ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Learning mechanisms influencing infants' early socio-pragmatic abilities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Trial
- Growth Trajectories of Joint Attention and Play as Predictors for Language in Young Children at Elevated Likelihood for Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- The Intriguingly Social N400 of Preverbal Infants.Developmental neurobiology · 2026Article
- Young children understand how social connections affect what people know about each other.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Neurocognitive Trajectories of Scalar Implicature in Mandarin-Speaking Children: ERP Evidence for Attentional Allocation and Pragmatic Recalibration (4-6 Years).Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Three- but not 2-year-olds misinform others spontaneously in an interaction-based task.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2025Article
- Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pragmatic communication and Theory of Mind.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Theory of Mind Development in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals: A Systematic Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Taking theory of mind research into much needed new terrain - a commentary on Kochanska et al. (2025).Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Bonobos point more for ignorant than knowledgeable social partners.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) mentally represent collaboration?: Action-learning and communication in a partnered task.PloS one · 2025Article
- Shame and development of self: a relational, cognitive, and linguistic perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Being honest won't pay. Seven- but not 5-year-olds begin to predict that others will lie for reputational reasons.PloS one · 2025Article
- Deafness, Hearing Loss and the Development of Mental State Reasoning Skills: A Review.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Developmental Profile in Children Aged 3-6 Years: Down Syndrome vs. Autism Spectrum Disorder.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Selective Action Prediction in Infancy Depending on Linguistic Cues: An EEG and Eyetracker Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Artificial cognition vs. artificial intelligence for next-generation autonomous robotic agents.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To predict and explain the behavior of others, one must understand that their actions are determined not by reality but by their beliefs about reality. Classically, children come to understand beliefs, including false beliefs, at about 4-5 y of age, but recent studies using different response measures suggest that even infants (and apes!) have some skills as well. Resolving this discrepancy is not possible with current theories based on individual cognition. Instead, what is needed is an account recognizing that the key processes in constructing an understanding of belief are social and mental coordination with other persons and their (sometimes conflicting) perspectives. Engaging in such social and mental coordination involves species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, especially as they are manifest in joint attention and linguistic communication, as well as sophisticated skills of executive function to coordinate the different perspectives involved. This shared intentionality account accords well with documented differences in the cognitive capacities of great apes and human children, and it explains why infants and apes pass some versions of false-belief tasks whereas only older children pass others.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.