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Cited by 360

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 165 of the 165 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Children’s understanding of second-order mental states.

Miller, Scott A.·2009·Psychological Bulletin

Abstract

The most popular topic in theory-of-mind research has been first-order false belief: the realization that it is possible to hold false beliefs about events in the world. A more advanced development is second-order false belief: the realization that it is possible to hold a false belief about someone else's belief. This article reviews research directed to second-order false belief and other forms of higher order, recursive mentalistic reasoning. Three general issues are considered. Research directed to developmental changes indicates that preschoolers typically fail second-order tasks and that success emerges at about age 5 or 6, although results vary some with method of assessment. Research directed to the consequences of second-order competence has revealed positive relations with a number of other aspects of children's development. Finally, measures of both language and executive function relate positively to performance on second-order tasks; the causal bases for the correlations, however, remain to be established. This article concludes with suggestions for future research.

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Metadata

Authors
Miller, S. A.
Venue
Psychological Bulletin
Published
2009
Volume
135
Issue
5
Pages
749-773
ISSN
  • 0033-2909 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1455
OpenAlex
W2010048121
Cited by
360
References
165
FWCI
15.57
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Children’s understanding of second-order mental states. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/a0016854
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Miller, S. A. (2009). Children’s understanding of second-order mental states. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016854

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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.