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Cited by 967

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality

Gopnik, Alison·1993·Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Abstract

As adults we believe that our knowledge of our own psychological states is substantially different from our knowledge of the psychological states of others: First-person knowledge comes directly from experience, but third-person knowledge involves inference. Developmental evidence suggests otherwise. Many 3-year-old children are consistently wrong in reporting some of their own immediately past psychological states and show similar difficulties reporting the psychological states of others. At about age 4 there is an important developmental shift to a representational model of the mind. This affects children's understanding of their own minds as well as the minds of others. Our sense that our perception of our own minds is direct may be analogous to many cases where expertise provides an illusion of direct perception. These empirical findings have important implications for debates about the foundations of cognitive science.

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Metadata

Authors
Gopnik, A.
Venue
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Published
1993-03
Volume
16
Issue
1
Pages
1-14
ISSN
  • 0140-525X (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-1825
OpenAlex
W2108247678
Cited by
967
References
26
FWCI
68.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/s0140525x00028636
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Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00028636

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.