When determining what others know, we intuitively consider not only whether they succeed but also their probability of success in the absence of knowledge (e.g., random guessing). Across three experiments (n = 240 North American 4-6-year-olds, data collected between 2020-2023) we find that 4-year-olds understand that tasks with a lower probability…

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

Aim/Purpose: This study explores the effectiveness of a virtual reality (VR) application designed to teach Theory of Mind (ToM) skills to children aged 5-6, addressing the gap in research on the use of VR for typically developing children. Background: ToM is a critical skill for social interaction and understanding others' perspectives. Despite…

Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

Purpose: Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children's language development and delays are well documented, yet less is known about their delays in theory of mind (ToM) development. Importantly, conversational-communicative experiences, language competence, and teacher/parent influences loom large. The present study examined ToM development and the…

Multidimensional theory of mind assessments should include items assessing both explicit theory of mind (theory of mind knowledge) and applied theory of mind (application of theory of mind knowledge in real-life contexts). However, the two theory of mind scores cannot be interpreted collectively to identify children having mismatched explicit and…

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states and feelings to others, and to understand that those mental states and feelings affect their behaviour. It is one of three core developmental tasks for children in preschool years, along with emotion self-regulation and relationships with parents and family members. Given there are…

Research investigating pragmatic abilities in healthy aging suggests that both production and comprehension might be compromised; however, it is not clear how pragmatic abilities evolve in late adulthood, as well as when difficulties are more likely to arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the decline of pragmatic skills in aging, and to…

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

Drawing on cognitive criticism, and using Theory of Mind, transportation, and imaginative resistance as a framework, this essay analyzes the ways in which Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows Duology, can build understanding of and empathy for people with living with mental illnesses. Maria Nikolajeva's germinal work on cognitive approaches to literature…

Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

Theory of mind (ToM) is crucial for social interactions. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development. However, it is unclear whether this is the case for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) before and around the second year of life. The…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

This study assessed children's (N = 236) ability to introspect the mental states of "seeing" and "knowing" relative to their ability to attribute each state to others. Children could introspect "seeing" 10 months before they could introspect "knowing." Two- and 3-year-olds correctly reported their own…