Preschoolers' explanations of actions based on past realities and false beliefs

We explored preschoolers' ability to explain actions that were motivated by two different phenomena: false beliefs and past realities. While both contexts were identical with respect to their explanatory requirements, only the false-belief context required children to understand that a mis-representation was the basis of the action. Results revealed that children were significantly more competent at explaining actions in the past-reality context than the false-belief context. Even so, 3-year-olds experienced some difficulty with the past-reality context signalling a more fundamental limitation generating explanations in light of an unexpected change. These findings have implications for the debate surrounding children's false-belief-based predictions versus explanations, and explanatory capacity more broadly during the preschool years.