Turkish preschoolers show an advantage in their understanding of their own representational change over others' false belief

Recent studies suggest that Turkish preschoolers exhibit a different pattern of theory of mind development than Western samples, particularly with respect to understanding the diversity of beliefs and knowledge acquisition. The present study posits that such differences extend to distinctions between understanding others' false belief and one's own representational change. Across two experiments, we found that preschoolers in Türkiye (n = 493; 249 Girls and 244 Boys) showed superior performance when asked a question about their own representational change compared with their understanding of another's false belief. These findings support the hypothesis that Turkish children attend to different facets of their own mental states, which might influence reasoning about their own representational change differently from others' false belief.