We investigated the relationship between infants' ability to coordinate their attention with that of other people and later Theory of Mind skills (i.e., the understanding that people have mental states such as desires, intentions and beliefs) in a sample of 28 children from middle class families in Brazil. Results showed that children's ability to follow the examiner's gaze and pointing gestures at nine months of age significantly predicted their performance on false-belief tasks at the age of four years, independently of variations in their non-verbal intelligence. These findings suggest that, at end of the first year of life, children's joint attention behaviors indicate intentional understanding.
Joint attention; theory of mind; false-belief tasks