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It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more attention to kind than surface feature information when judging the identity of objects (e.g.). Indeed, previous research found that 14-month-old infants can judge trans-temporal identity even in complete absence of kind-specific surface features. Here, we used another more demanding non-linguistic paradigm to test the limits of these abilities in 14-, 18-, 23- and 36-monthold infants, comparing their performance to recent great ape data. Particularly, we presented infants with two food kinds, whose surface features were then fully transformed to make them look identical. If reasoning according to essentialist principles, participants should select the preferred item despite superficial manipulations. However, only 36- month-olds reliably tracked the preferred item after superficial manipulations. This suggests that, although basic psychological essentialism may emerge early in infancy, more complex forms require domain-general cognitive prerequisites, which only develop in more protracted form.

Predicting others’ behavior is critical for everyday social interactions. Research indicates a development in the cues children rely on in making such predictions. The present studies investigated whether 5- and 8-year-olds from Germany and Israel (N = 136) rely on group preferences for predicting others’ behavior, and whether their reliance on group preferences vary for in- and outgroups. Children were asked to predict the behavior of in- and outgroup members, while presented with conflicting information about a group’s and an individual’s preference. The main finding was that in both Germany and Israel, children – especially 8-year-olds – systematically predicted that novel group members would follow a group preference, but that an individual would maintain his/her own preference. Moreover, in neither country were children affected by the group membership of the target individuals. These studies reveal the protracted development of children’s capacity to negotiate multiple sources of information for predicting people’s behaviors.

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry Yocasta, but did not intend to marry his mother (even though in fact, but unbeknownst to him, Yocasta was his mother). In the present study, we investigated the trajectories and determinants of children’s developing understanding of (less dramatic forms of) the aspectuality of intentions. In two studies, children aged 3–9 observed an agent who acted intentionally but based on some mis-representation regarding the target of her action. The agent grasped a box that contained A and B while believing that it only contained A but not B. Children were asked about the aspectuality of the agent’s intention (in particular, whether she intended to grasp B). When asked to do so spontaneously, children younger than 8 failed (falsely claiming that the agent intended to grasp B). In contrast, in a simplified format in which children were scaffolded through the required inferential chains, children from age 6 succeeded. Children’s general capacity for meta-representation appeared to be necessary but not sufficient by itself for understanding the aspectuality of intentions. The present findings suggest that the appreciation of the aspectuality of intentions is part of an advanced theory of mind that develops in much more protracted ways than basic theory of mind.

When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between diferent categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same? We tested dogs’ ability to discriminate these action categories by adapting the so-called “Unwilling vs. Unable” paradigm. This paradigm compares subjects’ reactions to intentional and unintentional human behaviour. All dogs received three conditions: In the unwillingcondition, an experimenter intentionally withheld a reward from them. In the two unable-conditions, she unintentionally withheld the reward, either because she was clumsy or because she was physically prevented from giving the reward to the dog. Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling- and unable-conditions. This indicates that dogs indeed distinguish intentional actions from unintentional behaviour. We critically discuss our fndings with regard to dogs’ understanding of human intentional action.

Recently, online testing has become an increasingly important instrument in developmental research, in particular since the COVID-19 pandemic made in-lab testing impossible. However, online testing comes with two substantial challenges. First, it is unclear how valid results of online studies really are. Second, implementing online studies can be costly and/or require profound coding skills. This article addresses the validity of an online testing approach that is low-cost and easy to implement: The experimenter shares test materials such as videos or presentations via video chat and interactively moderates the test session. To validate this approach, we compared children’s performance on a well-established task, the change-of-location false belief task, in an in-lab and online test setting. In two studies, 3- and 4-year-old received online implementations of the false belief version (Study 1) and the false and true belief version of the task (Study 2). Children’s performance in these online studies was compared to data of matching tasks collected in the context of in-lab studies. Results revealed that the typical developmental pattern of performance in these tasks found in in-lab studies could be replicated with the novel online test procedure. These results suggest that the proposed method, which is both low-cost and easy to implement, provides a valid alternative to classical in-person test settings.

What do young children understand about arguments? Do they evaluate arguments critically when deciding whom to learn from? To address this question, we investigated children at age 4–5, when robust selective social learning is in place. In Studies 1a/b, children made an initial perceptual judgment regarding the location of an object under varying perceptual circumstances; then received advice by another informant who had better/worse perceptual access than them; and then made their final judgment. The advice by the other informant was sometimes accompanied by utterances of the form “I am certain . . . because I’ve seen it”. These utterances thus constituted good arguments in some conditions (informant could see clearly), but not in others (informant had poor perceptual access). Results showed that children evaluated argument quality in context-sensitive ways and used them differentially for belief-revision. They engaged in more belief-revision when the informant gave this argument only when her perceptual condition, and thus her argument, was good. In Study 2, children were asked to find out about different properties (color/texture) of an object, and received conflicting testimony from two informants who supported their claims by utterances of the form “because I’ve seen it” (good argument regarding color/poor regarding texture) or “because I’ve felt it” (vice versa). Again, children engaged in context-relative evaluation of argument quality, selectively learning from the agent with the appropriate argument. Taken together, these finding reveal that children from age 4 understand argument quality in sophisticated, context-relative ways, and use this understanding for selective learning and belief-revision.

A long-standing dispute in theory of mind research concerns the development of understanding different kinds of propositional attitudes. The asymmetry view suggests that children understand conative attitudes (e.g., desires) before they understand cognitive attitudes (e.g., beliefs). The symmetry view suggests that notions of cognitive and conative attitudes develop simultaneously. Relevant studies to date have produced inconsistent results, yet with different methods and dependent measures. To test between the two accounts more systematically, we thus combined different forms of desire tasks (incompatible desires and competition) with different forms of measurement (verbal ascription and active choice) in a single design. Additionally, children’s performance in the desire tasks was compared to their false-belief understanding. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were better at ascribing desires than at ascribing beliefs for both desire tasks whereas they had difficulties actively choosing the more desired option in the competition task. The present findings thus favor the asymmetry theory.

Adults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in- versus out-group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany (N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of inand out-group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when explaining an out-group as compared to an in-group member’s behavior; and more often to individual factors when explaining an in-group as compared to an out-group member’s behavior. These findings are consistent with the early emergence of fundamental differences in the conceptualizations of in- and out-group members.

– Humans and nonhuman great apes share a sense for intuitive statistics, making intuitive probability judgments based on proportional information. This ability is of tremendous importance, in particular for predicting the outcome of events using prior information and for inferring general regularities from limited numbers of observations. Already in infancy, humans functionally integrate intuitive statistics with other cognitive domains, rendering this type of reasoning a powerful tool to make rational decisions in a variety of contexts. Recent research suggests that chimpanzees are capable of one type of such cross-domain integration: The integration of statistical and social information. Here, we investigated whether apes can also integrate physical information into their statistical inferences. We tested 14 sanctuary-living chimpanzees in a new task setup consisting of two “gumball machine”-apparatuses that were filled with different combinations of preferred and non-preferred food items. In four test conditions, subjects decided which of two apparatuses they wanted to operate to receive a random sample, while we varied both the proportional composition of the food items as well as their spatial configuration above and below a barrier. To receive the more favorable sample, apes needed to integrate proportional and spatial information. Chimpanzees succeeded in conditions in which we provided them either with proportional information or spatial information, but they failed to correctly integrate both types of information when they were in conflict. Whether these limitations in chimpanzees' performance reflect true limits of cognitive competence or merely performance limitations due to accessory task demands is still an open question.

Our folk psychology is built around the ascription of beliefs (and related cognitive states) and desires (and related conative states). How and when children develop a concept of these different kinds of propositional attitudes has been the subject of a long-standing debate. Asymmetry accounts assume that children develop a conception of desires earlier than they develop a concept of beliefs. In contrast, the symmetry account assumes that conceptions of both kinds of attitudes are based on the same underlying capacity to ascribe subjective perspectives. Accordingly, a genuine subjective understanding of desires develops in tandem with subjective belief understanding. So far, existing evidence that tested these two accounts remains inconclusive, with inconsistent findings resulting from diverging methods. Therefore, the current study tested between the two accounts in a more systematic way. First, we used a particularly clear test case—value-incompatible (wicked) desires. Such desires are strongly subjective because they are desirable only from the agent’s perspective but not from an objective perspective. Second, we probed children’s ascription of such desires in the most direct and simplified ways. Third, we directly compared children’s desire understanding with their ascription of subjective beliefs. Results revealed that young children were better in reasoning about subjective desires than about subjective beliefs. Desire reasoning was not correlated with subjective belief reasoning, and children did not have more difficulties in reasoning about strongly subjective wicked desires than about neutral desires. All in all, these findings are not in line with the predictions of the symmetry account but speak in favor of the asymmetry account.

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

Theory of mind is the human conceptual capacity to understand other people as agents who have subjective mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. It is the basis of distinctively human forms of social understanding and interaction that are essential for communication, cooperation, and culture. In this Review, I summarize the current state of research about the emergence and development of theory of mind in early childhood. I describe the typical developmental trajectory and review findings about the cognitive, linguistic, social and neural foundations of theory of mind development. Finally, I review an ongoing debate regarding whether there are different — implicit versus explicit — forms of theory of mind that develop independently, and conclude by providing an outlook on future challenges and perspectives for research in this area.