In response to Wimmer and Mayringer’s (this issue) report “False belief understanding in young children: Explanations do not develop before predictions”, the theoretical importance of the explanation versus prediction issue is expanded and the empirical conclusion of the report is questioned.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Bartsch, K. (1996). Between desires and beliefs: Young children’s action predictions . Child Development, 67, 1671-1685 .
2.
Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H.M. (1989). Young children’s attribution of action to beliefs and desires . Child Development, 60, 946-964 .
3.
Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H.M. (1995). Children talk about the mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press .
4.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
5.
Fodor, J.A. (1992). A theory of the child’s theory of mind . Cognition, 44, 283-296 .
6.
Gelman, S.A., & Wellman, H.M. (1991). Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious . Cognition, 38, 213-244 .
7.
Gopnik, A. (in press). Explanation as orgasm. Minds and machines.
8.
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A.N. (1996). Words, thoughts and theories. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press .
9.
Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H.M. (1994). The theory theory. In L. Hirschfield & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 257-293). New York: Cambridge University Press .
10.
Keil, F.C. (1987). Conceptual development and category structure . In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization. Emory symposia in cognition (Vol. 1, pp. 175-200 ). New York: Cambridge University Press.
11.
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
12.
Robinson, E.J., & Mitchell, P. (1995). Masking of children’s early understanding of the representational mind: Backwards explanation versus prediction . Child Development, 66, 1022-1039 .
13.
Siegal, M. (1991). Knowing children: Experiments in conversation and cognition. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd.
14.
Wellman, H.M. (1990). The child’s theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
15.
Wimmer, H., & Mayringer H. (this issue). False belief understanding in young children: Explanations do not develop before predictions . International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22, 403-422 .
16.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining functions of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception . Cognition, 13, 103-128 .
17.
Wimmer, H., & Weichbold, V. (1994). Children’s theory of mind: Fodor’s heuristics examined . Cognition, 53, 45-57 .
