Belief-desire reasoning: Biases, processing models, and developmental shifts
It’s well-known that there is a shift in how children reason about false
beliefs around four years of age. By developing and investigating a
processing model of belief-desire reasoning, we discovered two further
shifts. A second shift occurs around five to six years and a third
occurs much later, perhaps around puberty. I will describe two versions
of a model of how the contents of attributed beliefs are selected, the
different biases they predict, and results from tasks designed to test
their predictions. The famous first shift at four is not all that special
and in particular does not signal the emergence of the concept of belief
-- indeed, this has emerged long before.