Human Mentalizing: Its Scope and Limits

The main function of mentalizing is to provide human adults with intuitive higher-order beliefs about others' mental states.Behavioral evidence for false-belief attribution has been widely regarded as the hallmark of an attributor's mentalistic expectations about an agent's instrumental action.As it turns out, the developmental investigation of children's capacity to attribute false beliefs to others has yielded discrepant findings.While preschoolers have been shown to fail verbal false-belief tasks, findings based on non-verbal tests suggests that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her belief.Why? This volume addresses this experimental discrepancy by offering a pragmatic explanation of the failure of preschoolers on verbal false-belief tasks.Further findings also show that preverbal infants appropriately respond to the presence of ostensive cues whereby the agent of a non-verbal communicative action (pointing, for example) provides them with ev