ABSTRACT
An immense flowering of research in the last decade has explored what we can now see, in retrospect, to have been a largely uncharted continent in the child’s mind-a territory concerned with an appreciation of the properties of the mind itself, both in oneself and others. This appreciation has been referred to in different ways-as a theory of mind, a mindreading system, mentalism, natural psychology, or mental simulation, to name a few (Whiten, 1994). Interest in the child’s developing understanding of mental phenomena has a long history, perhaps most famously including Piaget and Inhelder’s (1948/1956) three mountains experiments, in which the developing child’s ability to construct the visual perspective of others was first investigated. But in the last decade, theory of mind has become such a growth area in developmental psychology that it has sometimes seemed to threaten to swamp all the rest, apparently reflecting a rapid and overdue realization about just how much we have still to learn about this subject. What a human being comes to understand about the mind may ultimately be limited largely by the nature of the to-be-understood mind itself, and as professional psychologists as well as everyday folk psychologists, we have some inkling of what a gigantic project the young mindreader is therefore embarked on (although only an inkling-by contrast with what has been learned about the child’s mindreading in recent years, the full nature of the adult mindreading system has remained largely the province of philosophers of mind (e.g. Dennett, 1987; Gordon, 1986), and empirically understudied (see d’An-drade, 1987; Heelas & Lock, 1981).
