ArticleCognitive development
Helping as an early indicator of a theory of mind: Mentalism or Teleology?
Article in Cognitive development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Relational vs representational social cognitive processing: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Three- but not 2-year-olds misinform others spontaneously in an interaction-based task.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2025Article
- Altercentric Memory Error at 9 Months But Correct Object Memory by 18 Months Revealed in Infants' Pupil.Developmental science · 2025Article
- How robust are egocentric and altercentric interference effects in social cognition? a test with explicit and implicit versions of a continuous false belief task.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Do young children track other's beliefs, or merely their perceptual access? An interactive, anticipatory measure of early theory of mind.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Infants' performance in the indirect false belief tasks: A second-person interpretation.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2021Review
- Actions do not speak louder than words in an interactive false belief task.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Article
- Mindreading in the balance: adults' mediolateral leaning and anticipatory looking foretell others' action preparation in a false-belief interactive task.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms.Developmental science · 2018Article
- The robustness and generalizability of findings on spontaneous false belief sensitivity: a replication attempt.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This article challenges the claim that young children's helping responses in Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (2009) task are based on ascribing a false belief to a mistaken agent. In our first Study 18- to 32-month old children (N = 28) were more likely to help find a toy in the false belief than in the true belief condition. In Study 2, with 54 children of the same age, we assessed the authors' mentalist interpretation of this result against an alternative teleological interpretation that does not make the assumption of belief ascription. The data speak in favor of our alternative. Children's social competency is based more on inferences about what is likely to happen in a particular situation and on objective reasons for action than on inferences about agents' mental states. We also discuss the need for testing serious alternative interpretations of claims about early belief understanding.
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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.