Three- and four-year-old children's ability to use desire- and belief-based reasoning

Recently, several researchers have claimed that young 3-year-old children rely on desire when making behavioral predictions and that this causes poor performance on standard measures of false-belief understanding. This study investigates this claim. Results suggest that young children may, in fact, be using desire to predict behavior in these standard paradigms. Importantly, it is the desires of the agent, not the child's own desires that are used to make the prediction. Further, older preschool children also have some difficulty coordinating both belief and desire when processing demands are increased. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.