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Dale E. Goldhaber

THEORY OF MIND

Theory of mind (ToM) is the understanding of the

mental states of others, including their intentions, de-

sires, beliefs, and emotions. Around the age of eigh-

teen months, a child is able to understand the

intentions of other people. This progresses until the

ages of three to four-and-a-half when children begin

to understand others’ states of knowledge and belief.

Janet Astington, a long-time ToM researcher, has

found that children’s performance on standard false

belief tasks was associated with their production of

joint proposals and explicit role assignments during

pretend play. Success at joint play may have some de-

pendence on representing differing and conflicting

beliefs and goals with the other participant in the play

session. For social development, it is necessary for

children to be able to communicate this information

amongst themselves. With no knowledge about the

mind or their playmate’s beliefs, these pretend play

interactions are quite difficult to execute successfully.

See also: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; EMOTIONAL

DEVELOPMENT

Bibliography

Astington, Janet W. ‘‘Intention in the Child’s Theory of Mind.’’ In

Douglas Frye and Chris Moore eds., Children’s Theories of

Mind: Mental States and Social Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ:

Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Astington, Janet W. Child’s Discovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1993.

Astington, Janet W., Paul L. Harris, and David R. Olson, eds. Devel-

oping Theories of Mind. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Universi-

ty Press, 1990.

Frye, Douglas, and Chris Moore, eds. Children’s Theories of Mind:

Mental States and Social Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum, 1991.

Harris, Paul L., Carl N. Johnson, Deborah Hutton, and Giles An-

drews. ‘‘Young Children’s Theory of Mind and Emotion.’’

Cognition and Emotion, 3, no. 4 (1989):379–400.

Heyes, Cecilia M. ‘‘Theory of Mind in Nonhuman Primates.’’ Be-

havioral and Brain Sciences 21, no. 1 (1998):101–134.

Perner, Josef, Ted Rufman, and Susan R. Leekam. ‘‘Theory of

Mind Is Contagious: You Catch It from Your Sibs.’’ Child De-

velopment 65 (1994):1228–1238.

Sara Salkind

THREE MOUNTAIN TASK

The Three Mountain Task was developed by Jean

Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder in the 1940s to study chil-

dren’s ability to coordinate spatial perspectives. In

the task, a child faced a display of three model moun-

tains while a researcher placed a doll at different view-

points of the display. The researcher asked the child

to reconstruct the display from the doll’s perspective,

select from a set of pictures showing the doll’s view,

THREE MOUNTAIN TASK 417