More Evidence for Perceptual Access Reasoning Theory: Reply to Schidelko and Rakoczy (2025)

The standard model of theory of mind (ToM) development holds that children normally acquire a representational ToM by about age 4 at the latest. Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) theory presents a fundamental challenge to the standard model by arguing that representational ToM does not develop until about age 7. One set of predictions of PAR theory concerns children's errors on certain true belief (TB) tasks. Schidelko and Rakoczy subscribe to the standard model, and report a test of the PAR account of TB errors versus their pragmatic account. The authors' preregistered predictions were not confirmed, and their publicly available data show that, contrary to their claims, the findings actually support the PAR account.