In this study, we focus on the possible roles of second-order syntactic recursion and working memory in terms of simple and complex span tasks in the development of second-order false belief reasoning. We tested 89 Turkish children in two age groups, one younger (4;6– 6;5 years) and one older (6;7–8;10 years). Although second-order syntactic recursion is significantly correlated with the second...

Two studies investigated the parallel developmental progress in theory of mind and executive control, as exemplified by correlations between the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task (DCCS; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995) and the false-belief task. Experiment 1 with sixty 3-year-old children confirmed earlier studies (e.g., Perner & Lang, 2002), suggesting that children's problem with the DCCS lie...

Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks. Findings indicated that individual differences in exe...

Interpretive diversity is the term used by Carpendale and Chandler (1996) to refer to the fact that two individuals exposed to precisely the same stimulus may interpret it in quite different, but equally plausible, ways. An appreciation of interpretive diversity is said by Carpendale and Chandler to represent a development in understanding that is qualitatively different from that necessary to ...

Does contrastive access help preschoolers succeed on traditional false-belief tasks? Threeand four-year-olds were presented with a modified version of the change-of-location story in which two characters are the focus of interest. In the contrastive access condition preschoolers’ observe that one character leaves the room while the other stays and witnesses the moving event; in the non-contrast...

Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding) in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore the development of the decisional behavior along ...

Much debate concerns whether any nonhuman animals share with humans the ability to infer others' mental states, such as desires and beliefs. In a recent eye-tracking false-belief task, we showed that great apes correctly anticipated that a human actor would search for a goal object where he had last seen it, even though the apes themselves knew that it was no longer there. In response, Heyes pr...

Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing fa...

Research has revealed a robust relationship between preschooler’s use of mental-state language (e.g. think, know) and performance on false-belief tasks (e.g. Ruffman, Slade & Crow, 2002). However, investigations of this relationship with school-aged children have shown mixed results, making it unclear whether mental-state talk continues to play a role in falsebelief understanding following the ...

The current study used a training methodology to determine whether different kinds of linguistic interaction play a causal role in children's development of false belief understanding. After 3 training sessions, 3-year-old children improved their false belief understanding both in a training condition involving perspective-shifting discourse about deceptive objects (without mental state terms) ...