The ability to infer other people's mental states such as desires, emotions, intentions and beliefs is essential for successful social interactions, and it is usually referred to as theory of mind (ToM). In particular, the ability to detect and understand that people have beliefs about reality that may be false is considered an important hallmark of ToM. This experiment reports on the results o...

Investigations that focus on children’s hand gestures often conclude that gesture production arises as a result of having multiple representations. To date, the predictive validity of this notion has not been tested. In this study we compared the gestures of 82 five-year old children holding either a single or a dual representation. The children retold a story narrated to them, with pictures, b...

Assessing what others know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs—beliefs that conflict with reality. The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive enough measures are used, adults show deficits in the same kind of false belief task that young children fa...

Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs (i.e., beliefs that conflict with reality). The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used wit...

Recent studies suggest that infants understand that others can have false beliefs. However, most of these studies have used looking time measures, and the few that have used behavioral measures are all based on the change-of-location paradigm, leading to claims that infants might use behavioral rules instead of mental state understanding to pass these tests. We investigated infants' false-belie...