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The Child's Theory of Mind
Abstract
Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind—that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Bradford Books imprint
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Citations
Cited by
Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-Mind Development: The Truth about False Belief
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00304 · Cited by 4,476
Self-citationCulture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.2.291 · Cited by 4,263
Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004) · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · doi:10.1023/b:jadd.0000022607.19833.00 · Cited by 4,093
The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts
Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/209380 · Cited by 3,811
Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment.
Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002) · Heuristics and Biases · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511808098.004 · Cited by 3,476
Metadata
- Authors
- Wellman, H. M., Carey, S., Gleitman, L., Newport, E. L., & Spelke, E. S.
- Venue
- The MIT Press eBooks
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Published
- 1990-07-19
- OpenAlex
- W2133520183
- Cited by
- 2,419
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 64.17
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Child's Theory of Mind. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.7551/mitpress/1811.001.0001
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- Wellman, H. M., Carey, S., Gleitman, L., Newport, E. L., & Spelke, E. S. (1990). The Child's Theory of Mind. The MIT Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1811.001.0001
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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.
