ABSTRACT
The theme of this volume and of the conference on which it is based is the relation between developing cognition, communication, and the culture in which development occurs. This is a broad theme and inevitably to make statements with any degree of precision, one has to focus in further on some particular aspect of the general theme. In our most recent work, we have been most interested in two parallel aspects of development during the preschool period—theory of mind and what we have termed future oriented prudence and altruism (Thompson, Barresi, & Moore, 1997). The notion of theory of mind is well known and appears in a number of other contributions to this volume. For the purposes of the current work, we take theory of mind to be the understanding of representational mental states that develops at about 4 years of age. A standard array of experimental tasks is used for theory of mind assessment, including various forms of false belief task.
