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intro Theory of mind: according to (Baron and Cohen 2001) theory of mind, refers to the ability to infer a full range of metal states such as beliefs, desires and intentions to one self and to others.It is e believed that as children mature they are able to acknowledge that what they think,believe and know may be different to what others do. As well as gaining the abilities to recognise that this mental states can be manifested in our behaviour.

A conventional way, in which theory of mind is studied is with the use of false belief tasks.This is argued to be a clear test of a representational theory of mind because in order to pass ,children must be able to reason about others beliefs as separate and distinct in content from reality and acknowledge that people's differing mental states can lead to false beliefs about the world.

A commonly used false belief task is the sally-Anne test developed by Wimmer and Perner (1983) This is used to evaluate whether a child has already Acquired ( ToM) . For this task, the child is presented with a fictitious scenario in which two dolls are introduced; sally and Anne. The child is explained that as sally leaves the room, Anne moves sally's marbles from sally's basket in to her own basket. The child ,is then asked where sally will look for her marbles upon her return?

In order to pass the test , The child must take sally's mindset and choose sally's basket, Therefore implying that he/she is aware that sally mental representations of reality can vary from reality and from his own.

It has been found that 3 years old and below typically fail this task, that is, they have not yet acquired theory of mind so predict that the first character will look where the object truly .Then sometime

between 3 and 5 years of age, children gradually come to show false belief understanding by

correctly predicting that the first character will look where she left the object originally.(Perner 1983)

why do kids fail

Contradicting evidence has found that based on observations, The behavioural patters of kids as young as three years old are able to able to reflect a representational understanding of others’ minds. This includes lying and teasing (Moses & Chandler, 1992) Therefore it is argued that Theory of mind emerges at a very early stage of a child's development yet it is not until they acquire expertise in other cognitive domains that hey are able to express it in a way that can be empirically tested.To test this argument, Replications of the false belief test have been conducted and modified so that the complexity of the language used cannot become an extraneous variable

On one hand some argue that the false belief task is not an accurate way of testing ToM .On the premise that children often fail the false belief tasks, not because they lack a conceptual

understanding of representational mental states, but rather because false belief tasks are too

complex, unnatural, and rely on cognitive capacities such as language, working memory, and executive control).This is because the child not only has to understand the verbal instructions bust also remember names and the sequence of the event. (Moses & Chandler, 1992)