ABSTRACT
Theory of mind is the term given to our everyday understanding that agentive behavior is caused most proximally by internal mental states such as intentions, desires, and beliefs. For adults, our understanding of mental states is representational in that we understand that the contents of mental states, particularly epistemic mental states such as knowledge and belief, are based on and constrained by idiosyncratic experiences. People who have had different perceptual experiences of the world may believe different things about the state of the world. A long tradition of research in cognitive development has shown that children’s abilities to express a representational theory of mind (RTM) and put that understanding to use for real-world problem solving emerges between the ages of 3 and 5 years (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). This basic developmental pattern appears to be universal-when culturally sensitive tasks are used, the same developmental pattern occurs in most areas that have been tested (Callaghan et al., 2005; Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh, 2008; Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses, & Lee, 2006). The only exceptions to this pattern are cases of specific neurodevelopmental syndromes (such as autism, Baron-Cohen, 2001), or cases in which the quality of children’s communicative environment is substantially compromised, such as when children are born deaf to hearing parents (Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005). This pattern has been taken by many to suggest that the timeline of young children’s explicit RTM understandings may be constrained by both neuromaturational and experiential factors (Mahy, Moses, & Pfeifer, 2014).
