Theory of mind development and social understanding

Abstract

A cross-sectional, correlational study of 30 children, 3 to 5 years old, investigated relations between their theory of mind development and social interaction, controlling for age and general language ability. Children's overall performance on 4 standard false belief tasks was associated with their production of joint proposals and explicit role assignments during a 10 minute session of pretend play, False belief task performance was not associated with the child's total amount of pretend play or with a measure of empathic concern. We discuss the significance of an association between a laboratory measure of theory of mind development and children's behaviour observed in a naturalistic setting. We argue that the description and explanation of children's theory of mind and social understanding is best pursued through the combined efforts of experimenters and ethologists.