Consciousness and control: The argument from developmental psychology

Limitations of Dienes and Perner's (D and P's) theory are traced to the assumption that the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is true. D and P claim that 18-month-old children are capable of explicitly representing factuality, from which it follows (on D and P's theory) that they are capable of explicitly representing content, attitude, and self. D and P then attempt to explain 3-year-olds' failures on tests of voluntary control such as the dimensional change card sort by suggesting that at this age children cannot represent content and attitude explicitly. We provide a better levels-of-consciousness account for age-related abulic dissociations between knowledge and action.