Abstract

The present study examined the Perner(1991)'s theory about the theory of mind development. Perner claims that the theory of mind development depends on the acquisition of a more general cognitive ability to metarepresent, that is the ability to represent the representational relationship between a primary representation and what is represents. He claims that 3-year-olds' difficulties in understanding false beliefs are related to a more general conceptual deficit regarding representations in both mental and non-mental domains. In order to examine the Perner's claim, children's performance on the mental representation tasks (false belief tasks and deception tasks) and psysical representation tasks (out-of-date photo tasks and false photo tasks) were compared. The metarepresentation capacity is required to pass the false belief, deception, and false photo tasks in common. In contrast, the secondary representation capacity is required to pass the out-of-date photo tasks. Sixty 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were participated. All three age groups of children performed significantly better on the false photo tasks than on both the false belief and deception tasks. This finding demonstrates that the understanding of false representations precedes in the physical domain than in mental domain. All three age groups of children performed better on the out-of-date photo tasks than on the false photo tasks. This finding demonstrates that children have greater difficulty with metarepresentation tasks than with secondary representation tasks. The result does not clearly support the claim that the theory of mind development is related to the general understanding of representations.