Longitudinal Relations Between Representational and Advanced Theory of Mind and Scientific Reasoning From Ages 4 to 7.

Children's scientific reasoning involves integrating early-developing causal reasoning capacities with the metacognitive capacity to represent and update the likelihood of hypotheses given evidence. Numerous studies have shown relations between children's scientific reasoning and certain metacognitive capacities, particularly 6- to 10-year-olds' developing theory of mind. Several recent studies suggest, however, that nascent scientific reasoning capacities emerge during the preschool years. The present study examined relations between children's developing representational and advanced theory of mind with their scientific reasoning using a longitudinal design. At 4-, 5.5-, and 7.5-years-old children received age-appropriate measures of scientific reasoning, theory of mind, executive function, and language ability. Performance on the theory of mind measures at each age related to children's scientific reasoning. Performance on representational theory of mind measures at 4-years-old also predicted children's scientific reasoning later in development, both directly at 5.5-years-old and indirectly through performance on more advanced theory of mind measures at 7.5-years-old. These relations held controlling for the measures of executive function and language ability, which also related to children's scientific reasoning. These findings point to the onset of representational theory of mind as being vital to the origins of children's scientific reasoning. As children's representational capacities develop during the preschool and early elementary-school years, children's scientific reasoning capacities become more advanced.