How children come to understand false beliefs
A shared intentionality account
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23327885 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Tomasello (0000-0002-1649-088X, Duke University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 115 |
| Issue | 34 |
| Pages | 8491-8498 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0027-8424 • E-ISSN: 1091-6490 |
| Publisher | National Academy of Sciences (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1073/pnas.1804761115 |
| PMID | 30104372 |
| OpenAlex | W2886577155 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 62 |
| References cited | 81 |
Significance In coming to understand minds, the greatest challenge for young children is understanding when others have a false belief. Why is that person searching for the toy over there when it is really over here? There is currently much controversy about when children come to this understanding because experiments of different types yield different results. This paper attempts to resolve the controversy by integrating theory and data in a different way. Specifically, the paper argues that young children do not just come to imagine what is in other minds on their own; rather, they come to this understanding through certain types of social and communicative interactions with others that require them to compare their respective perspectives.
Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Epistemology · False belief · Intentionality · Theory of mind · Child and Animal Learning Development · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
A Tale of Two Perspectives
The Ontogeny of Kinship Categorization
Parábolas, altruismo espontáneo y coherencia cognitiva. Analizando la eficaz construcción de algunas parábolas
The fear of insignificance from a socio-communicative perspective
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction
Theory of Mind and Young Children’s Behaviour
Does communication-based belief attribution in 18-month-olds reflect an altercentric bias?
Seeing the World From Others’ Perspective
Deafness, Hearing Loss and the Development of Mental State Reasoning Skills
Examining the relationship between social support and tendency to substance use among Iranian earthquake survivors
The Situational Mental File Account of the False Belief Tasks
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
Are Mentalizing Systems Necessary? An Alternative Through Self–other Distinction
A New Look at Young Children’s Referential Informativeness
How children approach the false belief test
Emergence unleashed
The Primate Origins of Human Social Cognition
The myth of spirituality
On the expression of mistaken beliefs in Australian languages
Bilingual toddlers show increased attention capture by static faces compared to monolinguals
A micro-genetic investigation of the theory of mind understanding
The form and function of joint attention within joint action
Explaining joint attention
Rethinking the “we” in “we” intentionality
Becoming episodic
Objectivity, perceptual constancy, and teleology in young children
Knowledge before belief in non‐human primates
Is there continuity from implicit recognition of intentional action in infants to explicit mindreading in preschoolers? Systematic review of longitudinal evidence and theoretical implications ( ¿Hay continuidad entre el reconocimiento implícito de la acción intencional en bebés y la lectura de mente explícita en preescolares? Revisión sistemática de la evidencia longitudinal e implicaciones teóricas )
A longitudinal study of early pretense
Simulating the Past- and Future-Directed Thoughts of Others
Taking theory of mind research into much needed new terrain – a commentary on Kochanska et al. (2025)
Joint attention and communication
Mindreading in conversation
Do toddlers reason about other people's experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning
The self-consistency effect seen on the Dot Perspective Task is a product of domain-general attention cueing, not automatic perspective taking
Loopholes
Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines
Preschool children’s use of meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions
Children and adults' intuitions of what people can believe
Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children
Multidimensional Reasoning Can Promote 3-Year-Old Children’s Performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task
The Most Demanding Moral Capacity
Developmental differences in reported speech and internal state language in preschoolers’ personal narratives
Using shared knowledge to determine ironic intent; a conversational response paradigm
Interrelatedness of false-belief reasoning, structural language, and pragmatic communication in typically developing 4- to 6-year-old children
Machiavellian strategist or cultural learner? Mentalizing and learning over development in a resource-sharing game
How children’s social tendencies can shape their theory of mind development
The instability of sensitivity to false beliefs
Really Looking and Being Seen
Responding to joint attention as a developmental catalyst
Pragmatic markers
No facts without perspectives
Minimal theory of mind – a Millikanian Approach
The cultural evolution of mind-modelling
Introduction to Folk Psychology
Competence and performance revised
What is it like to be a chimpanzee
Learning Loopholes
The role of roles in uniquely human cognition and sociality
What can lithics tell us about the evolution of learning and development
The Origin of Human Theory-of-Mind
Children Talk About The Mind
Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
The Role of Language in the Development of False Belief Understanding
Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs
Language and Theory of Mind
Chimpanzees know what conspecifics do and do not see
The cultural evolution of mind reading
Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm
Action Anticipation Through Attribution of False Belief by 2-Year-Olds
How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind
What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality
Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?
Do chimpanzees know what conspecifics know?
Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-Mind Development
Core mechanisms in ‘theory of mind’
Relations Between False Belief Understanding and Executive Function in Early Childhood
Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states?
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
Reference
Why We Cooperate
Origins of Human Communication
A Natural History of Human Thinking
Epistemic Vigilance
A Natural History of Human Morality
What is a Perspective Problem? Developmental Issues in Belief Ascription and Dual Identity
The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English
In defense of a developmental dogma
Joint attention to mental content and the social origin of reasoning
Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others
Young children's knowledge about visual perception
The sources of normativity
Older (but not younger) siblings facilitate false belief understanding
Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children
How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced
Declarative joint attention as a foundation of theory of mind
Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality—just not about the same object at the same time
Understanding attention
Reconstructing constructivism
| Unique citing works | 62 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 8,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 57 |