Scaling of Advanced Theory-of-Mind Tasks
Abstract
Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and perspective-taking abilities. The results refuted a unidimensional scale and revealed three distinct AToM factors: social reasoning, reasoning about ambiguity, and recognizing transgressions of social norms. Developmental progressions emerged for the two reasoning factors but not for recognizing transgressions of social norms. Both social factors were significantly related to inhibition, whereas language development only predicted performance on social reasoning. These findings suggest that AToM comprises multiple abilities, which are subject to distinct cognitive influences. Importantly, only two AToM factors involve conceptual development.
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Cross-sectional studies have shown age-related change in theory of mind ability in middle childhood and early adolescence.
“a number of cross-sectional studies have shown age-related change in ToM ability in middle childhood and early adolescence (Banerjee et al., 2011; Devine et al., 2023; Osterhaus et al., 2016; Peterson & Wellman, 2019).”
From Longitudinal development of theory of mind in adolescence and its associations with fiction reading experience. (2025) · cites this paper as Osterhaus et al., 2016
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Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker
Sclar, M., Kumar, S., West, P., Suhr, A., Choi, Y., & Tsvetkov, Y. (2023) · Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.780 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
van der Kleij, S. W., Devine, R. T., Shapiro, L. R., Ricketts, J., & Apperly, I. (2025) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/dev0001965 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
- Authors
- Osterhaus, C., Koerber, S., & Sodian, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Education Freiburg (DE)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Osterhaus, Christopher
- Venue
- Child Development
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2016-11-01
- Volume
- 87
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1971-1991
- ISSN
- 0009-3920 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8624
- OpenAlex
- W2472908287
- Cited by
- 147
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 30 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 17.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- Child Development (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Freiburg University of Education
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Education › Early Childhood Education and Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology › Developmental and Educational Neuropsychology
- Keywords
- false belief understanding, social reasoning, emotion recognition, perspective taking, inhibition, language development, conceptual development, elementary school students, cognitive development
- MeSH terms
- Child, Child Development, Concept Formation, Female, Humans, Inhibition, Psychological, Language Development, Male, Neuropsychological Tests, Social Behavior, Thinking, Theory of Mind
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