Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Abstract

Although it is well established that four‐year‐olds outperform three‐year‐olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four‐year‐olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief‐desire reasoning.