Social Cognition: Development of theory of mind reasoning

Children's understanding of mind has recently attracted great attention in developmental psychology. In the new wave of research in this area, it has been argued that human beings are equipped with a certain capacity through which understand others. This capacity or what is called "theory of mind" is an ability to impute mental states to self and others. According to this literature, by having a mentalistic understanding of behaviors, a person can appreciate, explain, and predict other's behaviors. The processes and mechanisms involved in theory of mind reasoning and their developments have been extensively studied during last two decades. The false-belief reasoning tasks as standard tests in measuring theory of mind ability generally show that children about 4 and 5 years are able to succeed in such tasks. Accordingly, it has been argued that children before 4 years have an undeveloped understanding of mind. Theory-theory, modularity and simulation approaches each describes theory of mind specifically. In the following paper, the theory-theory, the modularity, and the simulation's perspectives on processes and mechanisms involved in theory of mind have been explained