Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy…

The ability to represent desires and intentions as two distinct mental states was investigated in patients with parietal (N = 8) and frontal (N = 6) lesions and in age-matched controls (N = 7). A task was used where the satisfaction of the desire and the fulfilment of the intention did not co-vary and were manipulated in a 2 x 2 set. In two…

A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by "default" (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the…