The roles of behavioral and affective cues and false belief in children's trait attributions.

Children as young as 3 years can make trait attributions based on behavioral and emotional cues, but such skills continue to develop across childhood. ​Theory of mind understanding, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, may provide a foundation for early development of trait attributions. The purpose of the current study was to explore the impact of behavioral and affective cues on children's trait attributions, if their attributes changed incrementally across five repeated instances of an observed behavior, and to what extent such patterns of attributions are related to false belief, a key concept of theory of mind.