ABSTRACT
Research on the development of a theory of mind (ToM) in children has been one of the success stories of cognitive psychology. Research on the development of Theory of Mind (ToM), Executive Functions (EF), Working Memory (WM), and verbal abilities is informative for cognitive psychology in general because it reveals associations and dissociations of cognitive functions. Developmental psychologists working with preschool children seem to be blessed with phenomena that are neither completely specific nor completely general. A narrow definition of EF would focus on supervisory and control processes employed to ascertain that thought and behavior comply with the person's current goal. Most researchers define WM as a system responsible for holding a limited amount of information in a state of immediate accessibility for intentional manipulation. The chapter concludes that there are good theoretical reasons to expect that WM capacity contributes to the emergence of ToM understanding, and there is preliminary support for this hypothesis.
