Theories of Mind in Transition: A Microgenetic Study of the Development of False Belief Understanding

Microgenetic methods were used to document young children’s (N = 36; M age = 3;5) acquisition of false belief (FB) understanding and investigate developmental mechanisms. A control group received no experience with FB; 2 other groups re-ceived microgenetic sessions designed to promote FB understanding. Over consecu-tive weeks, microgenetic groups received implicit feedback about their performance on 24 FB tasks and generated explanations for FB events. Only 1 microgenetic group improved. Differences in the schedules of microgenetic experience and in the amount and type of FB explanation children engaged in accounted for these differences. Im-proving children developed FB understandings gradually and exhibited fluctuating task performance, suggesting slow conceptual restructuring, not sudden insight. This work provides the first microgenetic record of children’s transition to a representa-tional theory of mind. Between 3 and 5 years, children achieve one of the hallmarks of an adult-like the-ory of mind—an understanding of mental representation (see Flavell & Miller, 1998; Taylor, 1996; Wellman, 2002). This development is indexed in part by older children’s success on false belief (FB) tasks that involve predicting the thoughts or actions of someone whose beliefs about the world are mistaken. In Locations tasks (e.g., Wimmer & Perner, 1983), children predict where a character will search for an object whose location is changed during his absence. Older children (4- and 5-year-olds) correctly report that the character will search in the object’s original location, but younger children (3-year-olds) indicate the current location. Similar