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Development of theory of mind and executive control
Abstract
Several recent studies have demonstrated a developmental link, in the age range of 3-5 years, between the acquisition of a 'theory of mind' and self control. In this review, we consider the existence of such a link in assessing five competing theoretical hypotheses that might help us to understand the nature of this developmental advance: (1) executive control depends on theory of mind; (2) theory of mind development depends on executive control; (3) the relevant theory of mind tasks require executive control; (4) both kinds of task require the same kind of embedded conditional reasoning; (5) theory of mind and executive control involve the same brain region. We briefly describe these theoretical accounts and evaluate them in the light of existing empirical evidence. At present, only account (3) can be ruled out with some confidence.
... The directionality of the relationship between executive function and ToM has been the subject of considerable debate. Perner and Lang (1999) proposed that a better understanding of one's own mind provides better insight into how to exert self-control and improves the exercise of self-control itself. But those supporting it is executive function which mainly influences ToM (and not the other way around) argue that a sense of personal agency and top-down self-control allows children to understand the mental states of other people (Carlson et al. 2013). ...
... To complicate things further, ToM and executive function recruit common neural regions (Perner and Lang 1999). Brain regions typically involved in executive function also appear to be active during mental state reasoning, but there are also other neurobiological mechanisms underlying ToM and executive functions (Wade et al. 2018). ...
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a construct that reflects people’s ability to understand the mental states of others. In our daily lives, we continuously infer what others are thinking, understanding, feeling, and interpreting, especially with respect to us and other persons. The present chapter is focused on different definitions and concepts of ToM, its development in children and adolescents, and factors related to individual differences. We also analyse how ToM has been assessed in different studies and the methodological issues surrounding its measurement.
... lažna verovanja) deca razvijaju na istom ili sličnom uzrastu kao i neke aspekte egzekutivnih funkcija (npr. inhibicija) (Perner & Lang, 1999). Dodatno, u literaturi postoje objašnjenja koja suprotno mišljenju Rasela ističu da teorija uma zapravo predstavlja preduslov za razvoj egzekutivnih funkcija. ...
... Zadaci inhibicije zahtevaju razumevanje postojećih akcionih šema kao uzroka određenih mentalnih stanja. Do netačnih odgovora na zadacima dolazi jer su kodirane netačne informacije ili zato što su aktivirane šeme akcije koje treba potisnuti (Perner & Lang, 1999). ...
Predškolski uzrast predstavlja period suštinskih promena u sposobnostima dece da eksplicitno rasuđuju o mentalnim stanjima drugih. Cilj istraživanja je bio da se utvrdi odnos između teorije uma, radne memorije i jezičkih sposobnosti kod dece tipičnog razvoja, uzrasta od četiri do osam godina. Za procenu navedenih sposobnosti korišćeni su merni instrumenti: Zadatak lažnog verovanja „Sanja i Ana”, Raspon brojeva unazad, Test verbalnog pamćenja, Test brzine odlučivanja, Gramatika mališana i FONT test. Rezultati istraživanja su ukazali na statistički značajne korelacije između teorije uma, verbalnog pamćenja, kao i nekih aspekata jezičkih sposobnosti. Ipak, kao statistički značajan pokazatelj postignuća na zadacima teorije uma izdvaja se samo verbalno pamćenje (p < .05) koje zajedno sa verbalnom radnom memorijom predviđa 26% varijanse postignuća u usvojenosti teorije uma prvog reda (F = 9.40; df = 2; p = .00) i 15% varijanse postignuća u ukupnom skoru na zadacima procene teorije uma (F = 4.55; df = 2; p = .01). Rezultati istraživanja sugerišu blizak ali intrigantan odnos između teorije uma, egzekutivnih funkcija i jezičkih sposobnosti.
... Finally, there are mixed findings in the literature regarding the developmental sequence of effortful control and theory of mind. However, a compelling hypothesis is that children's understanding that mental states govern actions, inherent to theory of mind, fosters their capacity to exert effortful control over unwanted action tendencies (Perner & Lang, 1999). As young children learn to differentiate what they want and what others expect of them, they can gradually choose to meet (or not) adult demands and inhibit certain behaviors that they understand to be inappropriate in others' eyes, thus showing effortful control (Sharp & Fonagy, 2008). ...
... Theory of mind and effortful control were assessed concurrently in the current study. Accordingly, we initially tested a model that placed theory of mind prior to effortful control in the sequential mediation (Perner & Lang, 1999;Sharp & Fonagy, 2008), but given the concurrent assessments, we also tested an alternative model involving the reverse sequence. Thus, the current study examined a developmental cascade linking paternal mind-mindedness in early toddlerhood to child academic achievement in first grade via language in toddlerhood, theory of mind and effortful control at preschool age, and cognitive school readiness in kindergarten. ...
This study tested a 5-year sequential mediation model linking paternal mind-mindedness in toddlerhood to child early academic achievement through a developmental process unfolding in the preschool years. A sample of 128 mostly White middle-class families (68 girls) living in Montreal, Canada was assessed for paternal mind-mindedness when children were 18 months old, child language at age 2, theory of mind and effortful control at age 4, cognitive school readiness in kindergarten, and finally, achievement in math and reading in first grade. Controlling for maternal mind-mindedness assessed at age 12 months, the results showed prospective associations from paternal mind-mindedness to both math and reading achievement, mediated by theory of mind, effortful control, and school readiness in sequence. Results suggest that paternal mind-mindedness may support child academic outcomes by promoting the acquisition of intermediate skills during preschool years.
... Executive functions (EFs) collectively refer to a set of cognitive skills [34,35] including inhibitory control, planning and cognitive flexibility. Emotion regulation (ER) is an integral part of self-regulation, which is a complex concept that regulates emotions, motivation, cognition (e.g., attention), social interactions, and physical behavior [36]. ...
Introduction
Reversing malnutrition-induced impairment of cognition and emotional regulation is a critical global gap. We hypothesize that brain-targeted micronutrient supplemented nutritional rehabilitation in children with moderate acute malnutrition, followed by 2 years micronutrient supplementation will impact on the cognition and emotion regulation of these children.
Methods
The primary outcome of this prospective, randomized controlled trial is to study the development of executive functions (EFs) and emotion regulation (ER) in this cohort. Moderate acute malnourished (MAM; WLZ/WHZ <-2 and ≥-3 z-score, and/or 11.5 cm ≤ MUAC < 12.5cm; n = 140)children aged around one year (11m-13m) in Mirpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh will be randomized (1:1) to receive either locally produced Ready to Use Supplementary Food (RUSF) or Enhanced Ready to Use Supplementary Food (E-RUSF) until anthropometric recovery (WLZ/WHZ > -1SD), or for 3 months after enrollment (whichever is earlier). The randomized MAMs groups will be given either Small Quantity Lipid Based Nutrient Supplement (SQLNS) or Enhanced Small Quantity Lipid Based Nutrient Supplement (E-SQLNS), respectively until the end of the 2-year follow up period. Standard psychosocial stimulation will be provided to the MAMs intervention groups. Biological samples will be collected, anthropometric and neurocognitive assessments will be performed at 2 (22m-26m) and 3 (34m-38m) years of age. Two control groups will be recruited: 1), non-malnourished one-year (11m-13m) old children (WLZ/WHZ score>-1SD; n = 70); and 2) three—year (34m-38m) old children (n = 70) with untreated MAM (WHZ <-2 and ≥-3 z-score, and/or 11.5≤MUAC<12.5 cm). The 3-year-old MAM reference group will be assessed once and provided with 2 months of nutritional rehabilitation support (RUSF Nutriset’s Plumpy’Sup ™ ).
... The learning process of AI bears some resemblance to the initial stages of human cognitive development. Specifically, the initial cognitive learning process in humans can be categorized into three phases [16][17][18] : infancy, ignorant period and exploratory period (see Fig. 1). In human infancy, the mapping between objects and labels is first established through parental guidance. ...
A novel framework of machine learning--experience learning (EL) is proposed for observing new objects and mastering new skills, which can typically be applied to artificial intelligence robots (AIR) exploring the unknown. Unlike traditional approaches, it is not necessary to prepare a large training sample set prior to model training. Instead, an experience chain is established by continuously observing or stimulating the researched objects and recording these experiences, which is inspired by early human learning behavior. Through continuous observation and attempts, the experience chain is updated and gradually converges toward the actual output probability of the researched object. The current experience unit serves as the basis of EL judgment while past experiences can be discarded using a forget coefficient. The application mode of this framework is illustrated with two simple examples. The cat and dog generator experiment represents the self-exploration for new objects. The virtual basketball machine experiment demonstrates the ability of this method to learn a new skill and to effectively mitigate random interference. By comparison, the similarities and differences between the proposed method and the related algorithms are analyzed. Ultimately, this approach proves valuable in enabling artificial intelligence systems to study and explore the unknown territories.
... The effect of load, along with the effect of P3, on performance in the pure coordination task demonstrate that domain-general cognitive resources play an important role-not only in processing static, pre-given social information as in previous single-participant studies, but also in more naturalistic, dynamic interactions where each individual's previous actions mutually influence subsequent actions. This adds to the growing body of work challenging earlier claims that social alignment is domain-specific and does not require executive control in adults (Fodor, 1992;Leslie, 1994;Perner and Lang, 1999;Fiddick et al., 2000). Surprisingly, we found no evidence for a role of working memory in IBS. ...
Coordinating actions with others is thought to require Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to take perspective by attributing underlying intentions and beliefs to observed behavior. However, researchers have yet to establish a causal role for specific cognitive processes in coordinated action. Since working memory load impairs ToM in single-participant paradigms, we tested whether load manipulation affects two-person coordination. We used EEG to measure P3, an assessment of working memory encoding, as well as inter-brain synchronization (IBS), which is thought to capture mutual adjustment of behavior and mental states during coordinated action. In a computerized coordination task, dyads were presented with novel abstract images and tried selecting the same image, with selections shown at the end of each trial. High working memory load was implemented by a concurrent n-back task. Compared with a low-load control condition, high load significantly diminished coordination performance and P3 amplitude. A significant relationship between P3 and performance was found. Load did not affect IBS, nor did IBS affect performance. These findings suggest a causal role for working memory in two-person coordination, adding to a growing body of evidence challenging earlier claims that social alignment is domain-specific and does not require executive control in adults.
... It is important to note that particular features of an ad may overload viewers' cognitive capacity, causing a decline in recall (Geiger & Reeves 1993;Paul et al. 2003). When there is not enough cognitive capacity available for processing an exposed ad, mental resources are borrowed from other cognitive tasks, thereby causing performance decline (Perner et al. 1999). Brand familiarity tends to reduce the amount of attention to advertisements and prompt better recall. ...
Scarcity appeals have been widely utilized in marketing, yet academic research has predominantly concentrated on the scarcity of products depicted within advertisements rather than the scarcity of the advertisements themselves. The emergence of scarce advertisements, such as one-time view ads on popular social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, has underscored the significance of investigating ad scarcity. This thesis pioneers the exploration of the impact of ad scarcity on viewers' attention and recall, addressing a notable gap in existing literature.
Through three experimental studies, this research supports the hypothesis that ad scarcity positively influences individuals' attention to and recall of an advertisement's content. Furthermore, it identifies boundary conditions affecting this positive effect, specifically focusing on personal traits like Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Social Media Intensity levels, as well as the influence of a visible countdown timer. Importantly, the thesis reveals that the positive impact of ad scarcity extends beyond the immediate scarce ad, influencing the reception of subsequent ads that are not scarce.
This investigation significantly enriches our understanding of scarcity within the context of marketing and contributes valuable insights to the broader discourse on social media marketing. It not only highlights the effects of ad scarcity but also delves into the psychological and contextual factors that modulate these effects. The findings offer both theoretical and practical implications, suggesting new avenues for marketers to engage audiences and enhance ad memorability.
... Executive functioning (EF) is a set of top-down processes that allow individuals to allocate resources for storing, planning, and controlling relevant information during information processing (Perner & Lang, 1999). It encompasses core sub-functions such as working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility (Oh & Lewis, 2008). ...
This study investigates the intricate relations between dispositional mindfulness, executive functioning, rumination, and depression among Chinese high school students. It aims to understand how dispositional mindfulness can potentially predict depression in this demographic, providing insights for preventive interventions targeting adolescent depression. Despite growing recognition of mindfulness in mental health, its relations between executive functioning, rumination, and depression in high school students is not fully understood. The study involved 608 high school students (59.5% female; M age = 16.37 SD = 0.53) from the southwestern region of China. Data were collected using established scales: the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), the Teenage Executive Functioning Inventory (TEXI), the Ruminative Response Scale (RRS), and the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The analysis revealed significant correlations: a significant positive association between mindfulness and executive functioning capabilities, alongside notable negative associations between mindfulness and both rumination and depression, and a negative correlation between executive functioning and both rumination and depression.A positive correlation was observed between rumination and depression. Analytical the mediation model indicated that mindfulness predicts depression in directly, with this predictive effect being partially mediated by executive functioning and rumination in a serial multiple mediation model. These results corroborate the initial hypotheses and highlight the intricate interactions between mindfulness, executive functioning, rumination, and depression in high school student. This study underscores the importance of mindfulness, executive functioning, and rumination in understanding adolescent depression. The findings offer valuable insights for future research and highlight key areas for potential preventive strategies in adolescent mental health.
... It is vitally important to depict two mental states to determine when a faux pas has been committed. This ability involves both cognitive and emotional empathy components [26,27]. After listening to a narrative, the children answer four comprehension questions. ...
Deficits in social cognition in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been associated with difficulties in functioning. Since recognizing emotional facial expressions is essential for developing the perceptual components of the theory of mind (ToM), it is important to assess this relationship in children with ADHD. This study therefore compared the recognition of emotional stimuli and gaze patterns between children with ADHD and healthy children using eye-tracking with dynamic facial images. It also examined the relationship between facial emotion recognition accuracy, gaze patterns, ToM scores, and ADHD symptoms. Children with ADHD aged 8–13 (n = 47) and a control group (n = 38) completed a facial emotion recognition test, ToM tests, and the Conners’ Parent Rating Scale. Participants’ gaze patterns in response to dynamic facial emotion expressions were recorded using eye-tracking technology. Children with ADHD exhibited significantly lower accuracy in the recognition of the facial expressions of disgust and anger. The percentage fixation in the eye region was also significantly lower for happy, angry, sad, disgusted, and neutral emotions in the children with ADHD compared to the control group. No relationship was determined between the percentage of fixations on facial areas of interests and ADHD symptoms or ToM tests. This study provides evidence that children with ADHD experience deficits in visual attention to emotional cues. In addition, it suggests that facial emotion recognition deficits in children with ADHD represent a separate domain of social cognition that develops independently of ToM skills and core symptoms. Understanding and treating the social difficulties of individuals with ADHD may help improve their social functioning.
... From the literature review, the positive relationship between executive functions and perspective-taking has been widely documented from childhood to old age. For instance, several researchers suggested that EF development is a necessary requirement for successful perspective-taking acquisition, independent of age and IQ (Carlson & Moses, 2001b;Pellicano, 2007;Perner & Lang, 1999). Compared to children and elderly adults, whose cognitive control exhibits substantial variability, young adults as a group likely operate at peak cognitive capacity, potentially concealing any influence of individual differences. ...
Multilingual speakers have often been found to be superior in taking another person’s perspective. Also, females are commonly found to have enhanced perspective-taking (PT) abilities compared with males, with male PT being generally more easily affected by external factors. Research on bilingual advantages has been widely verified in children, adults, and the elderly. However, few researchers have paid attention to the bilingual advantages and perspective-taking in adolescents. Perspective-taking skills are often associated with positive behaviors such as prosocial behavior and understanding others. In this study, we used a large and representative sample derived from the 2018 PISA survey to examine the relationship between bilingual experience, perspective-taking, and cognitive flexibility. The moderating effect of cultural individualism was also analyzed. The results of multi-level structural equation modeling (MSEM) indicate that: (1) foreign language learning is positively associated with perspective-taking and cognitive flexibility after controlling for individual-level and country-level demographic variables; (2) cognitive flexibility mediated the association between foreign language learning and perspective-taking; (3) the moderating effect of cultural individualism is significant. Specifically, in collectivist (vs. individualist) countries/societies, there is a stronger association between foreign language learning and perspective-taking.
... Around the ages of 3-4, children begin to comprehend the differences between their own beliefs and knowledge and those of others, and thus begin to comprehend false beliefs; however, this ability does not become fully stable until the ages of 5-6 [94] . Later in the development trajectory [95] is the establishment of second-order ToM, which entails predicting what one person thinks or feels about what another person thinks or feels [94,96] . ...
In addition to a physical comprehension of the world, humans possess a high social intelligence—the intelligence that senses social events, infers the goals and intents of others, and facilitates social interaction. Notably, humans are distinguished from their closest primate cousins by their social cognitive skills as opposed to their physical counterparts. We believe that artificial social intelligence (ASI) will play a crucial role in shaping the future of artificial intelligence (AI). This article begins with a review of ASI from a cognitive science standpoint, including social perception, theory of mind (ToM), and social interaction. Next, we examine the recently-emerged computational counterpart in the AI community. Finally, we provide an in-depth discussion on topics related to ASI.
... El carácter dialógico de estas puede muy bien existir después de todo hay mucho trabajo empírico como teórico (ver Berk, 1992;Fernyhough, 1996Fernyhough, , 2008Fernyhough, , 2009Winsler, 2009;Wertsch, 1993), así como la evidencia diaria de la experiencia clínica de que las voces de otros se manifiesten en la regulación del sujeto cuando las tareas son difíciles, sin embargo, esto muy bien es compatible con una no correlación en las tareas de ToM. Una posibilidad, como ya mencionamos, es que es una medida (el GI) más sobre los procesos regulatorios, como muestra la FA y su relación con el tiempo, de la persona y por ende su relación a lo largo de los grupos es muy pequeña; lo cual mostraría que la hipótesis que sugiere que para pasar las tareas de ToM solo se requiere de un buen desarrollo de las FE para inhibir la respuesta preponderante es errónea, ya que un desarrollo conceptual parece necesario (Doherty, 2008;Perner & Lang, 1999 ...
El siguiente texto aborda la relación interfuncional entre lo que suele conocerse como teoría de la mente (ToM) y la internalización del lenguaje. La primera suele concebirse como la capacidad de predicción del comportamiento de las personas en función de la atribución de estados mentales, mientras que la segunda hace referencia al proceso dialógico entre el niño con los otros para la conformación de sus procesos psicológicos, en este caso el lenguaje. Bajo esta lógica se concibe que la teoría de la mente se relaciona con la internalización del lenguaje debido a que permite el desarrollo en esta a partir de las capacidades operatorias con el contenido semiótico de las perspectivas de otros.
El trabajo se divide en un recorrido histórico de la ToM, un análisis de los diferentes modelos dominantes (divididos en modulares-nativistas; metarrepresentacionales; y los modelos asociados al lenguaje) así como su crítica, posteriormente se propone un modelo vigotskiano, y finalmente se presenta la metodología para el estudio de esta interrelación como los resultados.
El estudio mostró que los niños van aumentando su grado de internalización (GI) según aumenta su edad, como fue predicho por Vigotsky, además de que su ToM va en aumento según la edad. Sin embargo, la ToM se encontró menos desarrollada en la muestra a cómo sugerían los modelos tradicionales. La relación entre la ToM y el GI no fue significativa a diferencia de lo propuesto por Fernyhough (2008, 2009) y lo encontrado en Fernyhough y Meins (2009), pero se encontró una relación con el tiempo de ejecución de la torre de Londres, por lo que se sugiere que las codificaciones del habla privada evalúan más la función regulativa y no son una buena representación de las capacidades de manipular perspectivas. Aunado a ello, se comprobó que la forma de la acción de los niños iba en aumento conforme lo esperado por Galperin, sin embargo, estas variables tampoco se encontraron asociadas a la ToM coincidiendo con el GI.
Se sugiere que los resultados pueden ser comprendidos si se considera al habla privada, y su GI, como medidas de la función regulativa del lenguaje y no de las capacidades de representación de múltiples perspectivas. Además de que medidas más adecuadas para medir dichas capacidades de representación, serían la codificación del habla privada, y habla, de los niños durante períodos de juegos de roles. Esto debido a que implican la consideración explícita de las perspectivas de otros para poder realizar dicha actividad.
... Finally, the last limitation we mention is that NC and EFs are two dimensions that, in real life, are related to many other dimensions of human development that could mediate or explain their relationship. One of these is theory of mind, which is associated with both dimensions [60,112]. In certain circumstances, speculatively, these variables might be responsible for the presence or the lack of association between EFs and NC across the studies. ...
Executive functions (EFs) and narrative competence (NC) are two important predictors of many outcomes in human development. To date, however, it is unclear whether these skills develop synergistically—supporting or opposing each other—or whether they are independent of each other. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to understand if these skills are related to over development and if the magnitude of their association changes over time; differs in typical and atypical development; and changes with EF (inhibition, working memory, flexibility, planning) and NC (oral, written; micro and macrostructural level). For this purpose, 30 studies containing 285 effect sizes were selected and combined. The results show that EFs and NC are weakly associated with each other (r = 0.236, p < 0.001) and that this association decreases with age (b(267) = −0.0144, p = 0.001). They are more associated in preschool and early elementary school grades, becoming more independent after seven years old. Between 3 and 7 years of age, the association seems stronger in atypically developing children and for macrostructural NC. Additionally, before 7 years old, the various EF domains seem to associate indistinctly with NC, and only later specific links between EFs and NC would be observed.
... Executive function is robustly related to theory of mind (e.g. Carlson, Mandell & Williams, 2004;Carlson & Moses, 2001;Hughes, 1998;Perner & Lang, 1999), and interestingly, there is some evidence of advanced theory of mind in bilingual compared to monolingual preschoolers (Goetz, 2003). The present investigation seeks to extend our understanding of the possible effects of bilingual experience on KS's executive functioning.Speech etiquette in a particular language has its own national specifics. ...
Abstract:The article deals with the problem of linguopragmatic te
analysis. It is an attempt in investigating the problem of pragmat
intentions in the literary texts of English and Karakalpak langua
es. Pragmatic intention can be defined as “verbalized in the text th
addresser’s deliberate intention to exert impact on the addresse
with the aim to cause some reconstruction in his/her world picture
[1,156]. The general pragmatic intention of literary discourse is a
aesthetic influence on the reader. However, in concrete situation
the types of pragmatic intentions vary, and so does their impact.
... In early childhood, a robust relationship exists between the acquisition of EFs and improvements in ToM skills, independent of age and IQ (e.g., Carlson et al., 2004;Perner & Lang, 1999). During adolescence, structural and functional progressions in the social brain are known to interact with improvements in cognitive control (Blakemore & Mills, 2014;Dumontheil, 2016;Humphrey & Dumontheil, 2016;Mills et al., 2015). ...
Taking another person's perspective provides a means to infer their beliefs and intentions (known as Theory of Mind), which is an essential part of social interaction. In this article, we examined how different subcomponents of perspective-taking change beyond childhood in a large sample (N = 263) of adolescents, young adults, and older adults, and tested the degree to which age-related changes in perspective-taking are mediated by executive functions. Participants completed three tasks that assessed: (a) the likelihood of making social inferences, (b) judgments about an avatar's visual and spatial perspective, and (c) their ability to use an avatar's visual perspective to assign reference in language. Results revealed that while the likelihood of correctly inferring others' mental states increased linearly between adolescence and older adulthood (likely reflecting accumulating social experience over the lifespan), the ability to judge an avatar's perspective and use this to assign reference was subject to developmental changes from adolescence to older age, with performance peaking in young adulthood. Correlation and mediation analyses incorporated three measures of executive functioning (inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) and revealed that executive functions contribute to perspective-taking ability in these tasks (particularly during development), but largely do not mediate the effect of age on perspective-taking. We discuss how these results fit with models of mentalizing that predict distinct patterns of social development depending on the maturation of cognitive and language mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... This implicit theory-of-mind system is said to be fast, effortless, and automatic (Clements and Perner 1994), and is shared with our nearest primate relatives. The explicit theory-ofmind system develops gradually via domain-general learning in response to social and linguistic input, and is slow, effortful, and heavily reliant upon executive resources, such as working memory (Perner and Lang 1999). It only emerges after children's fourth birthday and might not be shared with other species (but see Buttelmann et al. 2017). ...
An important question in the study of canine cognition is how dogs understand humans, given that they show impressive abilities for interacting and communicating with us. In this review, we describe and discuss studies that have investigated dogs’ perspective-taking abilities. There is solid evidence that dogs are not only sensitive to the gaze of others, but also their attention. We specifically address the question whether dogs have the ability to take the perspective of others and thus come to understand what others can or cannot perceive. From the latter, they may then infer what others know and use this representation to anticipate what others do next. Still, dogs might simply rely on directly observable cues and on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what others can perceive. And instead of making inferences from representations of others' mental states, they may have just learned that certain behaviours of ours lead to certain outcomes. However, recent research seems to challenge this low-level explanation. Dogs have solved several perspective-taking tasks instantly and reliably across a large number of variations, including geometrical gaze-following, stealing in the dark, concealing information from others, and Guesser/Knower differentiation. In the latter studies, dogs' choices between two human informants were strongly influenced by cues related to the humans’ visual access to the food, even when the two informants behaved identically. And finally, we review a recent study that found dogs reacting differently to misleading suggestions of human informants that have either a true or false belief about the location of food. We discuss this surprising result in terms of the comprehension of reality-incongruent mental states, which is considered as a hallmark of Theory of Mind acquisition in human development. Especially on the basis of the latter findings, we conclude that pet dogs might be sensitive to what others see, know, intend, and believe. Therefore, this ability seems to have evolved not just in the corvid and primate lineages, but also in dogs.
... Like many scientific perspectives, it started as an analogy to better understand how humans might develop the ability to represent others' minds. Its most ardent supporters, however, take it beyond the analogical insights and argue that philosophy of science's theory development processes are actual blueprints for how cognition transpires (Kuhn 1989;Gopnik 1996;Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl 1999;Perner and Lang 1999). Theories are viewed as systems that assign specific representations to inputs, similar to how the visual system assigns representations to input. ...
Human social interaction hinges on the ability to interpret and predict the actions of others. The most valuable explanatory variable of these actions, more important than environmental or social factors, is the one that we do not have direct access to: the mind. This lack of access leaves us to impute the mental states—beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, etc.—of others before we can explain their behaviors. Studying our ability to do so, our Theory of Mind, has long been the province of psychologists and philosophers. Computational scientists are increasingly joining this research space as they strive to imbue artificial intelligences with human-like characteristics. We provide a high-level review of Theory of Mind research across several domains, with the goal of mapping between theory and recursive agent models. We illustrate this mapping using a specific recursive agent architecture, PsychSim, and discuss how it addresses many of the open issues in Theory of Mind research by enforcing a set of minimal requirements.
... Developmental research suggests that the development of ToM has been linked to the emergence of executive functioning skills such as self-control [74,75]. Further, studies indicate increased ToM abilities correlate to lower levels of aggressive behaviour [76], suggesting a positive relation between ToM and self-control. ...
Background: Adolescence is a critical developmental period for mentalization and emotion regulation skills. Studies show that during this time, adolescents may experience greater vulnerability to challenges of mental and emotional well-being. Studies also show that self-skills, such as mentalization, self-compassion, and self-control are independently associated with feelings of global self-worth or psychological well-being. To date, no known studies have explored interconnected relations among these self-skills, despite significant overlaps in the social-biological development of these skills. Aims: To investigate interconnected relations among psychological well-being, mentalization, self-compassion and self-control. Gender differences in these relations are explored. Method: As part of a larger, longitudinal study of adolescent well-being, this cross-sectional study drew on a variety of self-report measures, investigating relations among adolescents’ self-reports of psychological well-being, emotion recognition, self-control, and self-compassion. Participants consisted of 88 girls and 57 boys, mean age 13.38. Results: Main results showed associations among emotion recognition, self-control and self-compassion and feelings of global self-worth. Specifically, results showed that understanding negative emotions in others relates to lower levels of self-compassion and feelings of self-worth. Further, adolescents who report low levels of self-control reported uncompassionate self-responding and lower levels of self-worth. Gender differences and implications for further research and adolescent social-emotional interventions are discussed.
... The developmental link between ToM and EF has been widely documented, particularly in childhood. For instance, Carlson and Moses (2001) suggest that EF development is a necessary requirement for successful ToM acquisition, independent of age and IQ (see also Pellicano, 2007;Perner & Lang, 1999). Among adults, correlations have been observed between EFs and ToM skills, and ToM performance can be impaired when executive demands are increased (e.g., Bernstein et al., 2011;Cane et al., 2017;Charlton et al., 2009;Duval et al., 2011;cf. ...
Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people’s perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20–86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities—a component of “Theory of Mind”—across adulthood, and how these changes may relate to individual differences in executive functions at different ages. Participants completed a referential-communication task (the “Director” task) while behavioral responses and eye movements were recorded, along with four measures of executive functions (inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning). Results revealed a quadratic fit of age in egocentric errors; performance on the task plateaued between 20 to ~37 years old but showed a substantial decline from ~38 years onward (i.e., increased egocentric errors). A similar pattern was established in eye-movement measures, demonstrating that advancing age led to a decrease in efficient attention orientation to a target. In other words, older adults were more distracted by a hidden competitor object (egocentric interference) and were therefore delayed in orienting their attention to the correct target object. Mediation analyses revealed that executive functions partially mediated the effect of age on perspective-taking abilities. Importantly, however, the relationship between age and egocentric bias in task performance remained significant when controlling for changes in executive functions, indicating a decline in social cognition abilities with advancing age that was independent of age-related declines in more domain-general abilities, such as executive functions.
... For example, children with poorer EF exhibit more negative emotion expressions, aggressive coping strategies, and impulsive behaviors, suggesting a link between executive function and emotion (Jahromi & Stifter, 2008). Furthermore, several studies have found that EF predicts performance on false belief tasks concerning the causes and goals of other's actions (Sabbagh et al., 2006;Carlson & Moses, 2001; for reviews, see Perner & Lang, 1999;Devine & Hughes, 2014). While prior research clearly demonstrates associations between emotions and higher-order cognitive processes, less is known regarding how emotions and EF interact (see chapter DeFRANCE, this volume). ...
The cognitive revolution of the 1970s and 1980s brought with it an emphasis on cognitive processes involved in emotion. While a similar wave of cognitive research spread to the field of developmental psychology, it did so in a relatively affectively neutral way. While infancy research systematically whittled down developmental processes into their most basic cognitive underpinnings, the role of cognition in emotional development remains largely underrepresented in the literature. This chapter is a clarion call to researchers to devote equal theoretical and empirical efforts to the role of cognition in emotional development. It highlights three areas of research ripe for closer examination by researchers of emotional development: appraisal, executive functioning, and inference-based learning. By linking existing research methodologies and findings in these cognitively dominated domains with open questions relating to emotional development, the chapter highlights how this research can help spur progress in the study of emotion.
... As additional support, however, multilinguals who are fluent in more than two languages are at a lower risk of cognitive decline compared to bilinguals (Perquin, Vaillant, Schuller, Pastore, Dartigues, Lair, & Diederich, 2013). ToM tasks frequently draw upon executive functions, relying on the ability to suppress one's own knowledge (inhibition), take another person's perspective (shifting attention), and hold this information in mind to make an inference (working memory) (Perner & Lang, 1999). Not surprisingly then, both executive functions and ToM follow similar developmental trajectories (Vetter, Leipold, Kliegel, Phillips, & Altgassen, 2013) and share a common neurological basis in the prefrontal cortex (Carlson & Moses, 2001). ...
Bilingual children have better Theory-of-Mind compared to monolingual children, but comparatively little research has examined whether this advantage in social cognitive ability also applies to adults. The current study investigated whether multilingual status and/or number of known languages predicts performance on a mentalizing task in a large sample of adult participants. Multilingualism was decomposed based on whether English is the first language or not. All analyses controlled for well-known predictors of mentalizing, such as gender, same-race bias, and years of English fluency. We found a U-shaped trend, such that monolinguals and multilinguals did not differ much in their mentalizing ability, but bilinguals performed worse than monolinguals. Our study builds upon past work by examining a large sample of participants, measuring a crucial aspect of adult social cognition that has previously been unexplored, controlling for several nuisance variables, and investigating whether multilingualism leads to additional benefits in mentalizing abilities beyond bilingualism.
Action processing is a crucial aspect of cognition and perception. It provides a window into the way we understand others and learn about the world. During the preschool years, there are significant developments in how children process actions. Here, we systematically review tasks investigating action processing in preschoolers, employing the electronic databases PubMed, Scopus and PsycINFO. We extracted 680 studies on action processing in preschoolers and identified 66 papers that focused on typically developing children. The studies employed various tasks, which we categorized based on their complexity and the cognitive abilities they demand. This review not only sheds light on the intricate developmental nuances of action processing during the preschool period but also serves as a valuable resource for researchers. By providing insights into the emergence of different ways how children process actions, it aids in selecting appropriate tasks for investigating action-related skills in preschool children.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Theory of mind (ToM) has been addressed in relation to functional alterations of certain brain regions and their connections. The objective is to evaluate ToM in imprisoned criminal offenders and to analyze their relationship with the functions linked to the prefrontal cortex according to their expression in neuropsychological tests. The sample was composed of 52 subjects. 27 committed instrumental homicides and 25 crimes of sale and/or possession of narcotics. A control group was taken, 19 healthy subjects at liberty. The Faux-Pas (FP) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes tests were used. A neuropsychological battery of executive functions and functions related to the frontal lobes and Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) was also applied. The criminal groups have comparable performances in all measures. The control group (in freedom) showed higher performance, with statistical significance, in the Faux-Pas test. Moderate negative correlations were found between the FP and the PCL-R. A distinction between affective and cognitive ToM could be affirmed, with people deprived of liberty presenting deficient functioning in the cognitive ToM test. This difference in performance could be linked to the disruptive event with the social norm and not so much with the violent homicide act itself.
Objective
When task groups depend on all members’ contributions, one poor performer can threaten the entire group’s goal attainment. The model of pro-group intent (M-PGI) stipulates that group responses to such poor performers are primarily determined by the group’s assessment of that person’s willingness to help the group ( attributed pro-group intent). Despite supportive evidence, past research has neglected whether model predictions hold under conditions more representative of group life. The current study thus tests the M-PGI in (a) personal interaction, (b) settings beyond the work context, and (c) repeated decisions.
Method
The current paper reports two experiments using repeated decision scenarios across a range of group situations (i.e., within-participant designs). The main experiment, moreover, manipulated whether two group members discussed their response to a described poor performer (interacting dyads) or decided individually (nominal dyads; between-participant factor).
Results
Results provide consistent evidence for the M-PGI across contexts. Process analyses provide some evidence that model effects were stronger in interacting (vs. nominal) dyads.
Conclusions
Interacting groups focus on poor performers’ intent when determining their responses. I discuss the implications of the M-PGI for group dynamics theory and research, as well as a range of applied fields.
The development of Theory of Mind (ToM) constitutes a central topic in the study of human cognitive development. During the last decades, researchers representing different theoretical approaches have been trying to explore the emergence and development of mental state understanding and the potential contribution of other complex cognitive mechanisms in this developmental process. The relationship between ToM and Executive Functions (EFs) has been assessed in the context of various experimental designs. Despite the significant number of existing studies and the variety of relevant theories proposed, there is still no agreement about the exact nature of the ToM-EFs relationship. The main aim of this paper is to review relevant research results on typically developing children. It attempts to disentangle the factors that can potentially explain the contradictory findings reported in the literature. The results, overall, support the ToM-EFs relationship and suggest EFs’ important role in ToM development. However, the exact nature of this relationship seems obscured by the diversity of approaches, operationalization of the theoretical constructs, methods and ages included in the studies. It is, therefore, suggested that for building a unified picture and an explanatory account of the dynamic developmental relationship between these two complex theoretical constructs, a refinement in the conceptual definitions and methodological approaches is crucial.
The theory-of-mind account of autism has been central to cognitive research in the field for nearly 40 years. It initially proposed that the diversity of symptoms in autism could derive from a deficit in the ability of autistic people to infer other individuals’ mental representations. An extraordinary amount of research has been carried out within or questioning this perspective, including numerous and different tasks that assess first-order, second-order, and advanced theory of mind. We review and describe in detail some of the more prominent studies in the field. We also explore two of the main challenges to this theory, namely the research highlighting the role of executive function and language development as alternative explanations of autistics’ performance on experimental theory-of-mind tasks. But all these accounts tend to focus on the limitations of the person with autism, ignoring the way they respond to and adapt to a world organized around the viewpoints of people without autism, and how that context functions in response to them. Recent studies into camouflaging and compensation, and hypotheses like the double-deficit model, further expand the field in this direction.
Much has been discussed about the Theory of Mind (ToM) and language. Some authors suggest that activating one enlightens the other, while others view language merely as a tool for developing the most distinctly human ability known. When it comes to speech and communication disorders, tracing ToM can be challenging since patients lack the tools to demonstrate their cognitive performance. This chapter delves into the biological foundations of ToM (anatomical and neurochemical). It also explores the evolution of ToM and neuroplasticity along our lifespan so that the reader can understand that nothing is static, that our brain engages in an everlasting dynamic relationship to keep us healthy and safe. This understanding has significant implications in how we approach language pathologies and the cognitive decline they might hinder. Additionally, the chapter examines the pragmatic side of language, offering insights into the right hemisphere and its role in emotion and affective communication. It considers the production-perception loop in communication, acknowledging that language and cognition cannot always be solely measured from production or perception alone. Social, cultural, and pathological factors may intervene and disrupt this loop, prompting the need for careful consideration in ToM theories and methods, particularly in the context of language pathologies. All these considerations should not be considered as preliminary or complementary, but central in understanding the implications of language in ToM, what language must really entail, so that the best clinical assessment and intervention is possible for patients with language pathologies. Finally, the chapter blends all these analyses into offering a review of crucial aspects of ToM in patients with aphasia.
There is evidence of weak self‐processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including diminished self‐reference effects (SREs) in memory. Because smaller SREs in older ASD children and adults are sometimes associated with worse social functioning, we examined this relation for the first time in ASD preschoolers ( n = 21). Following a self‐performed task, children completed tests of self/other source memory, verbal ability, imitation and mentalizing. Although the ASD children were outperformed on the socio‐cognitive measures by non‐autistic preschoolers ( n = 20), they still showed a significant SRE. Moreover, the SRE, but not the socio‐cognitive variables, was a significant predictor of children's social functioning as rated by parents. Larger SREs were linked with better social functioning, while children with stronger autism traits showed no memory advantage for information encoded self‐referentially. These findings support previous research showing that self‐processing impairments in ASD are mainly apparent for individuals with greater social difficulties.
This chapter presents the development of our understanding of the nature and origin of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The behavioural, cognitive, and biological features of ASD are presented, as well the evidence related to possible environmental risk factors. The long-term outcomes of ASD and the evidence for the efficacy of different treatments are both appraised. Explanations for the tendency of ADHD and ASD to co-occur are outlined, and the question of heterogeneity within these neurodevelopmental problems is addressed. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how far developmental psychopathology has developed as a field of study.
Bağlanma, birincil bakım-veren ile çocuk arasında gelişen temel bir bağdır. Zihin Teorisi, bağlanma ile muhtemelen ilişkili olan bir bilişsel yetenektir. Çalışmanın amacı, Çocuk Evleri Koordinasyon Merkezi Müdürlüğü’nde (ÇEKOM) kurum bakımında olan çocukların bağlanma stillerinin aile yanında olan çocuklara benzer olup-olmadığının araştırılması ve çocukların bağlanma stillerinin zihin kuramı becerisi ile ilişkisinin değerlendirilmesidir. Çalışmaya ÇEKOM’da kalan 54 çocuk (kurum grubu), aile yanında olup özel bir eğitim kurumunda eğitim alan 33 çocuk (kontrol grubu) ve aile yanında olup psikiyatri poliklinik başvurusu olan 34 çocuk (poliklinik grubu) dahil edildi. Çalışmaya katılan çocuk-ergenlerin, zihin kuramı becerileri Gözlerden Zihin Okuma testi ve GAF testi, bağlanma stili İlişki Ölçekleri Anketleri ile değerlendirilmiştir. Güvenli bağlanma, kontrol grubu, kurum grubu, poliklinik grubunda sırasıyla %27,3, %22,2, %5,9 oranlarında olup; kontrol grubu ve poliklinik grubu arasında anlamlı farklılık saptanmıştır (p=0,011). Kurumda kalan çocuklarda kurumda kalma gerekçesi istismar olanlarda kaygılı bağlanma (%36,4), olmayanlarda ise kayıtsız bağlanma (%55,6) en sık görülen bağlanma stiliydi (p=0.018). Kız çocuklarında güvenli bağlanma oranı (%14) erkek çocuklarından (%31,4) daha düşük bulunmuştur (p=0.040). Bağlanma stilleri ile GAF puanları arasında anlamlı bir farklılık gözlenmemiştir (p>0.05). Çocuğun kaldığı kurum bakımının özelliklerinin ne kadar önemli olduğu çalışmamızda gösterilmiştir. Özellikle her evde sabit bakım verenlerin olduğu ÇEKOM’da kalan çocukların, aile yanında olan çocuklara yakın güvenli bağlanma oranına sahip olması göz önünde bulundurulmalıdır.
Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western samples. In independent cultures, an emphasis on one's own mind offers a clear route to ‘simulate’ other minds, and inhibitory control may be required to set aside one's own perspective to represent the perspective of others. However, in interdependent cultures, social norms are considered the key catalyst for behaviour, and metacognitive reflection and/or suppression of one's own perspective may not be necessary. The cross‐cultural generalizability of the western developmental route to ToM is therefore questionable. The current study used an age‐matched cross‐sectional sample to contrast 56 Japanese and 56 Scottish 3–6‐year‐old's metacognition, ToM and inhibitory control skills. We replicated the expected cultural patterns for ToM (Scotland > Japan) and inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland). Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that inhibitory control and metacognition predict theory of mind competence in Scotland. However, these variables cannot be used to predict Japanese ToM. This confirms that individualistic mechanisms do not capture the developmental mechanism underlying ToM in Japan, highlighting a bias in our understanding of ToM development.
Research Highlights
We replicate an independent cultural advantage for theory of mind (Scotland > Japan) and interdependent advantage for inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland).
From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind and inhibitory control.
Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that the development of inhibitory control mediates the link between metacognition and theory of mind in Scotland.
However, this model does not predict Japanese theory of mind, highlighting an individualistic bias in our mechanistic understanding of theory of mind development.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Abstract:
The development of Theory of Mind (ToM) constitutes a central topic in the study of human cognitive development. During the last decades, researchers representing different theoretical approaches have been trying to explore the emergence and development of mental state understanding and the potential contribution of other complex cognitive mechanisms in this developmental process. The relationship between ToM and Executive Functions (EFs) has been assessed in the context of various experimental designs. Despite the significant number of existing studies and the variety of relevant theories proposed, there is still no agreement about the exact nature of the ToM-EFs relationship. The main aim of this paper is to review relevant research results on typically developing children. It attempts to disentangle the factors that can potentially explain the contradictory findings reported in the literature. The results, overall, support the ToM-EFs relationship and suggest EFs’ important role in ToM development. However, the exact nature of this relationship seems obscured by the diversity of approaches, operationalization of the theoretical constructs, methods and ages included in the studies. It is, therefore, suggested that for building a unified picture and an explanatory account of the dynamic developmental relationship between these two complex theoretical constructs, a refinement in the conceptual definitions and methodological approaches is crucial.
Inferring others' mental states, or mentalizing, is a critical social cognitive ability that underlies humans' remarkable capacity for complex social interactions. Recent work suggests that interracial contact shapes the recruitment of brain regions involved in mentalizing during impression formation. However, it remains unclear how a target's perceived racial group and a perceiver's previous contact with that racial group shapes mental state inferences. In this study, we examined brain activity in regions of interest associated with mentalizing and race perception among self-identified White perceivers who varied in lifetime contact while they inferred secondary emotions from perceived White eyes and perceived Black eyes (i.e., the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test). The interaction between lifetime contact and perceived target race predicted activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region consistently implicated in mental state inferences from perceptual cues, tracking eye gaze, and biological motion. Low and average contact White perceivers showed more left STS activity when inferring mental states from perceived White eyes than perceived Black eyes, whereas high contact White perceivers showed similar left STS activity regardless of perceived target race. These results indicate that interracial contact decreases racial biases in the recruitment of regions involved in mentalizing when inferring mental states from perceptual cues.
Die Verhaltenstherapie bietet ein breites Spektrum an Methoden für verschiedenste Störungsbilder. Diese basieren auf verschiedenen Lernmodellen und erstrecken sich von klassischen verhaltenstherapeutischen Maßnahmen wie Konfrontationstechniken und Modelllernen bis zu modernen Ansätzen wie achtsamkeitsbasierten Verfahren oder Schematherapie. In diesem Kapitel werden die Grundlagen dieser Techniken und deren Anwendung praxisrelevant dargestellt und mit Beispielen erklärt.
The first part of this chapter focuses on the development of our theory of mind or folk psychology. The second part gives a brief overview of how counterfactual reasoning develops and how this development interacts with theory of mind development. In both parts our focus is on developmental research that speaks to basic issues: What is the nature of our folk psychology, its genetic or experiential basis, its kinship with executive control and pragmatics, and its cognitive mechanism? Is there an ‘implicit’ theory that even infants master? How does counterfactual reasoning differ from conditional reasoning and why should counterfactual reasoning be important for folk psychology? We examine what answers forty years of research have produced so far.
Background
Studies showed preterm children born with very low birth weight (VLBW, <1500 g) are at risk for poorer executive functions (EFs). However, very little research has been reported longitudinally on the development of both cool and hot EFs deficits in preschool to school-age VLBW preterm children with normal early development.
Aims
Present study aimed to investigate the development of cool and hot EFs in VLWB preterm children longitudinally.
Methods
Forty preterm children born VLBW were followed up at ages 6, 8, and 10. Fifty term-born controls were recruited at each age stage. Cool EFs was assessed using backward digit span subtest of WISC-IV, Knox's Cube Test, Comprehensive Non-verbal Attention Test Battery (CNAT), Tower of London (ToL), Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and hot EFs was assessed using Theory of Mind (ToM) and Delay of Gratification (GIFT) tasks.
Results
The six-year-old VLBW preterm group showed significantly lower scores of planning in ToL, inhibition control in CNAT, and in both ToM and GIFT tasks. There is no significant difference in average cool and hot EFs between the eight and ten-year-old preterm group and the control group.
Conclusions
At six, VLBW preterm infants with normal early development have delayed cool and hot EFs development. Although the average performance of EFs can reach the level of the control group with age increasing to eight and ten years, there are still individual differences. It is recommended that more complete development indicators be established in the future, and early intervention should be made for VLBW premature children with delayed EFs.
Much effort has been made to understand the role of attention in perception; much less effort has been placed on the role attention plays in the control of action. Our goal in this chapter is to account for the role of attention in action, both when performance is automatic and when it is under deliberate conscious control. We propose a theoretical framework structured around the notion of a set of active schemas, organized according to the particular action sequences of which they are a part, awaiting the appropriate set of conditions so that they can become selected to control action. The analysis is therefore centered around actions, primarily external actions, but the same principles apply to internal actions—actions that involve only the cognitive processing mechanisms. One major emphasis in the study of attentional processes is the distinction between controlled and automatic processing of perceptual inputs (e.g., Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Our work here can be seen as complementary to the distinction between controlled and automatic processes: we examine action rather than perception; we emphasize the situations in which deliberate, conscious control of activity is desired rather than those that are automatic.
Abstract In this study, we compare regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) while French monolingual subjects listen to continuous speech in an unknown language, to lists of French words, or to meaningful and distorted stories in French. Our results show that, in addition to regions devoted to single-word comprehension, processing of meaningful stories activates the left middle temporal gyrus, the left and right temporal poles, and a superior prefrontal area in the left frontal lobe. Among these regions, only the temporal poles remain activated whenever sentences with acceptable syntax and prosody are presented.
This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children’s ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29% of 3-year-olds knew to influence the competitor’s mental state, 87% knew to physically exclude the competitor. There was no difference between children’s performance when trying to obtain the object for themselves or predicting what a story character would do. The success of the older children in concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence another’s behavior, one must influence that person’s mental state.
Two experiments investigated whether a simple-to-embedded-rules account can explain the change in causal reasoning in children between 3 and 4 years of age. A marble-and-ramp apparatus that operated in 2 distinct configurations of straight and across was used throughout. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds were able to predict the path of the marble when there was only 1 input hole (a simple if-then rules task), whereas only 4-year-olds could solve the 2-input version (an embedded or conjoint conditional if-then rules task). Experiment 2 found the same 3- to 4-year age difference when children chose where to insert the marble in the 2-input version, indicating that the same rules may underlie causal action as well as causal prediction for the more complicated task. The results of the 2 experiments are discussed in relation to previous findings on causal reasoning, children's theory of mind, and a theory of cognitive complexity in the preschool period. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Exp 1 demonstrated that autistic Ss continue to fail a task originally designed as one of strategic deception when there is no opponent present: They perseveratively indicate the target object. The authors argue that this behavior is better explained in terms of failing to disengage from an object than in terms of a theory-of-mind deficit. To ensure that their difficulties were not due to failure to construe the task in a competitive manner, the authors ran a 2nd study, on detour reaching. Compared with control Ss, the autistic Ss had great difficulty with the task. Children's difficulties with these 2 tasks are discussed in light of recent evidence that autism is associated with failing executive tasks, and it is argued that viewing the syndrome as an executive deficit has clear advantages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It has been nearly 10 years since the material for the original edition of this book was prepared. During that time, there has been dramatic growth in the fields of theory of mind, autism, and cognitive neuroscience. This new edition includes a whole section on the cognitive neuroscience of "mind-reading", bringing together varied research methods such as functional neuro-imaging, single cell recording, and neuropsychology. In addition, there is expanded coverage of primate studies and the evolution of a theory of mind, and new information relating theory of mind in clinical populations other than autism, such as schizophrenia. The original section on normal development has been updated, as has the debate over the relationship between theory of mind deficits and autism. Understanding other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience remains the key sourcebook for this important area, which attracts researchers and clinicians in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and primatology . The new material in this edition will ensure that it is essential reading for these groups. From reviews of the first edition: [This book] will be of absorbing interest to all those involved in the fields of autism and child development. It also contains thought-provoking ideas of relevance to psychology and psychiatry in general. L. Wing, National Autistic Society This book would be of great interest to researchers of child development but also to many clinicians and teachers working with individuals with autism. British Journal of Psychiatry.
This study reports a marked development between the ages of 3 and 5 years in children's ability to conceal information. In a situation of high-affect involvement, 3-year-olds did not know to misinform or withhold information from a competitor who always chose the object for which they themselves had previously stated a preference. Although only 29% of 3-year-olds knew to influence the competitor's mental state, 87% knew to physically exclude the competitor. There was no difference between children's performance when trying to obtain the object for themselves or predicting what a story character would do. The success of the older children in concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence another's behavior, one must influence that person's mental state.
The ability of normal children and adults to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict behaviour ("theory of mind") has been a focus of much recent research. Autism is a biologically based disorder which appears to be characterised by a specific impairment in this "mentalising" process. The present paper reports a functional neuroimaging study with positron emission tomography in which we studied brain activity in normal volunteers while they performed story comprehension tasks necessitating the attribution of mental states. The resultant brain activity was compared with that measured in two control tasks: "physical" stories which did not require this mental attribution, and passages of unlinked sentences. Both story conditions, when compared to the unlinked sentences, showed significantly increased regional cerebral blood flow in the following regions: the temporal poles bilaterally, the left superior temporal gyrus and the posterior cingulate cortex. Comparison of the "theory of mind" stories with "physical" stores revealed a specific pattern of activation associated with mental state attribution: it was only this task which produced activation in the medial frontal gyrus on the left (Brodmann's area 8). This comparison also showed significant activation in the posterior cingulate cortex. These surprisingly clear-cut findings are discussed in relation to previous studies of brain activation during story comprehension. The localisation of brain regions involved in normal attribution of mental states and contextual problem solving is feasible and may have implication for the neural basis of autism.
Although there is substantial evidence that 30-month-old children can reason about other people's desires, little is known about the developmental antecedents of this ability. A food-request procedure was devised to explore this understanding in 14- and 18-month-olds. Children observed an experimenter expressing disgust as she tasted 1 type of food and happiness as she lasted another type of food. They were then required to predict which food the experimenter would subsequently desire. The 14-month-olds responded egocentrically, offering whichever food they themselves preferred. However, 18-month-olds correctly inferred that the experimenter wanted the food associated with her prior positive affect. They were able to make this inference even when the experimenter's desires differed from their own. These data constitute the first empirical evidence that 18-month-olds are able to engage in some form of desire reasoning. Children not only inferred that another person held a desire, but also recognized how desires are related to emotions and understood something about the subjectivity of these desires.
"Theory of mind," the ability to make inferences about others" mental states, seems to be a modular cognitive capacity that underlies humans" ability to engage in complex social interaction. It develops in several distinct stages, which can be measured with social reasoning tests of increasing difficulty. Individuals with Asperger"s syndrome, a mild form of autism, perform well on simpler theory of mind tests but show deficits on more developmentally advanced theory of mind tests. We tested patients with bilateral damage to orbito-frontal cortex (n = 5) and unilateral damage in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (n = 5) on a series of theory of mind tasks varying in difficulty. Bilateral orbito-frontal lesion patients performed similarly to individuals with Asperger"s syndrome, performing well on simpler tests and showing deficits on tasks requiring more subtle social reasoning, such as the ability to recognize a faux pas. In contrast, no specific theory of mind deficits were evident in the unilateral dorsolateral frontal lesion patients. The dorsolateral lesion patients had difficulty only on versions of the tasks that placed demands on working memory.
It has been nearly 10 years since the material for the original edition of this book was prepared. During that time, there has been dramatic growth in the fields of theory of mind, autism, and cognitive neuroscience. This new edition includes a whole section on the cognitive neuroscience of "mind-reading", bringing together varied research methods such as functional neuro-imaging, single cell recording, and neuropsychology. In addition, there is expanded coverage of primate studies and the evolution of a theory of mind, and new information relating theory of mind in clinical populations other than autism, such as schizophrenia. The original section on normal development has been updated, as has the debate over the relationship between theory of mind deficits and autism. Understanding other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience remains the key sourcebook for this important area, which attracts researchers and clinicians in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and primatology . The new material in this edition will ensure that it is essential reading for these groups. From reviews of the first edition: [This book] will be of absorbing interest to all those involved in the fields of autism and child development. It also contains thought-provoking ideas of relevance to psychology and psychiatry in general. L. Wing, National Autistic Society This book would be of great interest to researchers of child development but also to many clinicians and teachers working with individuals with autism. British Journal of Psychiatry.
What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is intended to persuade such people to think again. It brings together essays by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists, who discuss various ways in which language may be implicated in human cognition. The editors have provided an introduction which lays out the basic terms and history of the debate, and a consolidated bibliography which will provide a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in language and its place in cognition.
In diesem Beitrag werde ich die These vertreten, daß die mentalistischen Begriffe und Kausalannahmen der Alltagspsychologie (daher Common-Sense Mentalismus) eine wesentliche konzeptuell-kognitive Basis für die Entstehung und das Erleben von Emotionen darstellen. Zum einen ergibt sich dies daraus, daß Emotionen selbst in begrifflich gefaßter Form als Zorn, Angst, Freude usw. ins Bewußtsein treten und nicht als unbegriffene Erregungszustände. Zum anderen entstehen Emotionen als Nebenprodukte bestimmter mentalistischer Interpretation, so wenn z. B. registriert wird, daß das eigene Wollen am Widerstand einer anderen Person scheitert. Mit dem Erwerb derartiger Selbstinterpretationen und dabei auftretender Gefühlszustände durch das Kind wird sich die entwicklungspsychologische Analyse in der vorliegenden Arbeit beschäftigen. Im ersten Teil werde ich auf die Struktur und Funktion des Common-Sense Mentalismus eingehen.
Two experiments were conducted on the child's developing ability to distinguish intended actions from mistakes, reflexes, and passive movements. Such distinctions were successfully made by 3–5 years of age, regardless of whether children were judging their own or another's familiar or unfamiliar behaviour. Responses to causal questions indicated that children as young as 3 years attributed behaviours to intentional states in accordance with the scheme for multiple sufficient causes.
The purpose of this study was to assess whether performance on false belief tasks was dependent on particular components of executive functions, specifically inhibitory control and working memory. Ten children with Prader‐Willi syndrome and 14 children with Williams syndrome were given 2 trials of a standard false belief task and 2 executive function tasks. These included Luria's (1966) tapping task, and a modified Stroop task, developed by Diamond and her colleagues (Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994). The main findings were that performance on the 2 executive function tasks was quite consistent, although some children had difficulty training on the tapping task. In contrast, there appeared to be no relation between performance on executive function tasks and false belief. These findings are discussed in the context of current theories about the development of theory of mind.
3–5-year-olds heard a story involving identical twins, one of whom was absent when their ball was moved from one drawer to another. Children found it easy to infer that the twin who later went to the original location to get the ball was the one who had gone outside. Children in a comparison condition found it relatively difficult to predict where a (nonidentical) twin who was absent when the ball was moved, would search for the ball, and made the usual realist error. In further investigations involving variations on the identical twins task, children were equally successful at making the link between looking in the wrong place and having been absent, whether a backwards inference was required (as above) or a forwards one (inferring that the twin who went outside must now be the one who was at the wrong location). We ruled out one twin's physical association with the correct location as an artifactual explanation for facilitation. Children performed well whether or not the experimenter told them explicitly which twin did not know the ball had been moved. These findings support the view that children's early insight into the representational character of mind is masked in traditional prediction tests of false belief.
The hypothesis that a growth in working memory capacity could explain the observed development of theory of mind in preschoolers was tested. Fifty-four 3- to 5-year-olds were administered: two false belief tasks as measures of theory of mind development; two “false” photograph tasks parallel to typical false belief tasks, but involving nonmental representations; the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test -Revised (PPVT-R); and two working memory capacity measures (backward digit span, BDS, and forward digit span, FDS). A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that BDS significantly predicted performance on both the false belief and false photograph tasks with age and PPVT-R score controlled, but that FDS did not, suggesting that growth in central executive capacity is important in determining children's success or failure on false belief tasks, but that articulatory loop capacity is not. It is concluded that, in general, the findings are consistent with the working memory hypothesis, although subsequent contingency table analysis revealed that success on the BDS task was not necessary for successful performance on theory of mind tasks.
A patient with a left frontal arachnoidal endothelioma was examined at the bedside. A series of simple tasks was administered. These showed: 1. (1) An inability to carry out compounded instructions whether these were given verbally or presented as a visual model. 2. (2) An inability to carry out "symbolic" instructions. 3. (3) These incapacities did not depend on any difficulty in apprehending the instructions per se. 4. (4) Error utilization appeared related to ease of disequilibration as tested by the orienting reaction. These results are believed to be indicative of frontal lobe impairment despite the presence of more generalized brain damage which may serve to bring out in relief and carricature the essence of a disturbance produced by the local lesion.
This review presents the potential contribution of developmental psychology to a more complete understanding of the nature of frontal lobe functioning in children. The cognitive construct of “executive function” has been adopted as a possible behavioral marker of prefrontal functioning from infancy through childhood. Instead of focusing exclusively on mature, adult‐level functioning of the frontal lobes, our article reviews evidence for the view that frontally mediated executive functions emerge in the first year of life and continue to develop at least until puberty, if not beyond. A key theme in this review is that measures used to detect executive functions must be developmentally appropriate, and suggestions regarding viable executive function measures are offered. The contribution of the animal models tested by Diamond and Goldman‐Rakic to our understanding of rudimentary executive functions in infancy is discussed. Another behavioral domain, self‐control, is proposed as a possible source of frontal assessment tools for very young children. In addition, several cognitive tasks from developmental psychology are highlighted as potential frontal measures for school‐age children. Critical issues and current problems associated with research in developmental neuropsy‐chology are discussed.
Investigated preschool children's understanding of mind and emotion by examining their understanding that emotions such as happiness and surprise depend on the actor's desires and beliefs. Study 1 examined 13 3-yr-olds' ratings of actors' happiness and surprise in a replication of a study by H. M. Wellman and K. Bartsch (see record
1989-25544-001). Study 2 included a natural language analysis of adults' use of the word "surprise" in conversation to 43 children (aged 3–5 yrs). Study 3 examined the abilities of 26 3–4 yr olds to explain the causes of desire- and belief-dependent emotional reactions, such as happiness and surprise, respectively. Ss as young as age 3 yrs appropriately understood the relevant mental states underlying happiness, sadness, surprise, and curiosity, although they misunderstood the usage of some related lexical terms, especially "surprise." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Fifty preschool children (aged 3.3–4.6 yrs) took part in an investigation of the relations between children's executive function performance, their understanding of mind and their language skills. The study demonstrates the feasibility of testing rudimentary executive function skills among preschoolers, using an original battery of tasks. The results were consistent with those from studies of older children, in that three aspects of executive function were distinguished: working memory, attentional flexibility and inhibitory control. In addition, specific links were found between executive function and theory-of-mind performance, even when age and both verbal and non-verbal ability were taken into account. In particular, children's deceptive abilities were closely related to success on tests of inhibitory control. The implications of these results for the understanding of deceit are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The hypothesis of the 1st and 3rd authors (see record
1983-27705-001) that a conceptual limitation underlies 3-yr-olds' difficulty with false-belief attribution was tested against 3 competing hypotheses. Results from 2 experiments involving 101 3- and 4-yr-olds show that false-belief attribution remained difficult for younger 3-yr-olds, despite their retention of essential facts and attempts to make expectations more explicit and prevent pragmatic misinterpretation. Findings strengthen the original hypothesis, specified as the inability to assign conflicting truth values to propositions. This hypothesis can explain why 3-yr-olds find pretend play, the distinction between expected and achieved outcomes, the real–imaginary distinction, and level 1 perspective taking easier to understand than false belief, the reality–appearance distinction, and level 2 perspective taking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
33 normal 3-yr-old, 16 normal 4-yr-old, 11 7–17 yr old autistic, and 14 7–28 yr old mentally handicapped (MH) children completed a task to measure capacity for strategic deception. A competitive game was played between the Ss and an experimenter in which participants tried to win chocolates. In the training phase, Ss learned that it was in their interest to tell the experimenter to look into an empty box for the chocolate, although Ss did not know until after the search which box was empty. In the testing phase, Ss could see the empty box. The 4-yr-olds and MH Ss generally pointed to the empty box on the 1st trial. The 3-yr-olds and autistic Ss frequently continued to point to the baited box for the full 20 test trials. The ability to apply the correct strategy was associated with success on a standard false-belief task. The tasks may be difficult because they require Ss to inhibit the tendency of salient knowledge about object locations to overwrite knowledge of epistemic states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments with 145 children (aged 2 yrs 8 mo to 4 yrs 11 mo) explored Ss' ability to deceive a competitor in a hiding game, using a paradigm similar to the one introduced by G. Woodruff and D. Premack (see record
1981-04926-001) for the study of deception in chimpanzees. There was a significant increase with age in the frequency of deceptive pointing, with children below the age of about 3.5 yrs consistently failing to deceive a competitor even under conducive conditions. Two deception tasks were significantly more difficult for 3–4 yr olds than parallel "sabotage" tasks. Findings demonstrate 3-yr-olds' difficulty with false belief representation and are discussed with regard to controversies on the early acquisition of a theory of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated whether young children can coordinate motive with outcome in judgments of satisfaction and whether this coordination is affected by the "objective" moral value of the motive and outcome. 24 3.5-yr-old children (range 2.11–3.11 yrs), 24 5.3-yr-old children (range 4.11–5.11 yrs) and 24 7.5-yr-old-children (range 6.11–7.11 yrs) judged a story character's satisfaction. Their comprehension of the relationship between motives and outcomes of action was tested by presenting them with matching and with mismatching outcomes. For example, one character's motive, depicted in a "thinks" bubble, was to throw a ball to 1 of 2 children. In a matching outcome, the intended child caught the ball, whereas in a mismatching outcome, the other child caught it. Even the youngest Ss judged the character more pleased when the outcome matched the motive than when it did not. This suggests that children from age 3 yrs can integrate motive and outcome information. Ss under 7 yrs failed to judge satisfaction appropriately when motives and outcomes were bad. Comparisons of Ss' satisfaction judgments with their moral judgments of the story characters suggested possible reasons for this failure. The implications of the results for social cognition and information integration are discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The ability to understand false beliefs is critical to a concept of mind. Chandler, Fritz, and Hala challenge recent claims that this ability emerges only at around 4 years of age. They report that 2- and 3-year-olds remove true trails and lay false ones to mislead someone about the location of a hidden object. Experiment 1 confirmed that 2- and 3-year-olds produce apparently deceptive ploys, but they produce them less often than 4-year-olds, require prompting, and rarely anticipate their impact on the victim's beliefs or search. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds produce deceptive and informative ploys indiscriminately, whether asked to mislead a competitor or inform a collaborator. By contrast, 4-year-olds act selectively. The results support earlier claims that an understanding of false beliefs and deceptive ploys emerges at around 4 years of age. 2- and 3-year-olds can be led to produce such ploys but show no clear understanding of their effect.
This research examines whether children's difficulties with deception and false belief arise from a lack of inhibitory control rather than from a conceptual deficit. In 3 studies, 3-year-olds deceived frequently under conditions requiring relatively low inhibitory control (e.g., misleading pictorial cues or arrows) but failed to do so under conditions of high inhibitory control (deceptive pointing). Study 2 ruled out that the findings were due to social intimidation: Children were equally successful using an arrow to deceive under anonymous and public conditions. Study 3 indicated that, under well-controlled conditions, children did not reveal greater understanding of false belief in deceptive than nondeceptive conditions. The results of these studies suggest that children may have greater deceptive abilities than some earlier studies indicated, and that the source of their difficulty on deceptive pointing tasks lies in a failure of inhibitory control. More generally, it is argued that children's performance on false belief tasks is also likely to be affected by inhibition deficits.
Four experiments examined children's ability to use their knowledge to guide their behavior in a dimensional change (color-shape) card sort. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds were told to sort cards first by one dimension (e.g., color: “Yellow ones go here; green ones go there”) and then by the other. The majority of 3-year-olds continued to use the preswitch rules on the postswitch phase, despite expressing knowledge of the postswitch rules by pointing to the appropriate location when asked about each rule. Experiment 2 found that this dissociation between knowledge and its use occurs even after a single preswitch trial. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that the dissociation also occurs when verbal rather than manual responses are required. Together, the findings indicate that knowing rules is sometimes insufficient to permit their use. According to the cognitive complexity and control theory, the growth of reflection between 3 and 5 years of age underlies increases in control over thought and action by allowing children to integrate incompatible pairs of rules into a single rule system.
The hypothesis is tested that during the preschool period a particular form of reasoning is applied to theory of mind and a set of problems that do not require the understanding of mental states. Three experiments each provided a different piece of support for this hypothesis. Experiment 1 found similar age-related changes between three standard theory-of-mind tasks (false belief, appearance-reality and representational change) and two specially designed nonmental state tasks (rule-based card sorting and physical causality). Experiment 2 demonstrated that 3-year-olds' poor performance on card sorting occurred across different pairs of dimensions (color-size, shape-number, size-number, color-shape) just as it does across different pairs of perspectives in the theory-of-mind tasks (self-other, looks like-is, before-after), and that sorting performance was related to theory of mind with age partialled. Experiment 3 showed that theory of mind was related to a specific complexity of sorting—sorting by one of two dimensions and not sorting by one dimension or two dimensions simultaneously. The results indicate that advances in theory of mind, card sorting, and causality between 3 and 5 years of age depend on being able to switch judgments across conditions and that reasoning by embedded rules could account for these changes.
Rhesus monkeys with selective lesions of the frontal cortex were tested on a motor conditional associative-learning task. Monkeys with lesions of the periarcuate area were severely impaired in acquiring this task, whilst monkeys with lesions of the principalis region showed only a mild retardation in learning.
Understanding of second-order belief structures by 5- and 10-year-old children was assessed in acted stories in which two characters (John and Mary) were independently informed about an object's (ice-cream van's) unexpected transfer to a new location. Hence both John and Mary knew where the van was but there was a mistake in John's second-order belief about Mary's belief: “John thinks Mary thinks the van is still at the old place”. Children's understanding of this second-order belief was tested by asking “Where does John think Mary will go for ice cream?” Correct answers could only be given if John's second-order belief was represented, since all shortcut reasoning based on first-order beliefs would have led to the wrong answer. Results suggested unexpected early competence around the age of 6 and 7 years, shown under optimal conditions when inference of second-order beliefs was prompted.
The cognitive study of the underlying mental abnormalities in autism has advanced rapidly, while the biological study of the underlying brain abnormalities and of putative genetic mechanisms is lagging somewhat behind. However, the linking of cognitive and biological studies has become a real possibility. Developmental cognitive neuroscience has transformed our understanding of this enigmatic disorder, which was once misguidedly thought to be caused by maternal rejection. The hypothesis of a specific theory of mind deficit was a crucial step in this process. It explains the puzzle of the characteristic social and communication impairments of autism and allows for the fact that they can coexist with good general abilities. This hypothesis has been widely accepted and a start has been made at pinpointing the brain basis of theory of mind. The non-social impairments of autism have now become a major focus for cognitive research. One theory proposes dysfunction in executive processes, in an attempt to explain repetitive behaviour and inflexibility. Another theory proposes weak information integration, in an attempt to explain narrow interests and special talents. Autism research has thus stimulated ideas on important mind-brain systems that may be dedicated to the development of social awareness, executive functions and integrative processing.
This study compared the neuropsychological profiles of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's syndrome (AS). In comparison with matched controls, both groups were impaired on executive function tests. Only the HFA group demonstrated deficits in theory of mind and verbal memory, performing more poorly than both controls and AS subjects. These results suggest that: (1) HFA and AS are empirically distinguishable on measures independent of diagnostic criteria, and (2) impairment on theory of mind measures is not universally found among individuals with autistic spectrum conditions. The primacy of executive function and theory of mind deficits to autism is discussed.
A group of high-functioning autistic individuals was compared to a clinical control group matched on VIQ, age, sex and SES. Significant group differences were found on executive function, theory of mind, emotion perception and verbal memory tests, but not on spatial or other control measures. Second-order theory of mind and executive function deficits were widespread among the autistic group, while first-order theory of mind deficits were found in only a subset of the sample. The relationship of executive function and theory of mind deficits to each other, and their primacy to autism, are discussed.
When and how children understand beliefs and desires is central to whether they are ever childhood realists and when they evidence a theory of mind. Adults typically construe human action as resulting from an actor's beliefs and desires, a mentalistic interpretation that represents a common and fundamental form of psychological explanation. We investigated children's ability to do likewise. In Experiment 1, 60 subjects were asked to explain why story characters performed simple actions, such as looking under a piano for a kitten. Both preschoolers and adults gave predominantly psychological explanations, attributing the actions to the actor's beliefs and desires. Even 3-year-olds attributed actions to beliefs and false beliefs, demonstrating an understanding of belief not evident in previous research. In Experiment 2, 24 3-year-olds were tested further on their understanding of false belief. They were given both false belief prediction and explanation tasks. Children performed well on explanation taks, attributing an anomalous action to the actor's false belief, even when they failed to predict correctly what action would follow from a false belief. We concluded that 3-year-olds and adults share a fundamentally similar construal of human action in terms of beliefs and desires, even false beliefs.
This research concerns the development of children's understanding of representational change and its relation to other cognitive developments. Children were shown deceptive objects, and the true nature of the objects was then revealed. Children were then asked what they thought the object was when they first saw it, testing their understanding of representational change; what another child would think the object was, testing their understanding of false belief; and what the object looked like and really was, testing their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction. Most 3-year-olds answered the representational change question incorrectly. Most 5-year-olds did not make this error. Children's performance on the representational change question was poorer than their performance on the false-belief question. There were correlations between performance on all 3 tasks. Apparently children begin to be able to consider alternative representations of the same object at about age 4.
25 infants were tested every 2 weeks on the AB Object Permanence Task devised by Piaget, from the age when they first reached for a hidden object until they were 12 months. The delay between hiding and retrieval necessary to produce the AB error increased continuously throughout this period at an average rate of 2 sec/month, from under 2 sec at 7 1/2 months to over 10 sec by 12 months. All children displayed the AB error repeatedly over the months of testing. Large between-children differences in delay needed for the AB error were found at each age. Girls tolerated longer delays than boys. The characteristic pattern to the AB error did not vary over age or sex. Range of delay producing the AB error in any child was small. Errors disappeared when delays were reduced by 2-3 sec, and reaching became random or severely perseverative when delays were increased 2-3 sec above the level producing AB error. AB provides an index of the ability to carry out an intention based on stored information despite a conflicting habitual tendency.
Understanding of another person's wrong belief requires explicit representation of the wrongness of this person's belief in relation to one's own knowledge. Three to nine year old children's understanding of two sketches was tested. In each sketch subjects observed how a protagonist put an object into a location x and then witnessed that in the absence of the protagonist the object was transferred from x to location y. Since this transfer came as a surprise they had to assume that the protagonist still believed that the object was in x. Subjects had to indicate where the protagonist will look for the object at his return. None of the 3–4-year old, 57% of 4–6-year old, and 86% of 6–9-year old children pointed correctly to location x in both sketches. Of the many cases where 4–6-year olds made an error they failed in only about 20% to remember the initial location correctly. As a test of the stability of children's representation of the protagonist's wrong belief the sketches continued with a statement about the protagonist's intention to either deceive an antagonist or truthfully inform a friend about the object's location. Independent of age, of those children who correctly thought that the protagonist would search in x, 85% of the time they also correctly thought that he would direct his antagonist to location y and his friend to location x. This shows that once children can represent a person's beliefs they can constrain their interpretation of this person's stated intentions to the person's beliefs. In a more story-like situation another group of children had to infer a deceptive plan from the depiction of a goal conflict between two story characters and one character's expedient utterance. At the age of 4–5 years children correctly judged this utterance as a lie only 28% of the time while 5–6-year olds did so 94% of the time. These results suggest that around the ages of 4 to 6 years the ability to represent the relationship between two or more person's epistemic states emerges and becomes firmly established.RésuméComprendre que ce que croit un tiers est erroné requiert une représentation explicitée de cette fausse croyance en relation avec son savoir propre.On a testé la compréhension de deux sketches par des enfants de 3 à 9 ans. Dans chacun des sketches les sujets observent un protagoniste placer un objet dans un lieu ‘x’, puis sont témoins du transfert de cet objet de ‘x’ en ‘y’ en l'absence du protagoniste. Ce transfert doit causer une surprise chez le protagoniste dont on assume qu'il croit que l'objet se trouve toujours en ‘x’. Les sujets doivent dire où le protagoniste va chercher l'objet. Aucun 3–4 ans n'indique correctement le lieu ‘x’, 57% des 4–6 ans et 86% des 6–9 ans le font. Parmi les nombreuses erreurs des 4–6 ans seules 20% sont attribuables à une incapacité de se souvenir du lieu ‘x’. Pour tester la stabilité de la représentation de la croyance erronée, on dit que le protagoniste a l'intention soit de tromper un adversaire soit d'informer un ami sur le lieu où se trouve l'objet. Indépendamment de leur âge, les enfants ayant donné des réponses correctes disent correctement dans 85% des cas que le protagoniste conduirait l'adversaire en ‘y’ et l'ami en ‘x’. Lorsque les enfants se représentent les croyances d'une personne, ils peuvent faire dépendre leurs interprétations des intentions exprimées par celles-ci à partir de ses croyances.Dans une situation de type histoire, un autre groupe d'enfants doit inférer un essai de tromperie à partir de la représentation d'un but conflictuel entre deux des personnages de l'énoncé tactique d'un des personnages. A 4–5 ans les enfants ne jugent correctement cet énoncé comme mensonger que dans 28% des cas alors qu'à 5–6 on a 94% de reponses correctes. Les résultats indiquent que vers 4–6 ans la capacité de représenter une relation entre les états épistémiques de deux personnes ou plus émerge et se confirme.
Young children can express conceptual difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction in two different ways: (1) by incorrectly reporting appearance when asked to report reality (“phenomenism”); (2) by incorrectly reporting reality when asked to report appearance (“intellectual realism”). Although both phenomenism errors and intellectual realism errors have been observed in previous studies of young children's cognition, the two have not been seen as conceptually related and only the former errors have been taken as a symptom of difficulties with the appearance-reality distinction. Three experiments investigated 3- to 5-year-old children's ability to distinguish between and correctly identify real versus apparent object properties (color, size, and shape), object identities, object presence-absence, and action identities. Even the 3-year-olds appeared to have some ability to make correct appearance-reality discriminations and this ability increased with age. Errors were frequent, however, and almost all children who erred made both kinds. Phenomenism errors predominated on tasks where the appearance versus reality of the three object properties were in question; intellectual realism errors predominated on the other three types of tasks. Possible reasons for this curious error pattern were advanced. It was also suggested that young children's problems with the appearance-reality distinction may be partly due to a specific metacognitive limitation, namely, a difficulty in analyzing the nature and source of their own mental representations.
Nine normal volunteers performed a 'theory of mind' task while their regional brain blood flow pattern was recorded using the PET [15O]H2O technique. Control conditions induced subjects to attend to the visual and semantic attributes of known objects. In a third condition, subjects had to infer the function of an unfamiliar object from its form. In the 'theory of mind' condition, subjects had to infer function based on the form of both familiar and unfamiliar objects and in addition, model the knowledge and rationality of another mind about the function of these objects. Performance during the 'theory of mind' condition evoked the activation of a distributed set of neural networks with prominent activation of the left medial frontal lobe (Brodmann area 9) and left temporal lobe (Brodmann areas 21, 39/19, 38). This result suggests that when inferential reasoning depends on constructing a mental model about the beliefs and intentions of others, the participation of the prefrontal cortex is required. When access to such knowledge is affected by central nervous system dysfunction, such as that found in autism, modeling other minds may prove difficult.
In this paper, we consider the domain of executive functions (EFs) and their possible role in developmental psychopathologies. We first consider general theoretical and measurement issues involved in studying EFs and then review studies of EFs in four developmental psychopathologies: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder (CD), autism, and Tourette syndrome (TS).
Our review reveals that EF deficits are consistently found in both ADHD and autism but not in CD (without ADHD) or in TS. Moreover, both the severity and profile of EF deficits appears to differ across ADHD and autism. Molar EF deficits are more severe in the latter than the former. In the few studies of more specific EF tasks, there are impairments in motor inhibition in ADHD but not in autism, whereas there are impairments in verbal working memory in autism but not ADHD. We close with a discussion of implications for future research.
The ability to attribute mental states to others ('theory of mind') pervades normal social interaction and is impaired in autistic individuals. In a previous positron emission tomography scan study of normal volunteers, performing a 'theory of mind' task was associated with activity in left medial prefrontal cortex. We used the same paradigm in five patients with Asperger syndrome, a mild variant of autism with normal intellectual functioning. No task-related activity was found in this region, but normal activity was observed in immediately adjacent areas. This result suggests that a highly circumscribed region of left medial prefrontal cortex is a crucial component of the brain system that underlies the normal understanding of other minds.
To begin to study the importance of dopamine for executive function abilities dependent on prefrontal cortex during early childhood, the present investigation studied children in whom we predicted reduced dopamine in prefrontal cortex but otherwise normal brains. These are children treated early and continuously for the metabolic disorder phenylketonuria (PKU). Untreated PKU is the most common biochemical cause of mental retardation. The root problem is an inability to convert one amino acid, phenylalanine (Phe), into another, tyrosine (Tyr), the precursor of dopamine. Phe levels in the bloodstream soar; Tyr levels fall. Treatment with a diet low in Phe reduces the Phe:Tyr imbalance but cannot eliminate it. We hypothesized that the resultant modest elevation in the ratio of Phe to Tyr in the blood, which results in slightly less Tyr reaching the brain, uniquely affects the cognitive functions dependent on prefrontal cortex because of the special sensitivity of prefrontally projecting dopamine neurons to small decreases in Tyr. In a 4-year longitudinal study, we found that PKU children whose plasma Phe levels were three to five times normal (6-10 mg/dl) performed worse than other PKU children with lower Phe levels, matched controls, their own siblings, and children from the general population on tasks that required the working memory and inhibitory control abilities dependent on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The impairment was as evident in our oldest age range (3 1/2-7 years) as it was in the youngest (6-12 months). The higher a child's Phe level, the worse that child's performance. Girls were more adversely affected than boys. The deficit appears to be selective, affecting principally one neural system, since even PKU children with Phe levels three to five times normal performed well on the 13 control tasks. Clinical implications for the treatment of PKU and other neurodevelopmental disorders are discussed.
Building on earlier work by Pascual-Leone (1970) and Case (1985), Olson (1989; 1993) set out a theory showing how a series of incremental changes in capacity for "holding in mind" could account, in part, for children's acquisition of a theory of mind. Following Piaget (1951) infants were said to employ schemata for maintaining relations with objects and events in the presence of those events. At about 18 months children became capable of holding in mind an object so as to free the perceptual system to perceive a second object and form a relation between the two, allowing for what Piaget called the "symbolic function" and what Olson described as predication. At around 4 years, the period examined in the present study, children were said to acquire the ability to represent that predicative relation as a belief or as true or false. That was the stage at which children were said to possess a theory of mind. The present study tested the hypothesized relation between development of a theory of mind and increasing computational resources. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children's performance on a pair of theory of mind tasks was compared with that on a pair of dual processing tasks designed on the basis of Baddeley's (1986) model of working memory. The resulting correlations, as high as r = .64 between the tasks, suggest that changes in capacity to hold in mind allow the expression of, and arguably the formation of, a theory of mind.
This research examines whether children's difficulties with deception and false belief arise from a lack of inhibitory control rather than from a conceptual deficit. In 3 studies, 3-year-olds deceived frequently under conditions requiring relatively low inhibitory control (e.g., misleading pictorial cues or arrows) but failed to do so under conditions of high inhibitory control (deceptive pointing). Study 2 ruled out that the findings were due to social intimidation: Children were equally successful using an arrow to deceive under anonymous and public conditions. Study 3 indicated that, under well-controlled conditions, children did not reveal greater understanding of false belief in deceptive than nondeceptive conditions. The results of these studies suggest that children may have greater deceptive abilities than some earlier studies indicated, and that the source of their difficulty on deceptive pointing tasks lies in a failure of inhibitory control. More generally, it is argued that children's performance on false belief tasks is also likely to be affected by inhibition deficits.