Children's understanding of recursive mental states

The present study examined when elementary school children (grades 1-6) come to understand recursive mental states. 3 second-order false-belief tasks were prepared : Ice-cream story (Perner & Wimmer, 1985), Birthday story (Sullivan et al., 1994), and a new Transfer story, which was simple and easy to test. Participants (N=378) were given a lie-joke story to test whether or not they could distinguish a lie from a joke. Results showed that the Transfer story was easy to understand, and that most first-graders (6-7 years old) could attribute second-order beliefs. The ability to distinguish a lie from a joke was strongly correlated with the ability to attribute second-order beliefs and intentions. Therefore, it was suggested that understanding of recursive mental states was a prerequisite for being able to distinguish a lie from a joke.