Discontinuity from implicit to explicit theory of mind from infancy to preschool age

• Published in: Cognitive development Vol. 65; p. 101273
• Main Authors: Poulin-Dubois, Diane, Goldman, Elizabeth J., Meltzer, Alexandra, Psaradellis, Elaine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.01.2023
• Subjects: False belief; Implicit tasks; Longitudinal study; Theory of Mind; False belief; Theory of Mind; Longitudinal study; Implicit tasks
• ISSN: 0885-2014; 1879-226X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2022.101273

Recent studies have reported stability in Theory of Mind (ToM) skills from infancy to early childhood, although others have failed to report such findings. The present longitudinal study tested infants’ performance on two implicit ToM tasks at 18 months of age, assessing the false belief concept and knowledge attribution abilities. Explicit ToM was measured at 4 years of age with the Wellman and Liu (2004) Theory of Mind Scale and a parental questionnaire, the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS). None of the cross-wave correlations reached statistical significance. To increase the sample size, we then combined the data with a published experiment that tested the same constructs (N = 97) and replicated the lack of stability in the larger sample. These results challenge the conclusion that explicit false belief reasoning develops out of a precocious false belief concept. •Previous research suggests that false belief tested with implicit tasks can be challenging to replicate.•Infants performed poorly on a false belief interactive task but as expected on knowledge attribution task.•Recent studies testing the long-term stability of theory of mind have yielded mixed results.•No stability was observed between performance on theory of mind tasks at 18 months and theory of mind skills at 4 years.