We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving (...) with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children's episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks. (shrink)

"Theory of mind� describes the ability to impute mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, to oneself and to other people. Usually we want to know why people did what they did and we wonder what they are going to do next. That is, everyday we try to predict and explain human behaviour. In order to do this we refer to a person"s beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions etc. Behaviour is the product of belief and desire: People do things because (...) they desire something and believe some act will achieve it. For adults it is clear that our assumptions about reality do not necessarily match the real world; but we know, regardless of whether our beliefs are true or not, our beliefs direct our actions. In contrast, it is not until the age of 4 years that children understand that one can be mistaken about the world and that actions can be based on this false belief. (shrink)

We investigate the common development of children’s ability to “look back in time” and to “look into the future” . Experiment 1 with 59 children 5 to 8.5 years old showed mental rotation, as a measure of prospection, explaining specific variance of free recall, as a measure of episodic remembering when controlled for cued recall. Experiment 2 with 31 children from 5 to 6.5 years measured episodic remembering with recall of visually experienced events when controlling for recall of indirectly conveyed (...) events . Quite unexpectedly rotators were markedly worse on indirect items than non-rotators. We speculate that with the ability to rotate children switch from knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering, which maintains success for experienced events but has detrimental effects for indirect information. (shrink)