One question about early understanding of the mind concerns when young children realize that pretence involves persons' thoughts or mental attitudes. Two experiments explored this understanding in 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds. In focal pretence tasks, children judged the thoughts of an absent puppet (Study 1) or person (Study 2) regarding a transformation of an initial pretence stipulation. For comparison, children completed a benchmark false belief task (Study 1) or a modified trick task (Study 2). Overall, children responded accurately when assessing another person's pretence‐directed thoughts but less so when reasoning about someone else's beliefs. By age 3 years, children appropriately assessed others' thoughts towards pretend happenings, demonstrating that they view pretence as both mentalistic and subjective.
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Hickling et al. (1997) studied this question.