Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important puzzle in theory of mind development is the performance shift in false belief understanding between the ages of 3 to 4. Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) theory (Leslie et al., 2005) argues that changes in inhibitory power (IP) account for this shift. Wang and colleagues (2019) developed a computational model to implement this theory, where they quantified the role of IP using group averaged data. Here, we extend the Wang and colleagues' (2019) model to account for changes happening across time at the individual level. We model a novel dataset where 14 children were repeatedly tested during this transitional period on average every 20 days. Their performance in high and low inhibitory demand false belief tasks (FBT), and an independent measure of their inhibitory control, was collected. We find that the model framework is successful in predicting matching inferences on children's IP given their performance in different FBTs.