© MPI f. Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Thanks to a critical fibre connection in the brain (green) by the age of four years we suddenly start to understand what other people think.
By the age of four years we suddenly start to understand what other people think and that their beliefs about the world might differ from our own. We then manage to do what 3-year-olds are not yet capable of - we can put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig were able to show what supports this milestone in development: the maturation of a critical fibre connection in the brain.
If you tell a 3-year-old child the following story of little Maxi, they will most probably not understand: Maxi puts his
chocolate on the kitchen table, then leaves to play outside. While he is gone, his mother puts the chocolate in the cupboard. Where will Maxi look for his chocolate? A 3-year-old child will not understand why Maxi would be surprised not to find the chocolate on the table where he left it. It is only by the age of 4 years that a child will correctly predict that Maxi will look for his chocolate where he left it and not in the cupboard where it is now.
Something similar can be observed when you show the 3-year-old child a chocolate box that contains pencils instead of chocolates. If you ask the child what another child would expect to be in the box, they will answer "pencils," although the other child would not know this. Only a year later, around the age of four years, however, they will understand that the other
child had hoped for chocolates.
Thus, there is a crucial developmental breakthrough between three and four years: This is when we start to attribute thoughts and beliefs to others and to understand that their beliefs can be different from ours. Before that age, thoughts don't seem to exist independently of what we see and know about the world. That is, this is when we develop a "Theory of Mind."
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