Colloquium Liesbeth Flobbe

Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals and
intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other
people's beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating
second order ToM reasoning.

A standard task to test second order reasoning is the false belief task. A
different approach is used by Hedden; Zhang (2002, Cognition 85), who
investigated the application of ToM reasoning in a strategic game. Another task
that is thought to involve second order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that
the listener can only understand by considering the speaker"s alternatives.

In this research a group of 8-10 year old children and a group of adults were tested
on (adaptations of) the three tasks described above. The results show interesting
differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this
experiment and previous research.