Same or different? ERP correlates of pretense and false belief reasoning in children

Pretend play, emerging at about 18 months, and explicit false belief (FB) understanding, arising around 4 years, constitute two pivotal milestones in the development of a Theory of Mind since both involve the ability to separate real from non-real content. The developmental lag has evoked vivid discussion with respect to whether or not pretense (PT) involves a metarepresentational understanding similar to FB. However, in children PT and FB have not yet been contrasted on a neural level to reveal whether they are subserved by the same neurocognitive mechanism. Therefore, the present event-related potential (ERP) study compared PT to a FB and to a non-mental control condition in 6- to 8-year-old children. Results revealed distinct ERP components for PT and FB. PT elicited a parietal P2, which was assumed to reflect the detection of incongruence, and a negative frontal slow wave (290-600 ms), which was associated with the identification of the intention underlying the pretend behavior. In contrast, FB evoked the characteristic positive fronto-central late slow wave (290-920 ms) that is supposed to indicate metarepresentation. Further, the broad distribution of the anterior slow-wave patterns associated with PT and FB reasoning was assumed to reflect the ongoing structural development and neural specialization of the respective areas, indicating the developmental progress in conceptualizing the mental domain. Given the differences in latency, polarity, and topography, PT and FB seem to rely on distinct neural substrates in children. The early negative frontal slow wave indicates that for PT reasoning children may use simple mentalizing processes such as intention processing, whereas the late positive slow-wave shows that for FB children may engage in metarepresentational processing. Therefore, the present findings seem to substantiate theoretical accounts postulating simple mentalistic reasoning for PT in children.