Early intention understandings that are common to primates predict children's later theory of mind.

Intention understanding emerges early in human development, manifest in deep and robust fashions even in infants. Overlapping intention understandings, encompassing agents as intentional actors and experiencers, are evident in nonhuman primates in more limited fashions. Intention understandings, of the sort shared by infants and nonhuman primates, predict the more comprehensive theory-of-mind understandings of older children. Those early understandings provide a platform for the ontogenesis of further, deeper achievements in the human case.