To get the grasp: seven-month-olds encode and selectively reproduce goal-directed grasping.

Infants need to analyze human behavior in terms of goal-directed actions in order to form expectations about agents' rationality. There is converging evidence for goal encoding during the first year of life from looking time as well as social learning paradigms using imitation procedures. However, conceptual interpretations of these abilities are challenged by low-level motor resonance accounts that propose task-specific lower level sensorimotor associations underlying looking time tasks rather than abstract conceptual knowledge.

Continuity from an implicit to an explicit understanding of false belief from infancy to preschool age.

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about goal-directed actions even in the second year of life. The present study presents data from a sample of N= 70 infants who were tested longitudinally at 15, 18, 30, 36 and 48 months with implicit and explicit Theory of Mind measures, as well as an assessment of verbal IQ.

Infants' joint attention skills predict toddlers' emerging mental state language.

To assess predictive relations between joint attention skills, intention understanding, and mental state vocabulary, 88 children were tested with measures of comprehension of gaze and referential pointing, as well as the production of declarative gestures and the comprehension and production of imperative gestures, at the ages of 7-18 months. Infants' intention-based imitation skills were assessed at 12, 15, and 18 months. At the ages of 24 and 36 months, toddlers' internal state lexicon was evaluated by parents with a German adaptation of the Mental State Language Questionnaire (Olineck & Poulin-Dubois, 2005).

True- and false-belief reasoning in children and adults: an event-related potential study of theory of mind.

The understanding that another person's belief can differ from reality and that behaviour is guided by beliefs and not by reality reflects an important cornerstone in the development of a Theory of Mind. The present event-related potential (ERP) study had two aims: first, to reveal ERPs that distinguish between false- and true-belief reasoning and second, to investigate the neural changes in the development of false- and true-belief reasoning from childhood to adulthood. True- and false-belief cartoon stories were presented to adults and 6-8-year-old children.

Precursors to a theory of mind in infancy: perspectives for research on autism.

There is ample evidence for a conceptual deficit in normally developing 3-year-olds' and autistic children's understanding of the mind. Recent research using nonverbal tasks has challenged this view since even 15-month-old infants appear to base their action predictions on a representation of the agent's beliefs (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005). Our own findings from looking-time experiments indicate, however, that 16-month-olds' action predictions depend on behavioural and situational cues, rather than on a person's access to information.

Neural correlates of true and false belief reasoning.

Belief reasoning plays a central role in making inferences about other people's mental states. The ability to reason about false beliefs is considered as a critical test for having a Theory of Mind (ToM). There is some controversy as to whether it is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) or the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) that is centrally involved in belief reasoning.

Now I see it but you don't: 14-month-olds can represent another person's visual perspective.

Twelve- and 14-month-old infants' ability to represent another person's visual perspective (Level-1 visual perspective taking) was studied in a looking-time paradigm. Fourteen-month-olds looked longer at a person reaching for and grasping a new object when the old goal-object was visible than when it was invisible to the person (but visible to the infant). These findings are consistent with the interpretation that infants 'rationalized' the person's reach for a new object when the old goal-object was out of sight.

The self and action in theory of mind research.

Research on children's developing theories of mind has contributed to our understanding of the developmental relation of self and action (1) by exploring the relation of the development of self knowledge to the development of knowledge of others' minds and (2) by investigating the relation between theory of mind development and the development of action control. We argue that evidence on theory of mind reasoning in children with deficient action control (ADHD-diagnosed children) is especially relevant to the second issue and we present some first evidence supporting the bi-directional hypothesis, that is, the view that theory of mind leads to improved action control which in turn supports the ability to represent mental states on-line.