ABSTRACT
There is an old problem for theories about how children develop their understanding of the mind that has provided much inspiration for the field. The puzzle is, why children are able to understand pretence considerably earlier (in their second year) than false belief (in their fourth or fifth year), and this creates difficulties for some theorists for at least two reasons. One is that pretence and false belief are based on very similar mental representation abilities, which makes it difficult to explain why they should develop at such different ages (Forguson & Gopnik, 1988; Leslie, 1988; Perner, 1988; Wimmer, Hogrefe, & Sodian, 1988). The other reason is that pretence and belief are conceptually related in such a way that some theorists concluded that one could not pretend without understanding that one is not falsely believing something (e.g. Fodor, 1992).
