PRESCHOOLERS UNDERSTANDING OF OTHERS MENTAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS PRETENDHAPPENINGS

One question about early understanding of the mind concerns when young children realize that pretence involves persons thoughts or mental at titudes. Two experiments explored this understanding in 3- and 4-year- olds. In focal pretence tasks, children judged the thoughts of an abse nt 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 pers on's pretence-directed thoughts but less so when reasoning about someo ne else's beliefs. By age 3 years, children appropriately assessed oth ers' thoughts towards pretend happenings, demonstrating that they view pretence as both mentalistic and subjective.