Implicit and explicit theory of mind: state of the art.

From their different vantage points, the contributors to this issue address the developmental puzzle of infants as young as 14 or 15 months (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007) displaying sensitivity to people’s mistaken false-belief-based behaviour in certain tasks, when it has proved difficult to show any such understanding before 3 or 4 years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) in many variations of the traditional false-belief test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Borrowing from the consciousness literature, these classes of tasks can be called indirect and direct tests. In the traditional falsebelief test and its variations, children are directly asked about the mistaken agent’s belief or behaviour, while in the tasks used with young infants any understanding has to be inferred indirectly from infants’ or toddlers’ spontaneous behaviour in the test situation. Baillargeon, Scott, and He (2010) used the cognate characterization of induced as opposed to spontaneous responding. Understanding shown in an indirect test when no such understanding is shown on the direct test is one of the hallmarks of implicit or unconscious knowledge (Merikle & Reingold, 1991). On these grounds, Perner and Clements (2000) spoke of implicit understanding of belief. The implicit– explicit distinction has however become a general expression of marking the intuitive difference between an inchoate earlier and a more robust later understanding.