Children's development of reasoning about other people's minds

Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people's beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second order reasoning is the false belief task. A different approach is used by Hedden and Zhang (2002), who investigated the application of ToM reasoning in a strategic game. Another task that is thought to involve second order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the listener can only understand by considering the speaker's alternatives. In this research a group of 8-10 year old children and a group of adults were tested on (adaptations of) the three tasks described above. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this experiment and previous research.