Chapter 26: False-Belief Understanding and Predictive Processing

False-Belief Understanding and Predictive Processing thoroughly examines the "developmental paradox" wherein three-year-olds fail elicited-response tests (such as the Maxi or Smarties tasks) that require verbal predictions, while infants as young as 15 months demonstrate understanding in spontaneous-response measures, including violation-of-expectation, anticipatory-looking, and active-helping paradigms,. The text critically evaluates diverse theoretical interpretations of this discrepancy, such as dual-system accounts that distinguish between minimal and propositional theory of mind, single-system perspectives focusing on executive processing loads, behavior-rule hypotheses, and interactionist approaches that emphasize second-person engagement and social affordances over third-person observation,. A central focus is the application of the Predictive Processing paradigm, which conceptualizes the brain as a probabilistic inference system aiming to minimize prediction error through either perceptual inference (updating internal models) or active inference (changing the world to fit the model),. The chapter argues that young children may fail elicited tasks because they are unable to employ active inference to resolve prediction errors and lack the inhibitory control to resist the default tendency toward perceptual inference when an agent is absent,. Finally, the discussion addresses the compatibility of PP with 4E cognition, navigating the tension between the representational commitments of predictive coding and the non-representational views of radical enactivism, suggesting a reconciliation through action-oriented representations,.