False‐Belief Understanding

Abstract

Cognitive developmental changes in belief understanding, particularly how and when children come to first appreciate false beliefs, occupy the bulk of research on human mindreading. Given apparently conflicting evidence from direct and indirect false‐belief tasks, there is much debate over whether there is a major conceptual breakthrough in belief reasoning sometime around children's 4th birthday and whether infants should be credited with abstract belief understanding. Focusing on who has belief concepts and when they have them, however, is only part of the developmental story. The contradiction could also reflect how the mature belief reasoning that children grow into involves two kinds of mindreading solutions: a flexible cognitive system for making sophisticated but effortful ascriptions about others' beliefs and an efficient cognitive system for tracking others' beliefs in an efficient but limited manner.