1 Developmental diversity in mindreading and metacognition

Although mindreading and metacognition are shared by all humans, they are variously influenced and shaped by cultural practices. A first aim of this chapter is to explain why children seem to present different patterns of development across culture for solving false belief tasks. Anthropological evidence will be offered suggesting that the tests devised for Western children might not be adequate outside Western cultures. Alternative practices and values, such as the willingness/refusal to express one's own mental states, the degree of autonomous agency allocated to young children, and the style of communication used in child-rearing might in part explain the timing differences in the development of mindreading. A second aim is to identify the sociocultural factors that might also differentially impact the development of metacognitive abilities. We propose that the cultural practices that regulate patterns of attention, ways of learning and communicational pragmatics should differentially influence the kinds of epistemic decisions that need to be monitored and the process of attribution of knowledge to the self in young children. On the basis of an experiment with German, Japanese and Yucatec Mayan children, we will present evidence for cross-cultural diversity in the development of implicit and explicit assessments of knowledge.