The classic study by Wimmer and Perner showed that children below the age of about 4 years of age fail to appreciate others' false beliefs. This opened the floodgates to the theory-of-mind research programme. Recently, a study by Riggs and Simpson has called the central challenge of false belief into question, reporting similar difficulties with true belief. I would argue, however, that not onl...

Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to people's false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding. We defend the view that early sensitivity to false beliefs shown in 'online tasks' (where engagement with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will happen wi...

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by grammaticalized particles of speaker (un)certainty, as in ...

Interpreting others' actions relies on an understanding of their current mental state. Emerging research has begun to identify a number of factors that give rise to individual differences in this ability. We report an ERP study where participants (N=28) read contexts that described a character having a true (TB) or false belief (FB) about an object's location. A second sentence described where ...

Recent experimental findings suggest that there is a dissociation between the performance by children with autism on False Belief tasks, on which they do poorly, and False Photograph, False Maps, and False Drawing tasks, on which they do well. This may be because only the False Belief task taps the capacity for metarepresentation, at least as defined by Leslie and Thaiss (1992). In an attempt t...

Can infants appreciate that others have false beliefs? Do they have a theory of mind? In this article I provide a detailed review of more than 20 experiments that have addressed these questions, and offered an affirmative answer, using nonverbal 'violation of expectation' and 'anticipatory looking' procedures. Although many of these experiments are both elegant and ingenious, I argue that their...

The main aim of the present paper is to use a proof system for hybrid modal logic to formalize what are called falsebelief tasks in cognitive psychology, thereby investigating the interplay between cognition and logical reasoning about belief. We consider two different versions of the Smarties task, involving respectively a shift of perspective to another person and to another time. Our formali...