Abstract. Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people’s beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second-order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second-order ToM reasoning is the second-order false belief task. A different approach to investigating ToM reasoning is through its application in a strategic game. Another task that is believed to involve the application of second-order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the hearer can only understand by considering the speaker’s alternatives. In this study we tested 40 children between 8 and 10 years old and 27 adult controls on (adaptations of) the three tasks mentioned above: the false belief task, a strategic game, and a sentence comprehension task. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this study and previous research.

This paper was originally written while the author was at the University of California at Berkeley

The first purpose of the studies reported was to compare the ability of autistic children in understanding false belief with the corresponding abilities of normal or mentally retarded children. Unexpected location tasks adapted from the Sally- Anne false belief tasks were used in experiment 1. Autistic children performed worse than normal children and the mentally retarded children, but the difference in performance between the autistic and the mentally retarded children was not significant. Similar results emerged when the unexpected content tasks adapted from the Smarties tasks were used in experiment 2.