Both theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning have been related to children's academic abilities. In a longitudinal study with 112 children, we investigated the influence of these two abilities on children's math and reading performance at 7 years of age. We found that math performance was predicted by concurrent working memory as well as by…

The metarepresentational aspect of early pretend play (make-believe activities where children create or participate in creating a new situation different from a real one) has been theoretically debated. In the present longitudinal study of N = 83 children, we tested for predictive relations of shared attention at 12-18 months, implicit false…

In a longitudinal study (N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children's implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to…

It has been argued that the distinction between factivity and non-factivity is more fundamental to mental state understanding than that between false beliefs and reality. The present study examined children's growing understanding of all possible contrasts between the factive verb "know" and the non-factive verbs "think" and…

The present longitudinal study aims at investigating the interplay between child temperament, mother-child interaction quality and child Theory of Mind (ToM) at preschool age with regard to the development of child problem behavior at school age in 115 participants. Maternal sensitivity and child temperament were assessed when children were 4…

First-order theory of mind (ToM) development has shown to conform to a Guttman scale, with desire reasoning developing before belief reasoning. There have been attempts to test for internal consistency and scalability in advanced ToM, but not over a broad age range and only with a limited set of tasks. This 2-year longitudinal study (N = 155;…

Do social cognition and epistemological understanding promote elementary school children's experimentation skills? To investigate this question, 402 children (ages 8, 9, and 10) in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were assessed for their experimentation skills, social cognition (advanced theory of mind [AToM]), epistemological understanding (understanding…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…