ABSTRACT
Researchers in cognitive development are used to looking for causal influences within the interplay among different areas of cognitive capabilities. This chapter focuses on the developmental dependencies among theory of mind (ToM), phonological working memory, and verbal ability. Only recently has research begun to identify aspects of cognitive development that develop concurrently with the emergence of children's ToM and, thus, could be cognitive correlates or even precursors of ToM development. ToM is defined as the capacity to impute mental states to oneself and to others. It has been investigated across a variety of tasks assessing concepts such as false belief understanding, appearance-reality distinction, level of perspective taking, or deception. Several researchers reported substantial correlations between children's performance in ToM tasks and their performance in other cognitive areas, such as language and working memory. If there are true developmental dependencies between different cognitive domains, substantial correlations should be observed among related variables.
