An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM.

中文翻译：

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感知访问推理 (PAR) 在开发心理表征理论中的作用

儿童社会和认知发展的一个重要部分是他们理解人是具有内在心理状态的心理生物，包括欲望、意图、感知和信念。将人完全理解为心理存在需要一种心理表征理论（ToM），这是一种理解，即心理状态可以忠实地代表现实，也可以歪曲现实。在过去的 35 年中，研究人员一直将错误信念任务作为黄金标准来测试儿童对信念可能歪曲现实的理解。在错误信念任务中，要求孩子们推理对情况有错误信念的代理人的行为。尽管大量证据表明大多数孩子在学龄前结束时通过了错误信念任务，但我们在本专着中提供的证据表明，大多数孩子直到童年中期才理解错误信念，甚至令人惊讶的是，甚至不理解真实信念。我们认为，幼儿通过使用感知访问推理在不理解错误信念的情况下通过错误信念任务（标准杆）。通过 PAR，孩子们明白看到会导致当下的知道，但并不知道知道也是由思考产生的，或者在情况发生变化后作为记忆和信念持续存在。出于同样的原因，PAR 会导致孩子们在真实信念任务中失败。PAR 理论可以解释代表性 ToM 和相关任务的其他传统测试的性能，并且可以解释已发现与真实和错误信念性能相关或影响的因素。该理论提供了一种新的实验室测量方法，我们将其标记为信念理解量表（BUS）。该量表可以区分使用 PAR 操作的孩子和理解信念的孩子。该量表提供了一种研究代表性 ToM 发展所需的方法。