Three studies were done to test the hypothesis that there is a development in early childhood from a less advanced (Level 1) to a more advanced (Level 2) form of knowledge and thinking about people's visual experiences. Study 1 replicated and further validated a previous finding that 3-year-olds perform very well on tasks that call for Level 1 knowledge but very poorly on those that require Level 2 knowledge. Study 2 showed that children of this age did not perform better when critical aspects of Level 2 tasks were designed to be familiar to them and similar to what they might encounter in everyday life. Study 3 showed that most of the children who performed poorly on Level 2 tasks in Study 2 continued to perform poorly on a retest given 2-19 weeks later. In addition, a brief training period following the retest proved largely unsuccessful in inducing Level 2 knowledge and thinking in these children. The results of these three studies appear to provide strong support for the Level 1-Level 2 developmental hypothesis.

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7 studies of the acquisition of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction suggest the following course of development. Many 3-year-olds seem to possess little or no understanding of the distinction. They fail the simplest Appearance-Reality (AR) tasks and are unresponsive to efforts to teach them the distinction. Skill in solving simple AR tasks is highly correlated with skill in solving simple perceptual Perspective-taking (PT) tasks; this suggests the hypothesis that the ability to represent the selfsame stimulus in two different, seemingly incompatible ways may underlie both skills. Children of 6-7 years have acquired both skills but nevertheless find it very difficult to reflect on and talk about such appearance-reality concepts as "looks like," "really and truly," and "looks different from the way it really and truly is." In contrast, children of 11-12 years, and to an even greater degree college students, possess a substantial body of rich, readily accessible, and explicit knowledge in this area.

Three experimental tests were made of the hypothesis that understanding of the pretend-real distinction develops earlier than understanding of the theoretically related apparent-real distinction. As predicted, 3-year-old children consistently performed better on pretend-real tasks than on apparentreal tasks, even when the two tasks were identical except for the distinction tested. Speculations were made about why understanding of the two distinctions might develop in that particular sequence and about how they might be related developmentally Psychologists have long been interested in the development of children's knowledge about the mind (Piaget, 1929). In fact, much of the now-extensive research literature on metacognitive and social-cognitive acquisitions has dealt with one or another aspect of this development. For reviews of this literature, see,

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