Preschoolers can attribute second-order beliefs.

Abstract

The ability to attribute 2nd-order mental states was investigated in 87 children drawn from preschool, kindergarten, lst-grade, and 2nd-grade classes. Children received 4 stories, 2 standard and 2 new, designed to test their understanding of 2nd-order mental states. The standard stories were modified versions of J. Perner and H. Wimmer's (1985) 2nd-order task. The new stories were made significantly simpler by reducing the number of characters, episodes, and scenes and by including a deception context. The main findings were that performance on the new stories was significantly better than on the standard stories and that nearly half of the preschoolers and almost all of the kindergartners were able to attribute 2nd-order beliefs. These findings contrast with earlier research.A strong consensus has emerged among theory-of-mind researchers that children first become capable of attributing mental states like belief at about the age of 4. Many researchers (e.g., Perner, 1991;Wellman, 1990) have noted, however, that the capacity to attribute second-order, or embedded, mental states (e.g., "She thinks that he thinks . . .") confers on children the capacity to understand not only a person's perception of a social situation (first-order reasoning) but also different individuals' concern about the other's mental states (second-order reasoning). It is these sorts of attributions that underlie much of our social reasoning and that are necessary for any sophisticated understanding of human action. Perner and Wimmer (1985) designed an interesting task to tap children's understanding of second-order belief. This task is based on the same paradigm that was used to investigate younger children's understanding of first-order false belief (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). They presented children with stories in which two actors, John and Mary, see an ice-cream van at the park where they are playing. Later, each is independently informed that the ice-cream van has moved from the park to the church, but neither knows that the other actor has been informed. In a series of six experiments, children between the ages of 5 and 10 were asked where John thinks Mary would go to buy an icecream. To respond correctly, children must take into account John's ignorance of Mary's knowledge of the true whereabouts of the ice-cream van. The findings across the individual experi-

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