Intellectual development is primarily considered a domain specific enterprise. Children develop naïve physics, a folk psychology (theory of mind), a naïve biology, etc. But understanding perspective is a general, overarching phenomenon that cuts across such domains in development and in the brain. This has important theoretical consequences. For instance, our folk psychology cannot consist of a uniform "theory of mind" for explaining behaviour. Parts of the theory that are sensitive to per...

Metacognition refers to the awareness an individual has of their own mental processes (also referred to as ' thinking about thinking'). In the past thirty years metacognition research has become a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary research within the cognitive sciences. Just recently, there have been major changes in this field, stimulated by the controversial issues of metacognition in nonhuman animals and in early infancy. Consequently the question what defines a metacognitive p...