Perceptual Access Reasoning: What are the alternatives?

Abstract

Karen Bartsch (2021), Charlie Lewis (2021), and Beate Sodian (2021) provided thoughtful commentaries on our Society for Research in Child Development Monograph, “Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind” (Fabricius et al., 2021). The commentators suggested alternative accounts of our empirical findings, an alternative approach to studying ToM development more generally, and alternative ways to test PAR theory specifically. Here we provide an in-depth response to the various alternatives, as well as a brief overview of the theory and a discussion of two recent alternative accounts that challenge the theory’s counter-intuitive prediction that PAR-users will fail true belief tasks.