title: Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: when children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others.
abstract: The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.
authors: Institute of Language and Communication Sciences, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
authors: Fabrice
authors: F
authors: Clément
authors: Stéphane
authors: S
authors: Bernard
authors: Laurence
authors: L
authors: Kaufmann
mesh_terms: D002652:Child Behavior / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D056345:Theory of Mind / Q000502:physiology*