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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.
Astington et al. (Wed,) studied this question.