Acquisition of a theory of mind and intellectual development in the child aged 3 to 5

The acquisition of a theory of mind by the young child is probably one of most widely discussed issues in today's developmental psychology. In an attempt to gain insight into certain empirical points underlying the debate between the nativist and constructivist conceptions of this acquisition, the present article reports the data obtained in a study on the link between intellectual development (assessed on the WPPSI) and the attribution of false beliefs, assessed using classical tasks. Three essential findings were obtained. First, while the level of expertise required for false-belief attribution and third-person inference was clearly correlated with mental age (chronological age held constant), no link in the reverse direction was observed: in a population of children with the same mental age, chronological age was no help at all in predicting false belief behavior. Second, when the false belief items were regressed over the WPPSI subtests (LISREL model) they were mainly linked to verbal subtests. Third, the arithmetic subtest was by far the best predictor of nearly all of the nine third-person inference items. A few ideas for interpreting this finding are proposed. The study was conducted on 260 children aged 3;6 to 5;3.