Abstract: This article reviewed researches about children’s inference of mental state which included the actor’s desire, belief, emotion and the authority’s desire in deontic context. In general, the framework which included deontic rules made children to assign inappropriate high weight on the deontic rules. There were also some contradictions among these results. The contradictions might due to the deontic rules which belonged to different domains (such as moral, conventional and prudential domain) and the tasks which were also different (such as behavior prediction and behavior evaluation). Finally, this article pointed out the other two possible factors: the form of deontic rules and the children’s ability of perspective taking

Key words: deontic rules, theory of mind, desire, belief, emotion