from the superior temporal sulcus [STS] to the inferior parietal lobe and is
closely associated with the mirror neuron system) is consistently activated in tasks that
require identifying goals or intentions, whereas neurons in the mPFC (which has
extensive interconnections with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior STS, the
TPJ, and other brain regions) are uniquely oriented to time and fire over extended periods
of time and across events (e.g., Huey, Krueger, & Grafman, 2006), and so may serve in the
integration of social information over time (i.e., via scripts or traits). In his meta-analysis,
van Overwalle (2009) concludes that the neural system that underpins social cognition
starts with the more posterior TPJ, where immediate goals and desires are inferred, and

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

progresses toward the more anterior mPFC, which is associated with explicit reasoning
based on enduring personality traits or social scripts.

Note, however, that the above conclusions do not reduce to a modular perspective. For
example, the TPJ is also activated by nonmentalistic tasks (e.g., the false-photo task) and
by tests of basic attentional processes (e.g., the flanker task). In his meta-analysis, van
Overwalle (2009) referred to the TPJ as the “where-to” system (by analogy with the
“where” system in the parietal lobe). In other words, the neural systems for mindreading
are closely entwined with more basic cognitive systems. The neat division of labor
between these two regions (TPJ and mPFC) may also be confounded by modality
differences in the tasks used: tasks tapping goal-directed inferences typically involve
visual presentations, whereas those that require more complex inferences about scripts
or traits typically involve verbal presentations. (Note, however, that performance on a
cartoon theory-of-mind task also activates the mPFC; Gallagher et al., 2000).

With regard to the relation between language and theory of mind, imaging studies of
bilingual adults and children suggest that the neural base for theory of mind cannot be
prespecified in a genetic code awaiting maturation (Perner & Aichhorn, 2008). For
example, in a series of studies involving monolingual and bilingual Japanese children and
adults, Kobayashi, Glover, and Temple (2006, 2007, 2008) found that (i) for adults,
processing of theory-of-mind tasks is associated with distinct regions of brain activity in
Japanese and in English and (ii) for children, processing of theory-of-mind tasks is
associated with diffuse and overlapping brain activity in these two languages. In addition,
a separate fMRI study involving 9- to 16-year-olds has shown that, across this
developmental period from late childhood to early adolescence, brain activity associated
with theory of mind appears to shift from the ventral to the dorsal part of the mPFC
(Moriguchi et al., 2007). Together, these results suggest both developmental
specialization and linguistic/cultural variation in the neural substrates that are activated
during theory-of-mind tasks.

Neural substrates for theory-of-mind skills have also been examined using event-related
potentials (ERPs). For example, two separate studies have shown that false-belief
reasoning in adults is associated with the late slow wave (LSW) ERP component over left-
frontal regions (Liu, Sabbagh, Gehring, & Wellman, 2004; Sabbagh & Taylor, 2000). More
recently, Liu, Sabbagh, Gehring, and Wellman (2009) have examined whether this
association with left-frontal LSW would also be apparent in children (aged 4 to 6 years),
and found that (i) the LSW was evident only in children who passed false belief tasks and
(ii) this LSW was more diffuse than that observed in adults, even though these child
passers were just as consistent as adults in their success on false-belief tasks. These ERP
findings suggest a critical role for the prefrontal cortex in both the employment and
development (p. 416) of theory of mind, with developmental consolidation continuing
even after children consistently succeed on false-belief tasks.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

The above findings also prompt questions about how the observed LSW should be
interpreted; here it is worth noting that previous ERP studies suggest that different forms
of LSWs are associated with different aspects of working memory. For instance, positive
and negative LSWs appear to reflect perceptual and conceptual memory processes,
respectively (Ruchkin, Johnson, Mahaffey, & Sutton, 1988). This suggests that theory-of-
mind performance depends on conceptual rather than perceptual working memory.
Further support for this view comes from recent fMRI findings of similar neural
correlates to theory-of-mind performance among typically developing and congenitally
blind children, which indicate that experiential influences on the neural development of
theory of mind probably involve amodal abstract representations (Bednya, Pascual-Leone,
& Saxe, 2009). In addition, drawing on earlier findings that adults’ false-belief and false-
photograph reasoning is associated with distinct ERP waveforms (Sabbagh & Taylor, 2000),
Liu and colleagues (2009) argue that the left-frontal negative LSW reflects conceptual
operations in verbal working memory that are recruited in a domain-specific manner to
solve mentalizing problems. However, as evident from Liu and colleagues’ own (2009)
findings, there are subtle yet important differences between the brain activation
associated with theory-of-mind performance in adults and in children, and so further
evidence is needed before this domain-specific account can be applied with confidence to
young children.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

The Educational Perspective

Education may be a fruitful area in which to investigate transitions from implicit to

explicit theory of mind because schooling may play an important role in the development
of reflective from intuitive understandings of mind. Thus far, there has been remarkably
little research in the area where theory of mind and education intersect. This may be
partly due to the fact that much of the research on theory of mind is conducted with
children under 5 years of age, while most education research is with children over 5
years. However, as described earlier in this chapter, there is now more interest in
exploring further development of theory of mind in the school-age years. Correspondingly,
and tied to initiatives in education aimed at the early years, there is now more research
focus on factors affecting school readiness (Blair & Razza, 2007; Forget-Dubois et al.,
2009). Thus, it is an opportune time to make closer links between research in theory of
mind and education.

Educators are primarily interested in what factors are associated with successful
teaching and successful learning. In this regard, some research has shown a relation
between children’s theory of mind, typically measured by standard false-belief task
performance, and various aspects of academic achievement and classroom behavior,
independent of children’s language abilities and their socioeconomic environment, both
of which are known to be related to school success (Astington & Pelletier, 2005). Yet there
is a need for more research in this area, particularly for longitudinal and intervention
studies with properly balanced experimental and control groups that together could
demonstrate a causal relation between theory of mind and school success. Then
subsequently, the experimental interventions could be used to design curriculum
innovations. However, we are not making a simplistic recommendation for teaching
theory of mind with the expectation of effects on school success. For a start, theory of
mind is more like language than literacy—that is, it is a system with biological roots,
developing in the preschool years without specific teaching, although certainly
environmental factors, such as the nature of family talk and book-reading habits, do
influence its development. Moreover, as described above, there is developmental
progression from early intuitive theory-of-mind understandings to a later-developing
reflective, more explicit understanding, and this is where schooling may play an
important role. For example, we know that a rich narrative environment in the preschool
years predicts children’s false-belief understanding (e.g., de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006;
Ontai & Thompson, 2008; Peterson & Siegal, 2000) and this ability predicts literacy
achievements in the early school years (Astington & Pelletier, 2005). A recent novel
intervention provides a rich narrative environment in kindergarten, with a resultant
positive effect on theory-of-mind development and literacy achievement (Thelander &
Comay, 2009).

Some recent work relates theory of mind to earlier research on metacognitive

development in the school-age years (Schneider, 2008). Nearly a century ago, Vygotsky
claimed that “school instruction plays a decisive role in making the child conscious of his

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

own mental activities” (Vygotsky, 1931/1962, p. 92). That is, schooling itself leads to more
explicit understanding by making children more aware of their own thought processes
and (p. 417) providing the opportunity and the vocabulary with which to talk about it.
Flavell, Green, and Flavell (1995, p. 91) suggest that participation in formal school
activities may facilitate children’s reflective abilities because their thinking about school
tasks may be overt and therefore easy for them to reflect on: “they can literally hear
themselves thinking.” Moreover, some curriculum interventions deliberately help make
intuitive theory-of-mind understanding more reflective (McKeough, Palmer, Jarvey, &
Bird, 2007). There is also the potential to introduce teachers to theory-of-mind research
so that it informs their interactions with children and they become better able to consider
the level of children’s epistemological development and help make their intuitive
understanding more explicit (Astington, 1997; Kuhn, 2005).

The Broader Perspective: Including Deontic Reasoning

As this chapter has shown, over the past two decades or more, research has revealed a
great deal about children’s understanding of mental states and their abilities to use this
understanding to explain and predict human action. For some time now, however, critics
have argued that this research approach, based on belief-desire reasoning assessed using
the ubiquitous false-belief task, is too narrowly focused on a logical-causal theory of
human action that is reductionist, mechanistic, and impersonal (e.g., Chandler, Sokol, &
Wainryb, 2000; Nelson, Plesa, & Henseler, 1998). To be sure, children are not merely
third-person observers of human behavior, but rather they acquire social understanding
and self-awareness as active participants within the social world, where first- and second-
person interactions play a large role in development, as discussed above (Reddy, 2008).

Moreover, belief-desire reasoning cannot provide a complete explanation of behavior

because action in a social world is premised not only on individuals’ mental states but
also on social roles and on moral and social rules. In the everyday interpretation of
human behavior we take account of such roles and rules in our explanations and
predictions. That is, social and moral obligations, as well as individual desires, motivate
actions, and both need to be considered in explaining action. Indeed, just as people may
act against their desires when their beliefs are false, so also they may act against their
desires to obey some moral or social rule. Such reasoning—about obligations, and also
permissions and prohibitions—is known as deontic reasoning. Thus, the development of
social understanding depends not only on the acquisition of mentalistic understanding of
belief and desire, but also on deontic understanding of obligation and permission (Núñez
& Harris, 1998). That is, both mentalistic reasoning and deontic reasoning are required
to fully interpret human behavior.

Because these two systems are fundamentally interconnected and operate together in
social reasoning, Wellman and Miller (2008) have recently argued for the inclusion of
deontic reasoning within theory of mind. We agree that deontic reasoning is fundamental
to social understanding, although to include it within theory of mind extends even further

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

the broad conception of theory of mind that we discussed in the first section of this
chapter. Perhaps it would be preferable to say that social understanding depends on both
mentalistic (theory-of-mind) reasoning and deontic reasoning. However, perhaps we
should not be so pedantically concerned because, as discussed above, “theory of mind” is
already such a wide-ranging term. A broader conceptualization of theory of mind, which
includes deontic concepts, certainly provides a richer framework for research on the
development of social understanding by taking account of the social contexts that
motivate and constrain people’s actions (Baird, 2008).

New research directions may develop within this framework and, indeed, are already
taking shape. For example, recent research has focused on children’s developing
understanding of how people act and feel in situations where desire and obligation
conflict (Lagattuta, 2005, 2008). The findings show that although 4- and 5-year-olds focus
on desires as motivating actions and determining emotions, by 7 or 8 years of age
children incorporate deontic reasoning into their judgments and recognize that people
may deny a desire to fulfill an obligation and will feel good about it. Moreover, the
relative importance of mentalistic and deontic reasoning in the interpretation of action
may differ in different cultural contexts (Wellman & Miller, 2006). There is also the
potential for research in developmental psychopathology to shed light on the integration
and coordination of the two systems by investigating reasoning in individuals with
developmental disorders, such as autism or psychopathy, where there is a dissociation
between mentalistic and deontic reasoning (Baird, 2008).

Lastly, we know a lot about the development of mentalistic reasoning, as described in this
chapter, but much less about the development of children’s deontic reasoning abilities.
Certainly there is an enormous literature, following Piaget (1932/1977) (p. 418) and
Kohlberg (1969), examining children’s moral judgments, which require deontic reasoning,
but in that literature, the research focus is on the content of the moral judgment and the
evaluation of a person’s actions as right or wrong (see the chapters by Blair and Smetana
in this handbook). In contrast, very few studies focus on deontic reasoning itself. They
employ a methodology based on Wason’s (1966) Selection Task to show that, like adults,
children find deontic reasoning about rules and permissions easier than epistemic
reasoning about factual statements (e.g., Cummins, 1996; Dack & Astington, 2011; Harris
& Núñez, 1996). Much more research is needed, however, to show the (p. 419)
developmental progression of deontic reasoning and its relation with theory-of-mind
development.

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

Conclusion
In this chapter we have taken a developmental view of theory of mind, in which early
intuitive awareness of self and others gives rise to explicit, reflective understanding.
Importantly, the later-developing explicit theory of mind does not replace the former, but
both together underpin self-reflection and social understanding from childhood to
adulthood. This framework is not uniquely ours; rather, it is consonant with others’ views,
including the family resemblance of distinctions that we cited in the introduction to the
chapter (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Dienes & Perner,
1999; Filippova & Astington, 2010; Frith, 2004; Hughes, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; San
Juan & Astington, 2012; Singer, 2006; Tager-Flusberg & Joseph, 2005; Zelazo, 2004).
Moreover, the framework has proved useful for some time now. For example, Tomasello,
Kruger, and Ratner (1993) argued for a developmental progression in cultural learning,
from imitative learning, to instructed learning, to collaborative learning. The first level
involves joint attention and learning by imitation, which requires understanding the other
as an intentional agent. It is not dependent on language (indeed, it facilitates the
development of language, cf. Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) and in that
sense is “intuitive,” in contrast to the later two levels, which are more explicitly didactic
and language dependent. The second level, instructed learning, is reflective, and the third
level is recursively reflective (i.e., the other is understood as a reflective agent, which
enables collaborative learning). In general, we believe that this framework provides a
fertile foundation for research and may help lay to rest the fruitless either/or arguments
the field has seen between so-called “boosters” and “scoffers” (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala,
1989) who advocate either rich or lean interpretations of behavior. This framework
acknowledges the authentic nature of infants’ social skills while still allocating
tremendous importance to the changes in self-reflection and social understanding that
occur through early and later childhood. It is a truly developmental perspective.

Questions for Future Research

1. We have proposed that there is developmental continuity of intuitive theory of
mind alongside developmental changes in reflective theory of mind from infancy to
adulthood. One important area for future research is to test this hypothesis by
developing indirect (i.e., intuitive) and direct (i.e., reflective) paradigms that can be
used across a wide range of ages.
2. We have proposed that an early intuitive understanding of false belief in the
toddler or even infancy years later gives rise to reflective understanding, yet we see
striking individual differences in the timing of this development during the preschool
years. More longitudinal studies of child-cognitive and environmental-social

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Theory of Mind: Self-Reflection and Social Understanding

precursors and their interactions are needed to address the question of causal
origins of the developmental change.
3. Although research has shown that there are two distinct neurological substrates
involved in intuitive (“implicit”) and reflective (“explicit”) theory-of-mind processing,
much more research is required to establish the precise neurological bases of theory
of mind in implicit and explicit forms, both during development and in adult life.
4. More research is needed into the educational implications of theory-of-mind
development and its role in children’s school success, both academically and socially,
including the effect of interventions on theory-of-mind development, narrative
competence, and literacy. Related to this, researchers need to develop tools (like
Wellman and Liu’s, 2004, theory-of-mind scale for 3- to 6-year-olds) that would
measure the developmental progression of theory of mind in the primary school
years, that is, 6 to 12 years of age (cf. Peterson, Wellman, & Slaughter, 2012).
5. More research is needed in the area of overlap between theory of mind and
deontic understanding—for example, to investigate the developmental progression of
deontic reasoning and its relation with theory-of-mind development, and to
investigate the relative importance of mentalistic versus deontic reasoning in the
interpretation of action in different cultural contexts.

Author Note
This chapter was first written in 2009. Support from the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged by the first author.

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Janet Wilde Astington

Janet Wilde Astington is Professor Emertia, Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study,
University of Toronto, Canada

Claire Hughes

Claire Hughes is Director of Studies in PPS, Newnham College, Cambridge

University.

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