Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present paper is a follow-up to the journal paper (Bra¨uner, 2014) which in turn is a revised and extended version of the conference paper (Bra¨uner, 2013). These papers were concerned with formalizations of the reasoning when giving correct responses to the psychological tests called the Sally-Anne task and the Smarties task, testing children’s capacity to ascribe false beliefs to others. In the present paper we give an analysis of what goes wrong when incorrect answers are given. Our analysis corroborates the claim that children under four and autistic children have difficulties shifting to a perspective different from their own.