False Belief Understanding Research Articles

The development of processing nested structures in language and action and false-belief understanding in preschool children.

Influential theories have proposed that processing nested structures constitutes an important characteristic of human cognition among various domains. It might represent an important cognitive capacity in human development. We assessed the development of nested structure processing (NSP) in 3- to 6-year-old German children (N = 130) across two domains, language and action. We explored (1) whether NSP development is related across the domains, (2) to which extent it relates to general cognitive functions such as inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM), and (3) whether NSP in action and language relates to the early development of false-belief understanding (FBU). NSP in the action and language domain was correlated even when controlling for IC, yet the correlation was not significant anymore when controlling for WM or age. Furthermore, NSP in action related to FBU even when controlling for WM, IC, and age. Overall, the results point to the development of a domain-general NSP capacity during preschool years. They suggest that WM constitutes an essential basis for NSP. Furthermore, our results support cognitive theories proposing that NSP plays a role in the early development of explicit FBU. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Theory of mind deficits in non-fluent primary progressive aphasia.

Theory of mind deficits in non-fluent primary progressive aphasia.

Resting-state EEG alpha asymmetry predicts false belief understanding during early childhood: An exploratory longitudinal study.

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, is fundamental to human socio-cognition. In child development, a full or explicit understanding of false beliefs (FB) and their impact on action emerges around the age of 4years. There is evidence of functional specialization of right hemispheric activity related to FB processing in adults and children. However, it remains unclear whether this specialization is the cause or the consequence of ToM development. The present exploratory study investigates the longitudinal relationship of resting-state electroencephalogram (rsEEG) alpha asymmetry measured in infancy/toddlerhood and behavioral false belief understanding (FBU) at the age of 4years. Employing a longitudinal design, Study 1 assessed rsEEG alpha asymmetry across frontal and parietal electrode sites (N = 43), implicit FBU at 34 months (N = 38), and explicit FBU at age 4 (N = 22). Study 2 is another independent longitudinal dataset that included rsEEG alpha asymmetry at 14months (N = 37) and explicit FBU at age 4 (N = 32). We found that superior explicit FBU at age 4 was associated with greater right frontal activity at an earlier age, and better implicit FBU was cross-sectionally related to greater right parietal activity. Given the limited sample size, these results should be viewed as preliminary and warrant replication in future studies. Interpreted cautiously, these findings may suggest that rsEEG alpha asymmetry in frontal regions may serve as an early-appearing neural marker of children's later explicit FBU.

NAO, I Can Read Your Mind: Preschool-Aged Children Construct Theory of Artificial Mind (ToAM)

The successful integration of social robots in education relies on children’s interpretations of robots’ mental states and capabilities. This study investigated the Theory of Mind (ToM) for peers and the Theory of Artificial Mind (ToAM) for robots among 87 children aged 3 to 6 and 21 adults. Using seven well-established ToM paradigms, key components such as desire, belief, knowledge, and emotion were analyzed. The findings reveal: (a) a developmental sequence in children’s construction of ToAM, alongside challenges in understanding false beliefs and emotions; (b) by age 6, children reach a critical phase in ToAM development, approaching adult-level interpretations; and (c) a distinction between ToM and ToAM, with children aged 3 to 6 more likely to project their knowledge and beliefs onto peers than onto humanoid robots like NAO. Overall, this study highlights age-based differences in children’s comprehension of robots’ mental states, illuminating their ToAM in educational contexts requiring cognitive understanding.

The role of theory of mind, group norms and intentionality in children's and adolescents' moral evaluations of a misinformer.

Misinformation poses a significant threat to modern society. Children and adolescents, highly active on social media, are particularly vulnerable to encountering misinformation from peers. Assessing whether intentionality impacts moral evaluations of misinformers, considering age and group norms, is crucial. Theory of Mind (ToM) plays a key role in understanding false beliefs and intentions. In a study involving 266 UK-based children (8-11-years-old) and adolescents (12-15-years-old), participants evaluated a misinformer in a scenario involving a school competition. Deliberate misinformation led to harsher judgements and a higher likelihood of punishment. However, children tended to be more inclusive than adolescents regardless of intentionality. Adolescents with higher ToM believed in the misinformation less. Higher ToM correlated with harsher misinformer evaluations across the sample. These findings underscore the impact of intentionality, ToM and age on moral evaluations, suggesting that high ToM may mitigate positive feelings towards misinformers, potentially reducing misinformation acceptance.

Three- but not 2-year-olds misinform others spontaneously in an interaction-based task.

One-year-olds spontaneously inform others, but less is known about the emergence of spontaneous misinforming. The current study investigated whether young children who spontaneously inform ignorant others also deliberately misinform others in matched uninstructed interactions. Conceptually, misinforming provides a convincing case for interaction-based, implicit false belief understanding. In a simplified, anticipatory and interactive paradigm, a protagonist puppet played with the child and an object and then hid the object in one of two boxes. When the protagonist was temporarily absent, either her friend or a competitor puppet searched for the hidden object. Children spontaneously joined the play and helped or hindered by informing or misinforming the puppets. Experiment 1 revealed that 2-year-olds spontaneously informed the friend. However, they did not selectively misinform the competitor. In order to exclude methodological biases and replicate previous findings, Experiment 2 tested 3-year-olds, confirming skills for spontaneous misinforming with the same paradigm. Findings reveal that informing, but not misinforming, is part of younger children's early spontaneous communication, which suggests a conceptual distinction in the use of communication and casts doubts on an interactive use of false belief understanding in early interactions.

Testing the Effectiveness of a Social Cognition Training Program on Preschoolers’ Social Cognition and Humor Understanding

Abstract Social cognition helps children develop an understanding of their own and others’ mental states, which facilities social interaction. Humor is a multidimensional skill that includes cognitive, social, and emotional aspects that may be shared mechanisms with social cognition. Although we know that both skills are positively related to each other, there has been no study investigating their causal relationship. The present study aimed to find out whether there is a causal relationship between social cognition and humor in 3-year-olds. Children in the experimental group were trained on emotion and false belief understanding, and children in the control group were trained on Piagetian conservation tasks for approximately 1 month. All children completed three different versions of social cognition tasks and one humor appreciation and production test at both baseline and posttest. There was no significant training effect on either social cognition or humor skills in preschoolers. Several possible explanations for the pattern of findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic and social cognitive outcomes in early childhood

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children’s day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children tested before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns on several measures of false-belief understanding, a critical social cognition skill that undergoes important developments in this age range. Controlling for age and language skills, children tested after the pandemic demonstrated significantly worse false-belief understanding than those tested before the pandemic, and this difference was larger for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. These results suggest that the pandemic negatively impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood, especially for lower SES children.

Listening beyond words: understanding theory of mind in hearing-impaired children with different hearing loss degree

ABSTRACT This study investigated Theory of Mind (ToM) development in children with hearing loss, comparing children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (MHL, n = 26), severe-to-profound hearing loss (SHL, n = 31), and typical hearing (TH, n = 53), aiming to explore the differences between the three groups and potential factor related to the ToM development in children with hearing loss. Participants completed the ToM scale and language assessments. One-way ANOVA and Bonferroni post-hoc tests were used to analyze group differences, while Pearson's correlation examined relationships between ToM, language, and background variables. Results revealed that both MHL and SHL groups showed delays in overall ToM skills compared to TH peers, with the SHL group exhibiting more substantial delays. The MHL group demonstrated delays only in hidden emotion understanding, while the SHL group showed delays from knowledge access through false belief and hidden emotion tasks. Language comprehension was significantly correlated with ToM skills in both hearing loss groups. Aided audibility was associated with false belief understanding in the MHL group. The study highlights the impact of hearing loss severity on ToM development and emphasizes the crucial role of language comprehension in ToM skills. Findings suggest the need for tailored interventions addressing language and communication challenges to support ToM development in children with hearing loss.

Children's Selective Teaching and Informing: A Meta-Analysis.

Empirical studies on selective teaching and informing indicate that children may vary what they teach depending on whom they are teaching, taking into account how helpful the information is for a given audience. The current meta-analysis quantifies the effect of selective informing and teaching in 2-7-year-olds by examining the relationship between the helpfulness of the information and the frequency of information transmission. Through a systematic search that yielded 1483 results, 28 studies (104 effect sizes, N=2716) met the inclusion criteria. Using robust variance estimation, we found a medium average effect, Hedges' g=0.578, 95% CI (0.331, 0.825), suggesting that children selectively share information based on its perceived helpfulness to the listener. Moderator analyses revealed that age and communicative context were significant factors. Children were more informative in their communication when asked to teach compared to other, nonpedagogical prompts. This finding supports and extends natural pedagogy theory-young children not only interpret pedagogical information differently than information acquired through other means, but they are more selective in their informing when teaching. Additionally, we observed a key developmental progression at age 4. Four- to 7-year-olds, but not 2-3-year-olds, selectively shared information that was most helpful for a given learner. This coincides with the development of false-belief understanding, which undergoes significant development at around age 4. Taken together, the present synthesis suggests that young children actively engage in selective social learning from both sides, that of beneficiaries and benefactors of valuable information.

Social reward predicts false belief understanding in Namibian Hai||om children

AbstractSocial motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle‐class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among N = 59 Hai||om children (AgeRange = 2.3–8.0 years) from rural Namibia, an indigenous community where children's social experience with peers and adults differs much from urban middle‐class milieus typically sampled in developmental science research. Children's preference for adult, but not peer faces predicted their false belief performance. Moreover, their false belief performance increased with age, showing mastery of the current false belief task by the preschool years. These results accommodate universalist claims on the link between social motivation and Theory of Mind while suggesting a particular contribution of the social reward responsivity to adult social partners.

Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs.

False belief understanding is always regarded as a milestone of Theory of Mind (ToM), which is an important aspect of social intelligence. Recently, some researchers have suggested the existence of two ToM systems in individuals: one that explicitly guides false belief understanding and another that implicitly directs sensitivity to false beliefs. However, studies on sensitivity to false beliefs have encountered challenges with replicability, and the factors influencing the manifestation of sensitivity to false beliefs remain to be explored. Based on the anticipatory looking task, we investigated whether verbal perceptual prompts could improve children's performance of sensitivity to false beliefs. Fifty-eight children aged 5 to 6 were randomly assigned tasks with or without verbal perceptual prompts, involving verbal descriptions and explanations of the protagonist's perceptual state. The findings showed that verbal perceptual prompts could slightly reduce children's propensity to look at the actual location of the object in false belief situations and increase the likelihood of exhibiting accurate anticipatory looking patterns across false belief and true belief situations. The results suggest that children's sensitivity to false beliefs may be situation-dependent, yet further investigation is needed to determine which situational factors can most effectively trigger robust sensitivity to false beliefs in children. The results enlighten educational practice, indicating that introducing cues in social environments that convey insights into others' mental states, akin to the use of learning scaffolding, is advantageous for the development of children's social cognitive abilities.

Earlier false belief understanding predicts later lie‐telling behavior in preschool children, but not vice versa

AbstractYoung children's lie‐telling behavior is associated with their theory of mind (ToM) development. However, current evidence is primarily based on cross‐sectional studies, with very little longitudinal evidence on the causal relation between the two constructs. The current study provided much‐needed cross‐lagged longitudinal evidence on the association between ToM and lying in young children. Adopting a short‐term longitudinal design, we tested 104 normally developing children's (64 boys, M = 54.0 months) false belief understanding and lie‐telling behaviors three times at 4‐month intervals. Results showed the cross‐lagged model fit the data well. Lie‐telling behaviors exhibited moderate stability across the three time points, while ToM exhibited moderate stability between the first two time points but not between Time 2 and Time 3. Earlier false belief understanding significantly predicted children's later lie‐telling behavior, controlling for family socioeconomic status, child age, gender, only child status, and Time 1 verbal ability and inhibitory control. On the contrary, earlier lie‐telling did not predict later false beliefs understanding. We concluded that earlier false belief understanding predicts later lie‐telling behavior in preschool children, but not vice versa.

Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans

At the core of what defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks. Here we compare human and LLM performance on a comprehensive battery of measurements that aim to measure different theory of mind abilities, from understanding false beliefs to interpreting indirect requests and recognizing irony and faux pas. We tested two families of LLMs (GPT and LLaMA2) repeatedly against these measures and compared their performance with those from a sample of 1,907 human participants. Across the battery of theory of mind tests, we found that GPT-4 models performed at, or even sometimes above, human levels at identifying indirect requests, false beliefs and misdirection, but struggled with detecting faux pas. Faux pas, however, was the only test where LLaMA2 outperformed humans. Follow-up manipulations of the belief likelihood revealed that the superiority of LLaMA2 was illusory, possibly reflecting a bias towards attributing ignorance. By contrast, the poor performance of GPT originated from a hyperconservative approach towards committing to conclusions rather than from a genuine failure of inference. These findings not only demonstrate that LLMs exhibit behaviour that is consistent with the outputs of mentalistic inference in humans but also highlight the importance of systematic testing to ensure a non-superficial comparison between human and artificial intelligences.

Picture book reading improves children's learning understanding.

Mental state reasoning is an integral part of children's teaching and learning understanding. This study investigated whether a picture book reading approach focusing on mental state discourse and contrasting perspectives in a preschool classroom setting would improve children's teaching and learning understanding and school readiness. In total, 104 children from four classrooms aged between 46 and 64 months (53 girls, M = 54.03 months, SD = 3.68) participated in the study. Half of the classrooms were randomly assigned to an experimental group where teachers read picture books rich in mental state discourse and engaged in intensive discussions with children for eight weeks. Children's false belief understanding and teaching and learning understanding were measured before and after the eight-week period. The result revealed that picture book reading improved children's learning understanding with a medium effect size, controlling for demographic variables, children's verbal ability, inhibition, and initial false belief understanding. The experimental group children further demonstrated more advanced school readiness 18 months after the intervention ended in a follow-up study using a teacher questionnaire.

False belief understanding in deaf children: what are the difficulties?

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrate proficiency in verbal-story elicited-response (VS-ER) false-belief tasks, such as the Sally & Ann task, at a similar age as typically developing hearing children. However, they face challenges in non-verbal spontaneous-response (NV-SR) false-belief tasks, measured via looking times, which hearing infants typically pass by around 2 years of age, or earlier. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether these difficulties remain in a non-verbal-story elicited-response (NVS-ER) false-belief task, in which children are offered the opportunity to provide an elicited response to a non-verbal-story task. A total of thirty 4- to 8-year-old children with CI-s and hearing children completed three different kinds of false-belief tasks. The results showed that children with CI-s performed above chance level on the verbal task (i.e., VS-ER task), but not on the two non-verbal tasks, (i.e., NVS-ER and NV-SR tasks). The control group of typically developing hearing children performed above chance on all three kinds of tasks (one-tailed significance level). Our findings highlight the importance of external narrative support for children with CIs in tasks that involve mental perspective-taking, and specifically predicting actions based on false beliefs.

Do great apes switch perspectives? Husserl, Tomasello, and operative intentionality

In Becoming Human (2021), evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello provides a comprehensive account of the social intentionality which makes us human. One of the many themes discussed is the intentionality required for switching between perspectives. A number of interesting claims are made in these parts, including that great apes (and young infants) have no sense of perspective, no understanding of false beliefs, and do not know they could be wrong about how they experience things. While I am sympathetic to the general purport of Tomasello’s theory of switching perspectives, I believe his theory mispresents the intentional skills that are involved in various pre-conceptual forms of switching perspectives, to the extent that it is worth a brief commentary. I first outline Tomasello’s theory of perspectivalness, and subsequently develop an alternative, based on the phenomenological distinction between operative and thematic intentionality.

Investigating belief understanding in children in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting

Investigating belief understanding in children in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting

Social Competence of Adolescents: The Role of Social Cognition and Behavior Control

Social competence during adolescence plays a crucial role in socialization and psychological well-being. Available data suggest that social cognition (theory of mind, ToM) and self-regulation (behavioral control) abilities make a significant contribution to social competence at a young age, but research on their role in adolescence is still limited. The purpose of the research is to study the role of behavior control and ToM in the social competence of adolescents. The study involved 106 6-8-grade students (girls - 51), aged 12-15 years ( Me = 13, SD = 0.87). The BRIEF questionnaire was used to assess their behavior control; ToM was assessed using tasks for understanding high-order false beliefs. For external assessment of the social competence of the participants, a questionnaire for teachers and a sociometric method were used. The groups of the adolescents, divided by the median criterion, were compared using the overall BRIEF regulation index and the total score for false-belief understanding. The most salient differences in the teachers’ and peers’ assessments of the social competence were found between the contrasting groups of the participants, i.e., with high levels of ToM and behavior control and with low levels of these abilities. At the same time, differences in the teachers’ assessments were observed for both positive and negative assessments but, in sociometric indices, only for negative ones. The teachers considered the adolescents with high levels of behavior control to be more socially competent, regardless of their level of social cognition. For the peers, the level of behavioral control mattered only when the ability to assess the mental states of other people was weak. The results of our study show the importance of the role of social cognition and behavioral control in the implementation of socially competent behavior in adolescents. At the same time, the data obtained indicate the heterogeneity of the contribution of these abilities to the social competence of adolescents assessed by peers and teachers.

Growth From Uncertainty: Understanding the Replication ‘Crisis’ in Infant Cognition

AbstractPsychology is a discipline that has a high number of failed replications, which has been characterized as a “crisis” on the assumption that failed replications are indicative of untrustworthy research. This article uses Chang’s concept of epistemic iteration to show how a research program can advance epistemic goals despite many failed replications. It illustrates this by analyzing an ongoing large-scale replication attempt of Southgate et al.’s work exploring infants’ understanding of false beliefs. It concludes that epistemic iteration offers a way of understanding the value of replications—both failed and successful—that contradicts the narrative centered around distrust.