Executive Functioning and Preschoolers' Understanding of False Beliefs, False Photographs, and False Signs

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers ’ emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N5 44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds’ performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted perfor-mance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 (N5 54) replicated the finding from Study 1 and showed that performance on the executive functioning task also predicted 3- to 5-year-olds ’ performance on false sign tasks. These findings show that executive functioning is required to reason only about represen-tations that are intended to reflect a true state of affairs. Results are discussed with respect to theories of pre-schoolers ’ theory-of-mind development. Theory-of-mind research has become a central focus of research in developmental psychology over the past 20 years, largely because of its far-reaching theoretical and empirical implications for various branches of the discipline, including cognitive de-velopment, social development, and child clinical psychology (Carpendale & Lewis, 2005; Repacholi &amp