Preschoolers’ Development of Theory of Mind: The Contribution of Understanding Psychological Causality in Stories

PubMed Central

Sanefuji, Wakako; Haryu, Etsuko

2018-01-01

This study investigated the relationship between children’s abilities to understand causal sequences and another’s false belief. In Experiment 1, we tested 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children (n = 28, 28, 27, and 27, respectively) using false belief and picture sequencing tasks involving mechanical, behavioral, and psychological causality. Understanding causal sequences in mechanical, behavioral, and psychological stories was related to understanding other’s false beliefs. In Experiment 2, children who failed the initial false belief task (n = 50) were reassessed 5 months later. High scorers in the sequencing of the psychological stories in Experiment 1 were more likely to pass the standard false belief task than were the low scorers. Conversely, understanding causal sequences in the mechanical and behavioral stories in Experiment 1 did not predict passing the false belief task in Experiment 2. Thus, children may understand psychological causality before they are able to use it to understand false beliefs.

The Accidental Transgressor: Morally Relevant Theory of Mind

PubMed Central

Killen, Melanie; Mulvey, Kelly Lynn; Richardson, Cameron; Jampol, Noah

2014-01-01

To test young children’s false belief theory of mind in a morally relevant context, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children (N = 162) at 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years of age were administered 3 tasks: prototypic moral transgression task, false belief theory of mind task (ToM), and an “accidental transgressor” task, which measured a morally relevant false belief theory of mind (MoToM). Children who did not pass false belief ToM were more likely to attribute negative intentions to an accidental transgressor than children who passed false belief ToM, and to use moral reasons when blaming the accidental transgressor. In Experiment 2, children (N = 46) who did not pass false belief ToM viewed it as more acceptable to punish the accidental transgressor than did participants who passed false belief ToM. Findings are discussed in light of research on the emergence of moral judgment and theory of mind. PMID:21377148

Processing demands in belief-desire reasoning: inhibition or general difficulty?

PubMed

Friedman, Ori; Leslie, Alan M

2005-05-01

Most 4-year-olds can predict the behavior of a person who wants an object but is mistaken about its location. More difficult is predicting behavior when the person is mistaken about location and wants to avoid the object. We tested between two explanations for children's difficulties with avoidance false belief: the Selection Processing model of inhibitory processing and a General Difficulty account. Children were presented with a false belief task and a control task, in which belief attribution was as difficult as in the false belief task. Predicting behavior in light of the character's desire to avoid the object added more difficulty in the false belief task. This finding is consistent with the Selection Processing model, but not with the General Difficulty account.

2.5-year-olds succeed at a verbal anticipatory-looking false-belief task.

PubMed

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renée

2012-03-01

Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of non-elicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behaviour). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible explanation for these findings is that toddlers succeed when they correctly interpret the prompt as a self-addressed utterance (making the task a non-elicited-response task), but fail when they mistakenly interpret the prompt as a direct question (making the task an elicited-response task). Here, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in a verbal anticipatory-looking task that was designed to help them interpret the anticipatory prompt as a self-addressed utterance: the experimenter looked at the ceiling, chin in hand, during and after the prompt. Children gave evidence of false-belief understanding in this task, but failed when the experimenter looked at the child during and after the prompt. These results reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief reasoning and provide additional support for the distinction between non-elicited- and elicited-response false-belief tasks. Three accounts of the discrepant results obtained with these tasks - and of early false-belief understanding more generally - are discussed. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

2.5-year-olds Succeed at a Verbal Anticipatory-Looking False-Belief Task

PubMed Central

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renée

2012-01-01

Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of nonelicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent’s likely behavior). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible explanation for these findings is that toddlers succeed when they correctly interpret the prompt as a self-addressed utterance (making the task a nonelicited-response task), but fail when they mistakenly interpret the prompt as a direct question (making the task an elicited-response task). Here, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in a verbal anticipatory-looking task that was designed to help them interpret the anticipatory prompt as a self-addressed utterance: the experimenter looked at the ceiling, chin in hand, during and after the prompt. Children gave evidence of false-belief understanding in this task, but failed when the experimenter looked at the child during and after the prompt. These results reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief reasoning and provide additional support for the distinction between nonelicited- and elicited-response false-belief tasks. Three accounts of the discrepant results obtained with these tasks—and of early false-belief understanding more generally—are discussed. PMID:22429030

An association account of false belief understanding.

PubMed

De Bruin, L C; Newen, A

2012-05-01

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young infants already understand false belief, then why do they fail the elicited-response false belief task? We postulate two systems to account for the development of false belief understanding: an association module, which provides infants with the capacity to register congruent associations between agents and objects, and an operating system, which allows them to transform these associations into incongruent associations through a process of inhibition, selection and representation. The interaction between the association module and the operating system enables infants to register increasingly complex associations on the basis of another agent's movements, visual perspective and propositional attitudes. This allows us account for the full range of findings on false belief understanding. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

False-belief understanding i 2.5-year-olds: evidence for violation-of-expectation change-of-location and unexpected-contents tasks.

PubMed

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renée

2011-03-01

Until recently, it was generally assumed that the ability to attribute false beliefs did not emerge until about 4 years of age. However, recent reports using spontaneous- as opposed to elicited-response tasks have suggested that this ability may be present much earlier. To date, researchers have employed two kinds of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks: violation-of-expectation tasks have been used with infants in the second year of life, and anticipatory-looking tasks have been used with toddlers in the third year of life. In the present research, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in violation-of-expectation tasks involving a change-of-location situation (Experiment 1) and an unexpected-contents situation (Experiment 2). Results were positive in both situations, providing the first demonstrations of false-belief understanding in toddlers using violation-of-expectation tasks and, as such, pointing to a consistent and continuous picture of early false-belief understanding.

False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from violation-of-expectation change-of-location and unexpected-contents tasks

PubMed Central

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renée

2012-01-01

Until recently, it was generally assumed that the ability to attribute false beliefs did not emerge until about 4 years of age. However, recent reports using spontaneous- as opposed to elicited-response tasks have suggested that this ability may be present much earlier. To date, researchers have employed two kinds of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks: violation-of-expectation tasks have been used with infants in the second year of life, and anticipatory-looking tasks have been used with toddlers in the third year of life. In the present research, 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested in violation-of-expectation tasks involving a change-of-location situation (Experiment 1) and an unexpected-contents situation (Experiment 2). Results were positive in both situations, providing the first demonstrations of false-belief understanding in toddlers using violation-of-expectation tasks and, as such, pointing to a consistent and continuous picture of early false-belief understanding. PMID:22213902

The Weird World of Cross-Cultural False-Belief Research: A True- and False-Belief Study among Samoan Children Based on Commands

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayer, Andreas; Träuble, Birgit

2015-01-01

Previous cross-cultural research using false-belief tasks has explored whether children's theory of mind develops synchronously across cultures. Success on false-belief tasks is usually interpreted as an important indicator of children's mental state understanding, but inconsistent findings have led to questions regarding the interpretation of…

Theory of Mind Development in Deaf Children: A Nonverbal Test of False-Belief Understanding.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Figueras-Costa, Berta; Harris, Paul

2001-01-01

Twenty-one children (ages 4-11) prelingually deaf and orally trained, were tested with verbal and nonverbal versions of a false-belief task. Children did not perform above chance in the verbal task. The nonverbal task significantly facilitated performance, however, only older children performed above change in the nonverbal false-belief tests.…

Gesture as a window on children's beginning understanding of false belief.

PubMed

Carlson, Stephanie M; Wong, Antoinette; Lemke, Margaret; Cosser, Caron

2005-01-01

Given that gestures may provide access to transitions in cognitive development, preschoolers' performance on standard tasks was compared with their performance on a new gesture false belief task. Experiment 1 confirmed that children (N=45, M age=54 months) responded consistently on two gesture tasks and that there is dramatic improvement on both the gesture false belief task and a standard task from ages 3 to 5. In 2 subsequent experiments focusing on children in transition with respect to understanding false beliefs (Ns=34 and 70, M age=48 months), there was a significant advantage of gesture over standard and novel verbal-response tasks. Iconic gesture may facilitate reasoning about opaque mental states in children who are rapidly developing concepts of mind.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds succeed at a traditional false-belief task with reduced processing demands.

PubMed

Setoh, Peipei; Scott, Rose M; Baillargeon, Renée

2016-11-22

When tested with traditional false-belief tasks, which require answering a standard question about the likely behavior of an agent with a false belief, children perform below chance until age 4 y or later. When tested without such questions, however, children give evidence of false-belief understanding much earlier. Are traditional tasks difficult because they tap a more advanced form of false-belief understanding (fundamental-change view) or because they impose greater processing demands (processing-demands view)? Evidence that young children succeed at traditional false-belief tasks when processing demands are reduced would support the latter view. In prior research, reductions in inhibitory-control demands led to improvements in young children's performance, but often only to chance (instead of below-chance) levels. Here we examined whether further reductions in processing demands might lead to success. We speculated that: (i) young children could respond randomly in a traditional low-inhibition task because their limited information-processing resources are overwhelmed by the total concurrent processing demands in the task; and (ii) these demands include those from the response-generation process activated by the standard question. This analysis suggested that 2.5-y-old toddlers might succeed at a traditional low-inhibition task if response-generation demands were also reduced via practice trials. As predicted, toddlers performed above chance following two response-generation practice trials; toddlers failed when these trials either were rendered less effective or were used in a high-inhibition task. These results support the processing-demands view: Even toddlers succeed at a traditional false-belief task when overall processing demands are reduced.

How to pass the false-belief task before your fourth birthday.

PubMed

Rubio-Fernández, Paula; Geurts, Bart

2013-01-01

The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under 4 years old fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, whereas more recent studies have revealed that infants are able to pass nonverbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artifact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: Nonverbal designs allow infants to keep track of a protagonist's perspective over a course of events, whereas verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective-tracking process in various ways, which makes it too hard for younger children to demonstrate their capacity for perspective tracking. We report three experiments that confirm this hypothesis by showing that 3-year-olds can pass a suitably streamlined version of the verbal false-belief task. We conclude that young children can pass the verbal false-belief task provided that they are allowed to keep track of the protagonist's perspective without too much disruption.

Tracking speakers' false beliefs: is theory of mind available earlier for word learning?

PubMed

Houston-Price, Carmel; Goddard, Kate; Séclier, Catherine; Grant, Sally C; Reid, Caitlin J B; Boyden, Laura E; Williams, Rhiannon

2011-07-01

Happé and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a 'privileged domain' in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of a protagonist in a story or to learn the meaning of a new word used by the protagonist. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of better performance in a false belief word-learning task compared to a false belief action-prediction task. However, systematic manipulation of the task parameters in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this performance discrepancy disappeared when tasks were equated in their 'referential pull' (Perner, Rendl & Garnham, 2007). We conclude that the notion of a precocious theory of mind for word learning is not required to explain dissociations in performance on false belief tasks. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Understanding the Mind or Predicting Signal-Dependent Action? Performance of Children with and without Autism on Analogues of the False-Belief Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bowler, Dermot M.; Briskman, Jackie; Gurvidi, Nicole; Fornells-Ambrojo, Miriam

2005-01-01

To evaluate the claim that correct performance on unexpected transfer false-belief tasks specifically involves mental-state understanding, two experiments were carried out with children with autism, intellectual disabilities, and typical development. In both experiments, children were given a standard unexpected transfer false-belief task and a…

Can We Forget What We Know in a False-Belief Task? An Investigation of the True-Belief Default.

PubMed

Rubio-Fernández, Paula

2017-01-01

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a "true-belief default"). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Deception dissociates from false belief reasoning in deaf children: implications for the implicit versus explicit theory of mind distinction.

PubMed

de Villiers, Peter A; de Villiers, Jill G

2012-03-01

Deception is a controversial aspect of theory of mind, and researchers disagree about whether it entails an understanding of the false beliefs of one's opponent. The present study asks whether children with delayed language and delayed explicit false belief reasoning can succeed on explicit deception tasks. Participants were 45 orally taught deaf children with varying language delays aged 4.5-8 years and 45 hearing children aged 3.5-6 years. Participants received a battery of language, executive function, deception, and both verbal and low-verbal false belief tasks. The result reveal a dissociation of deception and false belief tasks: the deaf children are on par with their hearing peers on deception games, but show significant delays in false belief tasks even when the language demands are made minimal. Furthermore, different skills are predictors of success for the two types of task in the deaf children: language, and in particular complement syntax, is the best predictor of false belief reasoning; but executive function skills, especially inhibitory control, are the best predictors of deception. It is argued that deception at this level can be handled by behaviour rules without reference to mental states. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

The overlap between false belief and spatial reorientation in the temporo-parietal junction: The role of input modality and task.

PubMed

Özdem, Ceylan; Brass, Marcel; Van der Cruyssen, Laurens; Van Overwalle, Frank

2017-04-01

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is activated when unexpected stimuli appear in spatial reorientation tasks as well as during thinking about the beliefs of other people triggered by verbal scenarios. While the role of potential common component processes subserved by the TPJ has been extensively studied to explain this common activation, the potential confounding role of input modality (spatial vs. verbal) has been largely ignored. To investigate the role of input modality apart from task processes, we developed a novel spatial false belief task based on moving shapes. We explored the overlap in TPJ activation across this novel task and traditional tasks of spatial reorientation (Posner) and verbal belief (False Belief vs. Photo stories). The results show substantial overlap across the same spatial input modality (both reorientation and false belief) as well as across the common task process (verbal and spatial belief), but no triple overlap. This suggests the potential for an overarching function of the TPJ, with some degree of specialization in different subregions due to modality, function and connectivity. The results are discussed with respect to recent theoretical models of the TPJ.

Breaking the rules: do infants have a true understanding of false belief?

PubMed

Yott, Jessica; Poulin-Dubois, Diane

2012-03-01

It has been suggested that infants' performance on the false belief task can be explained by the use of behavioural rules. To test this hypothesis, 18-month-old infants were trained to learn the new rule that an object that disappeared in location A could be found in location B. Infants were then administered a false belief task based on the violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm, an intention understanding task, and a modified detour-reaching task. Results revealed that infants looked significantly longer at the display when the experimenter looked for the toy in the full box (box with the toy) compared to infants who observed the experimenter search in the empty box (box without the toy). Results also revealed significant correlations between infants' looking time at the display and their scores on the intention task and on the detour-reaching task. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants possess an implicit understanding of false belief. In addition, they challenge the view that success on the implicit false belief task does not require executive functioning abilities. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

Metacognitive development of deaf children: lessons from the appearance-reality and false belief tasks.

PubMed

Courtin, Cyril; Melot, Anne-Marie

2005-01-01

'Theory of mind' development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The present paper is aimed at testing the metacognitive abilities of deaf children on two tasks: the appearance-reality paradigm designed by Flavell, Flavell and Green (1983) and the classic false belief inference task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Hogrefe, Wimmer & Perner, 1986). Twenty-eight second-generation deaf children, 60 deaf children of hearing parents and 36 hearing children, aged 5 to 7, were tested and compared on three appearance-reality and three false belief items. Results show that early exposure to language, be it signed or oral, facilitates performance on the two theory of mind tasks. In addition, native signers equal hearing children in the appearance-reality task while surpassing them on the false belief one. The differences of performance patterns in the two tasks are discussed in terms of linguistic and metarepresentational development.

Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies

PubMed Central

Barrett, H. Clark; Broesch, Tanya; Scott, Rose M.; He, Zijing; Baillargeon, Renée; Wu, Di; Bolz, Matthias; Henrich, Joseph; Setoh, Peipei; Wang, Jianxin; Laurence, Stephen

2013-01-01

The psychological capacity to recognize that others may hold and act on false beliefs has been proposed to reflect an evolved, species-typical adaptation for social reasoning in humans; however, controversy surrounds the developmental timing and universality of this trait. Cross-cultural studies using elicited-response tasks indicate that the age at which children begin to understand false beliefs ranges from 4 to 7 years across societies, whereas studies using spontaneous-response tasks with Western children indicate that false-belief understanding emerges much earlier, consistent with the hypothesis that false-belief understanding is a psychological adaptation that is universally present in early childhood. To evaluate this hypothesis, we used three spontaneous-response tasks that have revealed early false-belief understanding in the West to test young children in three traditional, non-Western societies: Salar (China), Shuar/Colono (Ecuador) and Yasawan (Fiji). Results were comparable with those from the West, supporting the hypothesis that false-belief understanding reflects an adaptation that is universally present early in development. PMID:23363628

Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.

PubMed

Barrett, H Clark; Broesch, Tanya; Scott, Rose M; He, Zijing; Baillargeon, Renée; Wu, Di; Bolz, Matthias; Henrich, Joseph; Setoh, Peipei; Wang, Jianxin; Laurence, Stephen

2013-03-22

The psychological capacity to recognize that others may hold and act on false beliefs has been proposed to reflect an evolved, species-typical adaptation for social reasoning in humans; however, controversy surrounds the developmental timing and universality of this trait. Cross-cultural studies using elicited-response tasks indicate that the age at which children begin to understand false beliefs ranges from 4 to 7 years across societies, whereas studies using spontaneous-response tasks with Western children indicate that false-belief understanding emerges much earlier, consistent with the hypothesis that false-belief understanding is a psychological adaptation that is universally present in early childhood. To evaluate this hypothesis, we used three spontaneous-response tasks that have revealed early false-belief understanding in the West to test young children in three traditional, non-Western societies: Salar (China), Shuar/Colono (Ecuador) and Yasawan (Fiji). Results were comparable with those from the West, supporting the hypothesis that false-belief understanding reflects an adaptation that is universally present early in development.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds succeed at a traditional false-belief task with reduced processing demands

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Baillargeon, Renée

2016-01-01

When tested with traditional false-belief tasks, which require answering a standard question about the likely behavior of an agent with a false belief, children perform below chance until age 4 y or later. When tested without such questions, however, children give evidence of false-belief understanding much earlier. Are traditional tasks difficult because they tap a more advanced form of false-belief understanding (fundamental-change view) or because they impose greater processing demands (processing-demands view)? Evidence that young children succeed at traditional false-belief tasks when processing demands are reduced would support the latter view. In prior research, reductions in inhibitory-control demands led to improvements in young children’s performance, but often only to chance (instead of below-chance) levels. Here we examined whether further reductions in processing demands might lead to success. We speculated that: (i) young children could respond randomly in a traditional low-inhibition task because their limited information-processing resources are overwhelmed by the total concurrent processing demands in the task; and (ii) these demands include those from the response-generation process activated by the standard question. This analysis suggested that 2.5-y-old toddlers might succeed at a traditional low-inhibition task if response-generation demands were also reduced via practice trials. As predicted, toddlers performed above chance following two response-generation practice trials; toddlers failed when these trials either were rendered less effective or were used in a high-inhibition task. These results support the processing-demands view: Even toddlers succeed at a traditional false-belief task when overall processing demands are reduced. PMID:27821728

Black Preschoolers' Social Cognition: Storytelling and False Belief.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Curenton, Stephanie M.; Wilson, Melvin N.; Lillard, Angeline S.

Noting that the lower performance of low-income children on false belief tasks in comparison to that of middle-income children has not been adequately explained, this study examined the possibility that black children's experiences and talents with storytelling may facilitate their performance on false belief tasks when narrative questions are…

Belief-desire reasoning as a process of selection.

PubMed

Leslie, Alan M; German, Tim P; Polizzi, Pamela

2005-02-01

Human learning may depend upon domain specialized mechanisms. A plausible example is rapid, early learning about the thoughts and feelings of other people. A major achievement in this domain, at about age four in the typically developing child, is the ability to solve problems in which the child attributes false beliefs to other people and predicts their actions. The main focus of theorizing has been why 3-year-olds fail, and only recently have there been any models of how success is achieved in false-belief tasks. Leslie and Polizzi (Inhibitory processing in the false-belief task: Two conjectures. Developmental Science, 1, 247-254, 1998) proposed two competing models of success, which are the focus of the current paper. The models assume that belief-desire reasoning is a process which selects a content for an agent's belief and an action for the agent's desire. In false belief tasks, the theory of mind mechanism (ToMM) provides plausible candidate belief contents, among which will be a 'true-belief.' A second process reviews these candidates and by default will select the true-belief content for attribution. To succeed in a false-belief task, the default content must be inhibited so that attention shifts to another candidate belief. In traditional false-belief tasks, the protagonist's desire is to approach an object. Here we make use of tasks in which the protagonist has a desire to avoid an object, about which she has a false-belief. Children find such tasks much more difficult than traditional tasks. Our models explain the additional difficulty by assuming that predicting action from an avoidance desire also requires an inhibition. The two processing models differ in the way that belief and desire inhibitory processes combine to achieve successful action prediction. In six experiments we obtain evidence favoring one model, in which parallel inhibitory processes cancel out, over the other model, in which serial inhibitions force attention to a previously inhibited location. These results are discussed in terms of a set of simple proposals for the modus operandi of a domain specific learning mechanism. The learning mechanism is in part modular--the ToMM--and in part penetrable--the Selection Processor (SP). We show how ToMM-SP can account both for competence and for successful and unsuccessful performance on a wide range of belief-desire tasks across the preschool period. Together, ToMM and SP attend to and learn about mental states.

A Nonverbal False Belief Task: The Performance of Children and Great Apes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

1999-01-01

Compared performance of preschool children, chimpanzees, and orangutans on nonverbal task of false-belief understanding and tested children's performance on a verbal version of the same task. Found that children's performance on verbal and nonverbal tasks were highly correlated, and no chimp or orangutan succeeded in the nonverbal false-belief…

Making sense of theory of mind and paranoia: the psychometric properties and reasoning requirements of a false belief sequencing task.

PubMed

Corcoran, Rhiannon; Bentall, Richard P; Rowse, Georgina; Moore, Rosanne; Cummins, Sinead; Blackwood, Nigel; Howard, Robert; Shryane, Nick M

2011-11-01

INTRODUCTION. This study used Item-Response Theory (IRT) to model the psychometric properties of a false belief picture sequencing task. Consistent with the mental time travel hypothesis of paranoia, we anticipated that performance on this deductive theory of mind (ToM) task would not be associated with the presence of persecutory delusions but would be related to other clinical, cognitive, and demographic factors. METHOD. A large (N=237) and diverse clinical and nonclinical sample differing in levels of depression and paranoid ideation performed 2 ToM tasks: the false belief sequencing task and a ToM stories task that was used to assess the validity of the false belief sequencing task as a measure of ToM. RESULTS. A unidimensional IRT model was found to fit the data well. Latent ToM ability as measured by the false belief sequencing task was negatively related with age and positively with IQ. In contrast to the ToM stories measure, there was no association between clinical diagnosis or symptoms and false belief picture sequencing after controlling for age and IQ. CONCLUSIONS. In line with mental time travel hypothesis of paranoia (Corcoran, 2010 ), performance on this deductive nonverbal ToM task is not related to the presence of paranoid symptoms. This measure is best suited for assessing ToM functioning where participants' performance falls just short of the average latent ToM ability. Furthermore, it is sensitive to the effects of increasing age and decreasing IQ.

Procedural Metacognition and False Belief Understanding in 3- to 5-Year-Old Children

PubMed Central

Bernard, Stéphane; Proust, Joëlle; Clément, Fabrice

2015-01-01

Some studies, so far limited in number, suggest the existence of procedural metacognition in young children, that is, the practical capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive activity in a given task. The link between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding is currently under theoretical discussion. If data with primates seem to indicate that procedural metacognition and false belief understanding are not related, no study in developmental psychology has investigated this relation in young children. The present paper aims, first, to supplement the findings concerning young children’s abilities to monitor and control their uncertainty (procedural metacognition) and, second, to explore the relation between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding. To examine this, 82 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with an opt-out task and with 3 false belief tasks. Results show that children can rely on procedural metacognition to evaluate their perceptual access to information, and that success in false belief tasks does not seem related to success in the task we used to evaluate procedural metacognition. These results are coherent with a procedural view of metacognition, and are discussed in the light of recent data from primatology and developmental psychology. PMID:26517260

Procedural Metacognition and False Belief Understanding in 3- to 5-Year-Old Children.

PubMed

Bernard, Stéphane; Proust, Joëlle; Clément, Fabrice

2015-01-01

Some studies, so far limited in number, suggest the existence of procedural metacognition in young children, that is, the practical capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive activity in a given task. The link between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding is currently under theoretical discussion. If data with primates seem to indicate that procedural metacognition and false belief understanding are not related, no study in developmental psychology has investigated this relation in young children. The present paper aims, first, to supplement the findings concerning young children's abilities to monitor and control their uncertainty (procedural metacognition) and, second, to explore the relation between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding. To examine this, 82 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with an opt-out task and with 3 false belief tasks. Results show that children can rely on procedural metacognition to evaluate their perceptual access to information, and that success in false belief tasks does not seem related to success in the task we used to evaluate procedural metacognition. These results are coherent with a procedural view of metacognition, and are discussed in the light of recent data from primatology and developmental psychology.

Theory of mind and executive function: working-memory capacity and inhibitory control as predictors of false-belief task performance.

PubMed

Mutter, Brigitte; Alcorn, Mark B; Welsh, Marilyn

2006-06-01

This study of the relationship between theory of mind and executive function examined whether on the false-belief task age differences between 3 and 5 ears of age are related to development of working-memory capacity and inhibitory processes. 72 children completed tasks measuring false belief, working memory, and inhibition. Significant age effects were observed for false-belief and working-memory performance, as well as for the false-alarm and perseveration measures of inhibition. A simultaneous multiple linear regression specified the contribution of age, inhibition, and working memory to the prediction of false-belief performance. This model was significant, explaining a total of 36% of the variance. To examine the independent contributions of the working-memory and inhibition variables, after controlling for age, two hierarchical multiple linear regressions were conducted. These multiple regression analyses indicate that working memory and inhibition make small, overlapping contributions to false-belief performance after accounting for age, but that working memory, as measured in this study, is a somewhat better predictor of false-belief understanding than is inhibition.

Deception and false belief in paranoia: modelling theory of mind stories.

PubMed

Shryane, Nick M; Corcoran, Rhiannon; Rowse, Georgina; Moore, Rosanne; Cummins, Sinead; Blackwood, Nigel; Howard, Robert; Bentall, Richard P

2008-01-01

This study used Item Response Theory (IRT) to model the psychometric properties of a Theory of Mind (ToM) stories task. The study also aimed to determine whether the ability to understand states of false belief in others and the ability to understand another's intention to deceive are separable skills, and to establish which is more sensitive to the presence of paranoia. A large and diverse clinical and nonclinical sample differing in levels of depression and paranoid ideation performed a ToM stories task measuring false belief and deception at first and second order. A three-factor IRT model was found to best fit the data, consisting of first- and second-order deception factors and a single false-belief factor. The first-order deception and false-belief factors had good measurement properties at low trait levels, appropriate for samples with reduced ToM ability. First-order deception and false beliefs were both sensitive to paranoid ideation with IQ predicting performance on false belief items. Separable abilities were found to underlie performance on verbal ToM tasks. However, paranoia was associated with impaired performance on both false belief and deception understanding with clear impairment at the simplest level of mental state attribution.

Theory of mind in schizophrenia: exploring neural mechanisms of belief attribution.

PubMed

Lee, Junghee; Quintana, Javier; Nori, Poorang; Green, Michael F

2011-01-01

Although previous behavioral studies have shown that schizophrenia patients have impaired theory of mind (ToM), the neural mechanisms associated with this impairment are poorly understood. This study aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of ToM in schizophrenia, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a belief attribution task. In the scanner, 12 schizophrenia patients and 13 healthy control subjects performed the belief attribution task with three conditions: a false belief condition, a false photograph condition, and a simple reading condition. For the false belief versus simple reading conditions, schizophrenia patients showed reduced neural activation in areas including the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) compared with controls. Further, during the false belief versus false photograph conditions, we observed increased activations in the TPJ and the MPFC in healthy controls, but not in schizophrenia patients. For the false photograph versus simple reading condition, both groups showed comparable neural activations. Schizophrenia patients showed reduced task-related activation in the TPJ and the MPFC during the false belief condition compared with controls, but not for the false photograph condition. This pattern suggests that reduced activation in these regions is associated with, and specific to, impaired ToM in schizophrenia.

False-belief reasoning from 3 to 92 years of age

PubMed Central

Coolin, Alisha; Fischer, Ashley L.; Thornton, Wendy Loken; Sommerville, Jessica A.

2017-01-01

False-belief reasoning, defined as the ability to reason about another person’s beliefs and appreciate that beliefs can differ from reality, is an important aspect of perspective taking. We tested 266 individuals, at various ages ranging from 3 to 92 years, on a continuous measure of false-belief reasoning (the Sandbox task). All age groups had difficulty suppressing their own knowledge when estimating what a naïve person knew. After controlling for task-specific memory, our results showed similar false-belief reasoning abilities across the preschool years and from older childhood to younger adulthood, followed by a small reduction in this ability from younger to older adulthood. These results highlight the relative similarity in false-belief reasoning abilities at different developmental periods across the lifespan. PMID:28957366

False-belief reasoning from 3 to 92 years of age.

PubMed

Bernstein, Daniel M; Coolin, Alisha; Fischer, Ashley L; Thornton, Wendy Loken; Sommerville, Jessica A

2017-01-01

False-belief reasoning, defined as the ability to reason about another person's beliefs and appreciate that beliefs can differ from reality, is an important aspect of perspective taking. We tested 266 individuals, at various ages ranging from 3 to 92 years, on a continuous measure of false-belief reasoning (the Sandbox task). All age groups had difficulty suppressing their own knowledge when estimating what a naïve person knew. After controlling for task-specific memory, our results showed similar false-belief reasoning abilities across the preschool years and from older childhood to younger adulthood, followed by a small reduction in this ability from younger to older adulthood. These results highlight the relative similarity in false-belief reasoning abilities at different developmental periods across the lifespan.

Developmental Continuity in Theory of Mind: Speed and Accuracy of Belief-Desire Reasoning in Children and Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apperly, Ian A.; Warren, Frances; Andrews, Benjamin J.; Grant, Jay; Todd, Sophie

2011-01-01

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Chinese preschoolers' implicit and explicit false-belief understanding.

PubMed

Wang, Bo; Low, Jason; Jing, Zhang; Qinghua, Qu

2012-03-01

Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in Mainland China (3- to 4-year-olds; N= 192) were tested for dissociations between anticipatory looking (AL) and verbal judgments on false-belief tasks. The dissociation between the two kinds of understanding was robust despite direct false-belief test questions using a Mandarin specific think-falsely verb and despite participants living in a culture that promotes early self-control. Children showed coherent AL across different belief-formation scenarios. Manipulation of inhibitory demand in the false-belief task did not affect preschoolers' verbal judgments any more than their AL, and yet separate measures executive function correlated only with direct judgments and not looking responses. The findings are discussed in terms of an implicit-explicit cognitive systems account of false-belief understanding. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

Children's Understanding of Second-Order False Belief: Comparisons of Content and Method of Assessment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Scott A.

2013-01-01

This research examined children's performance on second-order false belief tasks as a function of the content area for the belief and the method of assessing understanding. A total of 70 kindergarten and first-grade children responded to four second-order stories. On two stories, the task was to judge a belief about a belief, and on two, the…

Children's Performance on a False-belief Task Is Impaired by Activation of an Evolutionarily-Canalized Response System.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keenan, Thomas; Ellis, Bruce J.

2003-01-01

Two studies examined how task content that activates predator-avoidance affects preschool children's performance on a false-belief task. Findings indicated that the proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task was greater than that for the predator-avoidance task, suggesting that activation of the predator-avoidance system…

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account.

PubMed

Roby, Erin; Scott, Rose M

2016-01-01

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children's performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers' performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers' performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction.

Testing the Domain-Specificity of a Theory of Mind Deficit in Brain-Injured Patients: Evidence for Consistent Performance on Non-Verbal, ''Reality-Unknown'' False Belief and False Photograph Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apperly, Ian A.; Samson, Dana; Chiavarino, Claudia; Bickerton, Wai-Ling; Humphreys, Glyn W.

2007-01-01

To test the domain-specificity of ''theory of mind'' abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning (Apperly, Samson, Chiavarino, & Humphreys, 2004) and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems…

Early conversational environment enables spontaneous belief attribution in deaf children.

PubMed

Meristo, Marek; Strid, Karin; Hjelmquist, Erland

2016-12-01

Previous research suggests that deaf children who grow up with hearing parents display considerable difficulties in understanding mental states of others, up to their teenage years when explicitly asked in a verbal test situation (Meristo et al., 2007). On the other hand, typically developing pre-verbal infants display evidence of spontaneous false belief attribution when tested in looking-time tasks, although verbal tests are typically not passed before the age of 4years (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005). The purpose of the present study was to examine whether deaf children of hearing parents are able to demonstrate spontaneous belief attribution in a non-verbal eye-tracking task. Thirty 4- to 8-year-old, deaf and hearing children, completed a non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief task and a verbal elicited-response false-belief task. The deaf children were either children with cochlear implants or children with hearing aids. Comparative analyses were also carried out with a previous sample of deaf and hearing 2-year-olds (reported in Meristo, Morgan, et al., 2012). We found that in the non-verbal spontaneous-response task typically hearing children, but not deaf children, were able to predict that a person with a false belief about an object's location will search erroneously for the object. However, hearing children and deaf children with implants, but not deaf children with hearing aids, passed the verbal elicited-response task. Language development was significantly correlated with both types of false-belief tasks for the whole sample. Our findings strengthen the hypothesis that the emergence of the ability to recognize others' beliefs needs to be supported initially by very early conversational input in dialogues with caregivers. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Apes perform like infants in false-belief tasks.

PubMed

Bugnyar, Thomas

2017-12-01

Although the extent to which some nonhuman animals understand mental states is currently under debate, attributing false beliefs has been considered to be beyond their limits. A recent study by Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, and Tomasello (Science, 354, 110-114, 2016) shows that great apes pass a false-belief task when they are tested with an anticipatory-looking paradigm developed for nonverbal human infants.

Breaking the Rules: Do Infants Have a True Understanding of False Belief?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yott, Jessica; Poulin-Dubois, Diane

2012-01-01

It has been suggested that infants' performance on the false belief task can be explained by the use of behavioural rules. To test this hypothesis, 18-month-old infants were trained to learn the new rule that an object that disappeared in location A could be found in location B. Infants were then administered a false belief task based on the…

Theory of mind: a new perspective on the puzzle of belief ascription.

PubMed

Airenti, Gabriella

2015-01-01

The concept of theory of mind (ToM) has considerably changed since its first proposal. The aim of first human studies was to understand how young children acquire the representation of others' mental states, in particular beliefs, and how they distinguish them from their own and from reality. The False Belief Task was designed to prove the acquisition of this capacity. According to children's performance in this test the acquisition of ToM has been attested at around 4 years of age. In last years it has been shown that using spontaneous response tasks also 15-month-old-children could attribute to an agent a false belief about the location of an object. These results have generated the puzzle of belief-ascription: Why do 3-year-old children fail the classical false belief tasks whereas much younger children show the correct expectation in the spontaneous response tasks? In this paper I shall argue that (i) infants and young children, when confronted with the two forms of false belief tasks do not face the same problem and (ii) behind the two testing situations there are different ways to understand theory of mind. I shall propose that what appears in infants is the natural human disposition to intersubjectivity.

Processing of false belief passages during natural story comprehension: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Kandylaki, Katerina D; Nagels, Arne; Tune, Sarah; Wiese, Richard; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Kircher, Tilo

2015-11-01

The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task). In a natural setup, such as listening to stories, false belief mentalizing occurs incidentally as part of narrative processing. In our experiment, participants listened to auditorily presented stories with false belief passages (implicit false belief processing) and immediately after each story answered comprehension questions (explicit false belief processing), while neural responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All stories included (among other situations) one false belief condition and one closely matched control condition. For the implicit ToM processing, we modeled the hemodynamic response during the false belief passages in the story and compared it to the hemodynamic response during the closely matched control passages. For implicit mentalizing, we found activation in typical ToM processing regions, that is the angular gyrus (AG), superior medial frontal gyrus (SmFG), precuneus (PCUN), middle temporal gyrus (MTG) as well as in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) billaterally. For explicit ToM, we only found AG activation. The conjunction analysis highlighted the left AG and MTG as well as the bilateral IFG as overlapping ToM processing regions for both implicit and explicit modes. Implicit ToM processing during listening to false belief passages, recruits the left SmFG and billateral PCUN in addition to the "mentalizing network" known form explicit processing tasks. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A Lag between Understanding False Belief and Emotion Attribution in Young Children: Relationships with Linguistic Ability and Mothers' Mental-State Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Rosnay, Marc; Pons, Francisco; Harris, Paul L.; Morrell, Julian M. B.

2004-01-01

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental-state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief-based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief-based emotion-attribution tasks. A standard task in…

Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge, Ignorance, and False Belief.

PubMed

Deneault, Joane

2015-01-01

The author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3-7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.

Theory of mind in schizophrenia: Exploring neural mechanisms of belief attribution

PubMed Central

Lee, Junghee; Quintana, Javier; Nori, Poorang; Green, Michael F.

2014-01-01

Background Although previous behavioral studies have shown that schizophrenia patients have impaired theory of mind (ToM), the neural mechanisms associated with this impairment are poorly understood. This study aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of ToM in schizophrenia using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a Belief Attribution Task. Methods In the scanner, 12 schizophrenia patients and 13 healthy control subjects performed the Belief Attribution Task with 3 conditions: a false belief condition, a false photograph condition, and a simple reading condition. Results For the false belief vs. simple reading conditions, schizophrenia patients showed reduced neural activation in areas including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) compared with controls. Further, during the false belief vs. false photograph conditions we observed increased activations in the TPJ and the MPFC in healthy controls, but not in schizophrenia patients. For the false photograph vs. simple reading condition, both groups showed comparable neural activations. Conclusions Schizophrenia patients showed reduced task-related activation in the TPJ and the MPFC during the false belief condition compared with controls, but not for the false photograph condition. This pattern suggests that reduced activation in these regions is associated with, and specific to, impaired ToM in schizophrenia. PMID:22050432

A test of the submentalizing hypothesis: Apes' performance in a false belief task inanimate control

PubMed Central

Hirata, Satoshi; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2017-01-01

ABSTRACT Much debate concerns whether any nonhuman animals share with humans the ability to infer others' mental states, such as desires and beliefs. In a recent eye-tracking false-belief task, we showed that great apes correctly anticipated that a human actor would search for a goal object where he had last seen it, even though the apes themselves knew that it was no longer there. In response, Heyes proposed that apes' looking behavior was guided not by social cognitive mechanisms but rather domain-general cueing effects, and suggested the use of inanimate controls to test this alternative submentalizing hypothesis. In the present study, we implemented the suggested inanimate control of our previous false-belief task. Apes attended well to key events but showed markedly fewer anticipatory looks and no significant tendency to look to the correct location. We thus found no evidence that submentalizing was responsible for apes' anticipatory looks in our false-belief task. PMID:28919941

A test of the submentalizing hypothesis: Apes' performance in a false belief task inanimate control.

PubMed

Krupenye, Christopher; Kano, Fumihiro; Hirata, Satoshi; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2017-01-01

Much debate concerns whether any nonhuman animals share with humans the ability to infer others' mental states, such as desires and beliefs. In a recent eye-tracking false-belief task, we showed that great apes correctly anticipated that a human actor would search for a goal object where he had last seen it, even though the apes themselves knew that it was no longer there. In response, Heyes proposed that apes' looking behavior was guided not by social cognitive mechanisms but rather domain-general cueing effects, and suggested the use of inanimate controls to test this alternative submentalizing hypothesis. In the present study, we implemented the suggested inanimate control of our previous false-belief task. Apes attended well to key events but showed markedly fewer anticipatory looks and no significant tendency to look to the correct location. We thus found no evidence that submentalizing was responsible for apes' anticipatory looks in our false-belief task.

The Accidental Transgressor: Morally-Relevant Theory of Mind

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Killen, Melanie; Mulvey, Kelly Lynn; Richardson, Cameron; Jampol, Noah; Woodward, Amanda

2011-01-01

To test young children's false belief theory of mind in a morally relevant context, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children (N=162) at 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years of age were administered three tasks: prototypic moral transgression task, false belief theory of mind task (ToM), and an "accidental transgressor" task, which measured a…

2.5-Year-Olds Succeed at a Verbal Anticipatory-Looking False-Belief Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renee

2012-01-01

Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of non-elicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behaviour). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced…

Language and theory of mind in autism spectrum disorder: the relationship between complement syntax and false belief task performance.

PubMed

Lind, Sophie E; Bowler, Dermot M

2009-06-01

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use their knowledge of complement syntax as a means of "hacking out" solutions to false belief tasks, despite lacking a representational theory of mind (ToM). Participants completed a "memory for complements" task, a measure of receptive vocabulary, and traditional location change and unexpected contents false belief tasks. Consistent with predictions, the correlation between complement syntax score and location change task performance was significantly stronger within the ASD group than within the comparison group. However, contrary to predictions, complement syntax score was not significantly correlated with unexpected contents task performance within either group. Possible explanations for this pattern of results are considered.

Continuity from an implicit to an explicit understanding of false belief from infancy to preschool age.

PubMed

Thoermer, Claudia; Sodian, Beate; Vuori, Maria; Perst, Hannah; Kristen, Susanne

2012-03-01

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about goal-directed actions even in the second year of life. The present study presents data from a sample of N= 70 infants who were tested longitudinally at 15, 18, 30, 36 and 48 months with implicit and explicit Theory of Mind measures, as well as an assessment of verbal IQ. Belief-based anticipatory looking in the false-belief task at 18 months significantly predicted verbal false-belief reasoning at 48 months, after controlling for verbal IQ. These findings indicate developmental continuity and conceptual specificity in belief reasoning from infancy to preschool age. They are discussed with respect to competing accounts of infants' understanding of the mind. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs?

PubMed

Onishi, Kristine H; Baillargeon, Renée

2005-04-08

For more than two decades, researchers have argued that young children do not understand mental states such as beliefs. Part of the evidence for this claim comes from preschoolers' failure at verbal tasks that require the understanding that others may hold false beliefs. Here, we used a novel nonverbal task to examine 15-month-old infants' ability to predict an actor's behavior on the basis of her true or false belief about a toy's hiding place. Results were positive, supporting the view that, from a young age, children appeal to mental states--goals, perceptions, and beliefs--to explain the behavior of others.

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account

PubMed Central

Roby, Erin; Scott, Rose M.

2016-01-01

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers’ performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers’ performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction. PMID:27857702

Validity of false belief tasks in blind children.

PubMed

Brambring, Michael; Asbrock, Doreen

2010-12-01

Previous studies have reported that congenitally blind children without any additional impairment reveal a developmental delay of at least 4 years in perspective taking based on testing first-order false-belief tasks. These authors interpret this delay as a sign of autism-like behavior. However, the delay may be caused by testing blind children with false-belief tasks that require visual experience. Therefore, the present study gave alternative false-belief tasks based on tactile or auditory experience to 45 congenitally blind 4-10-year-olds and 37 sighted 3-6-year-olds. Results showed criterion performance at 80 months (6; 8 years) in blind children compared with 61 months (5; 1 years) in sighted controls. It is concluded that this 19-month (1; 7 year) difference, which is comparable with delays in other developmental areas, is a developmental delay caused by the fact of congenital blindness rather than a sign of a psychopathological disorder of autism-like behavior.

The Development of Theory of Mind According to False Belief Performance of Children Ages 3 to 5

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keceli Kaysili, Bahar; Acarlar, Funda

2011-01-01

This study has examined the role of age in the false belief understanding in typically developing children and to determine if the different type of false belief tasks affects performance on false belief. The survey research design was used. False belief understanding was measured in 72 children between the ages of 3.00 to 5.11 year old. The…

Young children have difficulty ascribing true beliefs.

PubMed

Riggs, Kevin J; Simpson, Andrew

2005-05-01

Using the format of a false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), we investigated the ability of 88 3- and 4-year-olds to ascribe a previously held true belief to a story protagonist. In an unexpected transfer task, children found true belief ascription as difficult as false belief ascription even though they could answer memory questions about story details. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of theory of mind development that stress the importance of understanding the falsity of belief, and those accounts that stress the importance of information or executive processes.

Deaf children's use of clear visual cues in mindreading.

PubMed

Hao, Jian; Su, Yanjie

2014-11-01

Previous studies show that typically developing 4-year old children can understand other people's false beliefs but that deaf children of hearing families have difficulty in understanding false beliefs until the age of approximately 13. Because false beliefs are implicit mental states that are not expressed through clear visual cues in standard false belief tasks, the present study examines the hypothesis that the deaf children's developmental delay in understanding false beliefs may reflect their difficulty in understanding a spectrum of mental states that are not expressed through clear visual cues. Nine- to 13-year-old deaf children of hearing families and 4-6-year-old typically developing children completed false belief tasks and emotion recognition tasks under different cue conditions. The results indicated that after controlling for the effect of the children's language abilities, the deaf children inferred other people's false beliefs as accurately as the typically developing children when other people's false beliefs were clearly expressed through their eye-gaze direction. However, the deaf children performed worse than the typically developing children when asked to infer false beliefs with ambiguous or no eye-gaze cues. Moreover, the deaf children were capable of recognizing other people's emotions that were clearly conveyed by their facial or body expressions. The results suggest that although theory-based or simulation-based mental state understanding is typical of hearing children's theory of mind mechanism, for deaf children of hearing families, clear cue-based mental state understanding may be their specific theory of mind mechanism. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A Competitive Nonverbal False Belief Task for Children and Apes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Krachun, Carla; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2009-01-01

A nonverbal false belief task was administered to children (mean age 5 years) and two great ape species: chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and bonobos ("Pan paniscus"). Because apes typically perform poorly in cooperative contexts, our task was competitive. Two versions were run: in both, a human competitor witnessed an experimenter hide a reward in…

Examination of the Relationship between False-Belief Understanding and Referential Communication Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maridaki-Kassotaki, Katerina; Antonopoulou, Katerina

2011-01-01

The present study is an attempt to examine the relation between false-belief understanding and referential communication skills. The ability of 76 children aged 5 years to attribute false beliefs to themselves and others was examined with three false-belief tasks. The referential communication skills of the same children were assessed with two…

Continuity from an Implicit to an Explicit Understanding of False Belief from Infancy to Preschool Age

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thoermer, Claudia; Sodian, Beate; Vuori, Maria; Perst, Hannah; Kristen, Susanne

2012-01-01

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about…

A new paper and pencil task reveals adult false belief reasoning bias.

PubMed

Coburn, Patricia I; Bernstein, Daniel M; Begeer, Sander

2015-09-01

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to take other people's perspective by inferring their mental state. Most 6-year olds pass the change-of-location false belief task that is commonly used to assess ToM. However, the change-of-location task is not suitable for individuals over 5 years of age, due to its discrete response options. In two experiments, we used a paper and pencil version of a modified change-of-location task (the Real Object Sandbox task) to assess false belief reasoning continuously rather than discretely in adults. Participants heard nine change-of-location scenarios and answered a critical question after each. The memory control questions only required the participant to remember the object's original location, whereas the false belief questions required participants to take the perspective of the protagonist. Participants were more accurate on memory trials than trials requiring perspective taking, and performance on paper and pencil trials correlated with corresponding trials on the Real Object Sandbox task. The Paper and Pencil Sandbox task is a convenient continuous measure of ToM that could be administered to a wide range of age groups.

Seeing it my way: a case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective.

PubMed

Samson, Dana; Apperly, Ian A; Kathirgamanathan, Umalini; Humphreys, Glyn W

2005-05-01

Little is known about the functional and neural architecture of social reasoning, one major obstacle being that we crucially lack the relevant tools to test potentially different social reasoning components. In the case of belief reasoning, previous studies have tried to separate the processes involved in belief reasoning per se from those involved in the processing of the high incidental demands such as the working memory demands of typical belief tasks. In this study, we developed new belief tasks in order to disentangle, for the first time, two perspective taking components involved in belief reasoning: (i) the ability to inhibit one's own perspective (self-perspective inhibition); and (ii) the ability to infer someone else's perspective as such (other-perspective taking). The two tasks had similar demands in other-perspective taking as they both required the participant to infer that a character has a false belief about an object's location. However, the tasks varied in the self-perspective inhibition demands. In the task with the lowest self-perspective inhibition demands, at the time the participant had to infer the character's false belief, he or she had no idea what the new object's location was. In contrast, in the task with the highest self-perspective inhibition demands, at the time the participant had to infer the character's false belief, he or she knew where the object was actually located (and this knowledge had thus to be inhibited). The two tasks were presented to a stroke patient, WBA, with right prefrontal and temporal damage. WBA performed well in the low-inhibition false-belief task but showed striking difficulty in the task placing high self-perspective inhibition demands, showing a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective. WBA also made egocentric errors in other social and visual perspective taking tasks, indicating a difficulty with belief attribution extending to the attribution of emotions, desires and visual experiences to other people. The case of WBA, together with the recent report of three patients impaired in belief reasoning even when self-perspective inhibition demands were reduced, provide the first neuropsychological evidence that the inhibition of one's own point of view and the ability to infer someone else's point of view rely on distinct neural and functional processes.

A Reaction Time Advantage for Calculating Beliefs over Public Representations Signals Domain Specificity for "Theory of Mind"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen, Adam S.; German, Tamsin C.

2010-01-01

In a task where participants' overt task was to track the location of an object across a sequence of events, reaction times to unpredictable probes requiring an inference about a social agent's beliefs about the location of that object were obtained. Reaction times to false belief situations were faster than responses about the (false) contents of…

Language and theory of mind: meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding.

PubMed

Milligan, Karen; Astington, Janet Wilde; Dack, Lisa Ain

2007-01-01

Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the variability across studies--including aspect of language ability assessed, type of false-belief task used, and direction of effect. The results indicate a moderate to large effect size overall that remains significant when age is controlled. Receptive vocabulary measures had weaker relations than measures of general language. Stronger effects were found from earlier language to later false belief than the reverse. Significant differences were not found among types of false-belief task.

What Did I Say? Versus What Did I Think? Attributing False Beliefs to Self amongst Children with and without Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, David M.; Happe, Francesca

2009-01-01

The task used most widely to assess recognition of false belief in self "and" others is the "Smarties" unexpected contents task. Amongst individuals with and without autism, the Self and Other-person test questions of this task are of an equivalent level of difficulty. However, a potential confound with this task may allow the Self test question…

False Belief Attribution in Children with Williams Syndrome: The Answer Is in The Emotion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campos, R.; Martínez-Castilla, P.; Sotillo, M.

2017-01-01

Background: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show difficulties in attributing false beliefs, whereas they are better at attributing emotions. This study examines whether being asked about the emotion linked to a false belief, instead of explicitly about the belief, facilitates performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Method: Thirty…

Chinese Preschoolers' Implicit and Explicit False-Belief Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Bo; Low, Jason; Jing, Zhang; Qinghua, Qu

2012-01-01

Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in Mainland China (3- to 4-year-olds; N = 192) were tested for dissociations between anticipatory looking (AL) and verbal judgments on false-belief tasks. The dissociation between the two kinds of understanding was robust despite direct false-belief test questions using a Mandarin specific think-falsely verb and…

When representations conflict with reality: the preschooler's problem with false beliefs and "false" photographs.

PubMed

Zaitchik, D

1990-04-01

It has been argued that young preschoolers cannot correctly attribute a false belief to a deceived actor (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Some researchers claim that the problem lies in the child's inadequate epistemology (Chandler & Boyes, 1982; Wellman, 1988); as such, it is specific to the child's theory of mind and no such problem should appear in reasoning about nonmental representations. This prediction is tested below in the "false photograph" task: here an actor takes a photograph of an object in location X; the object is then moved to location Y. Preschool subjects are asked: "In the picture, where is the object?" Results indicate that photographs are no easier to reason about than are beliefs. Manipulations to boost performance on the photograph task proved ineffective. Further, an explanation of the failure as a processing limitation having nothing to do with the representational nature of beliefs or photographs was ruled out. It is argued that young children's failure on the false belief task is not due to an inadequate epistemology (though they may have one) and is symptomatic of a larger problem with representations.

Nonspecificity and theory of mind: new evidence from a nonverbal false-sign task and children with autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Iao, Lai-Sang; Leekam, Susan R

2014-06-01

Understanding of false belief has long been considered to be a crucial aspect of "theory of mind" that can be explained by a domain-specific mechanism. We argue against this claim using new evidence from a nonverbal false representation task (false-sign task) with typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that typically developing children (mean age=62.67months) were equivalent in their performance across nonverbal and verbal forms of both the false-belief and false-sign tasks. Results for these two misrepresentation tasks differed from the results of an outdated representation task ("false"-photograph task). Experiment 3 showed that children with ASD had difficulties with the false representation tasks, and this could not be explained by executive functioning or language impairments. These findings support the view that children with ASD might not have a specific theory-of-mind deficit. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Logistic Mixed Models to Investigate Implicit and Explicit Belief Tracking.

PubMed

Lages, Martin; Scheel, Anne

2016-01-01

We investigated the proposition of a two-systems Theory of Mind in adults' belief tracking. A sample of N = 45 participants predicted the choice of one of two opponent players after observing several rounds in an animated card game. Three matches of this card game were played and initial gaze direction on target and subsequent choice predictions were recorded for each belief task and participant. We conducted logistic regressions with mixed effects on the binary data and developed Bayesian logistic mixed models to infer implicit and explicit mentalizing in true belief and false belief tasks. Although logistic regressions with mixed effects predicted the data well a Bayesian logistic mixed model with latent task- and subject-specific parameters gave a better account of the data. As expected explicit choice predictions suggested a clear understanding of true and false beliefs (TB/FB). Surprisingly, however, model parameters for initial gaze direction also indicated belief tracking. We discuss why task-specific parameters for initial gaze directions are different from choice predictions yet reflect second-order perspective taking.

Representing metarepresentations: is there theory of mind-specific cognition?

PubMed

Egeth, Marc; Kurzban, Robert

2009-03-01

What cognitive mechanisms underlie Theory of Mind? Some infer domain-specific Theory of Mind cognition based the pattern of children diagnosed with autism failing the False Belief test but passing the False Photograph test. However, we argue that the False Belief test entails various task demands the False Photograph task does not, including the necessity to represent a higher-order representation (a metarepresentation), thus confounding the inference of domain-specificity. Instead, a general difficulty that affects representations of metarepresentations might account for the seeming domain-specific failure. Here we find that False-Belief failing False-Photograph passing children fail the Meta Photograph test, a new photograph-domain test that requires subjects to represent a metarepresentation. We conclude that people who fail the False Belief test but pass the False Photograph test do not necessarily have a content-specific Theory of Mind deficit. Instead, the general ability to represent representations and metarepresentations might underlie Theory of Mind.

Theory of mind in Williams syndrome assessed using a nonverbal task.

PubMed

Porter, Melanie A; Coltheart, Max; Langdon, Robyn

2008-05-01

This study examined Theory of Mind in Williams syndrome (WS) and in normal chronological age-matched and mental age-matched control groups, using a picture sequencing task. This task assesses understanding of pretence, intention and false belief, while controlling for social-script knowledge and physical cause-and-effect reasoning. The task was selected because it is entirely non-verbal, so that the WS individuals could not rely on their good verbal skills when performing the task. Results indicated a specific deficit in understanding of false belief within the WS group. There was also evidence of heterogeneity in the WS group, with the false belief impairment restricted to only a particular subgroup of WS individuals identified originally by Porter, M., & Coltheart, M. (2005). Cognitive heterogeneity in Williams syndrome. Developmental Neuropsychology, 27(2), 275-306.

Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?

PubMed Central

Onishi, Kristine H.; Baillargeon, Renée

2012-01-01

For more than two decades, researchers have argued that young children do not understand mental states such as beliefs. Part of the evidence for this claim comes from preschoolers’ failure at verbal tasks that require the understanding that others may hold false beliefs. Here, we used a novel nonverbal task to examine 15-month-old infants’ ability to predict an actor’s behavior on the basis of her true or false belief about a toy’s hiding place. Results were positive, supporting the view that, from a young age, children appeal to mental states—goals, perceptions, and beliefs—to explain the behavior of others. PMID:15821091

Is False Belief Skin-Deep? The Agent's Eye Status Influences Infants' Reasoning in Belief-Inducing Situations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poulin-Dubois, Diane; Polonia, Alexandra; Yott, Jessica

2013-01-01

Two experiments were conducted to determine if infants attribute false beliefs to others when tested with the violation-of-expectancy procedure. In Experiment 1, the false-belief task was administered to 14- and 18-month-old infants. The procedure was identical to the one used by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), except that two transparent boxes…

Young Children's Knowledge of the Representational Function of Pictorial Symbols: Development across the Preschool Years in Three Cultures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Callaghan, Tara C.; Rochat, Philippe; Corbit, John

2012-01-01

Three- to 5-year-old children's knowledge that pictures have a representational function for others was investigated using a pictorial false-belief task. In Study 1, children passed the task at around 4 years old, and performance was correlated with standard false-belief and pictorial symbol tasks. In Study 2, the performance of children from two…

Language and Theory of Mind in Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Relationship between Complement Syntax and False Belief Task Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lind, Sophie E.; Bowler, Dermot M.

2009-01-01

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use their knowledge of complement syntax as a means of "hacking out" solutions to false belief tasks, despite lacking a representational theory of mind (ToM). Participants completed a "memory for complements" task, a measure of receptive vocabulary, and…

Making sense of early false-belief understanding.

PubMed

Helming, Katharina A; Strickland, Brent; Jacob, Pierre

2014-04-01

We address the puzzle about early belief ascription: young children fail elicited-response false-belief tasks, but they demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding. Based on recent converging evidence, we articulate a pragmatic framework to solve this puzzle. Young children do understand the contents of others' false belief, but they are overwhelmed when they must simultaneously make sense of two distinct actions: the instrumental action of a mistaken agent and the experimenter's communicative action. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Does social distance modulate adults' egocentric biases when reasoning about false beliefs?

PubMed

Farrar, Benjamin G; Ostojić, Ljerka

2018-01-01

When given privileged information of an object's true location, adults often overestimate the likelihood that a protagonist holding a false belief will search in the correct location for that object. This type of egocentric bias is often labelled the 'curse of knowledge'. Interestingly, the magnitude of this bias may be modulated by the social distance between the perspective taker and target. However, this social distance effect has yet to be fully demonstrated when adults reason about false beliefs. Using a continuous false belief task, we investigated i) whether adults were biased by their own knowledge when reasoning about another's false belief, ii) whether the magnitude of this egocentric bias was modulated by social distance, and iii) whether this social distance effect extended to a heterospecific out-group, namely a dog. To test these hypotheses we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 283), we used an established continuous false belief task, in Experiment 2 (N = 281) we modified this task, and Experiment 3 (N = 744) was a direct replication of Experiment 2. Across these experiments, the curse of knowledge effect was reliably replicated when adults mentalised about an in-group protagonist, and replicated in two of the three studies (Experiments 1 and 3) when adults mentalised about out-group protagonists. In an internal-meta analysis, the curse of knowledge effect was present across all conditions, and there was no effect of social distance. Hence, overall these data are not consistent with the hypothesis that social distance modulates adults' egocentric biases when reasoning about false beliefs. The finding that egocentric biases of a similar magnitude were observed when adults mentalised about an in-group protagonist and a dog suggests that interpersonal dissimilarity is not in itself sufficient to reduce egocentric bias when reasoning about false beliefs.

Children with autism can track others' beliefs in a competitive game.

PubMed

Peterson, Candida C; Slaughter, Virginia; Peterson, James; Premack, David

2013-05-01

Theory of mind (ToM) development, assessed via 'litmus' false belief tests, is severely delayed in autism, but the standard testing procedure may underestimate these children's genuine understanding. To explore this, we developed a novel test involving competition to win a reward as the motive for tracking other players' beliefs (the 'Dot-Midge task'). Ninety-six children, including 23 with autism (mean age: 10.36 years), 50 typically developing 4-year-olds (mean age: 4.40) and 23 typically developing 3-year-olds (mean age: 3.59) took a standard 'Sally-Ann' false belief test, the Dot-Midge task (which was closely matched to the Sally-Ann task procedure) and a norm-referenced verbal ability test. Results revealed that, of the children with autism, 74% passed the Dot-Midge task, yet only 13% passed the standard Sally-Ann procedure. A similar pattern of performance was observed in the older, but not the younger, typically developing control groups. This finding demonstrates that many children with autism who fail motivationally barren standard false belief tests can spontaneously use ToM to track their social partners' beliefs in the context of a competitive game. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Measuring beliefs in centimeters: private knowledge biases preschoolers' and adults' representation of others' beliefs.

PubMed

Sommerville, Jessica A; Bernstein, Daniel M; Meltzoff, Andrew N

2013-01-01

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3-year-old children's (N = 63), 5-year-old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ages, participants' knowledge of the object's actual location biased their search estimates, independent of the attentional or memory demands of the task. Children's degree of bias correlated with their performance on a classic change-of-location false belief task, controlling for age. This task is a novel tool for providing a quantitative measurement of the degree to which self-knowledge can bias estimates of others' beliefs. © 2013 The Authors. Child Development © 2013 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Understanding of Speaker Certainty and False-Belief Reasoning: A Comparison of Japanese and German Preschoolers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matsui, Tomoko; Rakoczy, Hannes; Miura, Yui; Tomasello, Michael

2009-01-01

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by…

False belief attribution in children with Williams syndrome: the answer is in the emotion.

PubMed

Campos, R; Martínez-Castilla, P; Sotillo, M

2017-11-01

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show difficulties in attributing false beliefs, whereas they are better at attributing emotions. This study examines whether being asked about the emotion linked to a false belief, instead of explicitly about the belief, facilitates performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Thirty children with WS and 90 typically developing children, who were individually matched on mental age (50-112 months), were administered six explicit (i.e. questions on belief) and six implicit (i.e. questions on emotion) trials of false belief tasks. Theory of mind competences were related to cognitive development. Children with WS performed comparably to typically developing children on the emotion questions. Correct answers to questions on emotion reveal an implicit understanding of false belief. The Representational redescription process could be impaired in the domain of ToM in this population. This finding has relevant implications for the design of supports aiming to optimise the development of ToM competences in individuals with WS. © 2017 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Children's understanding of idioms and theory of mind development.

PubMed

Caillies, Stéphanie; Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Sandrine

2008-09-01

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis according to which theory of mind competence was a prerequisite to ambiguous idioms understanding. We hypothesized that the child needs to understand that the literal interpretation could be a false world representation, a false belief, and that the speaker's intention is to mean something else, to correctly process idiomatic expressions. Two kinds of ambiguous idioms were of interest: decomposable and nondecomposable expressions (Titone & Connine, 1999). An experiment was designed to assess the figurative developmental changes that occur with theory of mind competence. Five-, 6- and 7-year-old children performed five theory of mind tasks (an appearance-reality task, three false-belief tasks and a second-order false-belief task) and listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions inserted in context, before performing a multiple choice task. Results indicated that only nondecomposable idiomatic expression was predicted from the theory of mind scores, and particularly from the second-order competences. Results are discussed with respect to theory of mind and verbal competences.

Validity of False Belief Tasks in Blind Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brambring, Michael; Asbrock, Doreen

2010-01-01

Previous studies have reported that congenitally blind children without any additional impairment reveal a developmental delay of at least 4 years in perspective taking based on testing first-order false-belief tasks. These authors interpret this delay as a sign of autism-like behavior. However, the delay may be caused by testing blind children…

The Roles of Explanation and Feedback in False Belief Understanding: A Microgenetic Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guajardo, Nicole R.; Petersen, Rachel; Marshall, Timothy R.

2013-01-01

The authors examined effects of feedback and explanation on false belief performance. Thirty-three children (42-54 months; 15 girls, 18 boys) were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions: explanation, feedback, feedback researcher explains, and feedback child explains. Children completed false belief tasks during pretraining, 8 training…

Understanding False Belief as Generalized Operant Behavior

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McHugh, Louise; Barnes-Holmes, Yvonne; Barnes-Holmes, Dermot; Stewart, Ian

2006-01-01

The current work reports 2 experiments that investigate the development of false belief from the perspective of Relational Frame Theory. The true and false belief test protocol used across both experiments contained a range of tasks that involved responding in accordance with the 3 perspective-taking frames of I-YOU, HERE-THERE, NOW-THEN, and in…

Understanding of thought bubbles as mental representations in children with autism: implications for theory of mind.

PubMed

Kerr, Sharyn; Durkin, Kevin

2004-12-01

Standard false belief tasks indicate that normally developing children do not fully develop a theory of mind until the age of 4 years and that children with autism have an impaired theory of mind. Recent evidence, however, suggests that children as young as 3 years of age understand that thought bubbles depict mental representations and that these can be false. Twelve normally developing children and 11 children with autism were tested on a standard false belief task and a number of tasks that employed thought bubbles to represent mental states. While the majority of normally developing children and children with autism failed the standard false belief task, they understood that (i) thought bubbles represent thought, (ii) thought bubbles can be used to infer an unknown reality, (iii) thoughts can be different, and (iv) thoughts can be false. These results indicate that autistic children with a relatively low verbal mental age may be capable of understanding mental representations.

Syntactic Recursion Facilitates and Working Memory Predicts Recursive Theory of Mind

PubMed Central

Arslan, Burcu; Hohenberger, Annette; Verbrugge, Rineke

2017-01-01

In this study, we focus on the possible roles of second-order syntactic recursion and working memory in terms of simple and complex span tasks in the development of second-order false belief reasoning. We tested 89 Turkish children in two age groups, one younger (4;6–6;5 years) and one older (6;7–8;10 years). Although second-order syntactic recursion is significantly correlated with the second-order false belief task, results of ordinal logistic regressions revealed that the main predictor of second-order false belief reasoning is complex working memory span. Unlike simple working memory and second-order syntactic recursion tasks, the complex working memory task required processing information serially with additional reasoning demands that require complex working memory strategies. Based on our results, we propose that children’s second-order theory of mind develops when they have efficient reasoning rules to process embedded beliefs serially, thus overcoming a possible serial processing bottleneck. PMID:28072823

Logistic Mixed Models to Investigate Implicit and Explicit Belief Tracking

PubMed Central

Lages, Martin; Scheel, Anne

2016-01-01

We investigated the proposition of a two-systems Theory of Mind in adults’ belief tracking. A sample of N = 45 participants predicted the choice of one of two opponent players after observing several rounds in an animated card game. Three matches of this card game were played and initial gaze direction on target and subsequent choice predictions were recorded for each belief task and participant. We conducted logistic regressions with mixed effects on the binary data and developed Bayesian logistic mixed models to infer implicit and explicit mentalizing in true belief and false belief tasks. Although logistic regressions with mixed effects predicted the data well a Bayesian logistic mixed model with latent task- and subject-specific parameters gave a better account of the data. As expected explicit choice predictions suggested a clear understanding of true and false beliefs (TB/FB). Surprisingly, however, model parameters for initial gaze direction also indicated belief tracking. We discuss why task-specific parameters for initial gaze directions are different from choice predictions yet reflect second-order perspective taking. PMID:27853440

Further Evidence for Nonspecificity of Theory of Mind in Preschoolers: Training and Transferability in the Understanding of False Beliefs and False Signs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Iao, Lai-Sang; Leekam, Susan; Perner, Josef; McConachie, Helen

2011-01-01

In a training study, the authors addressed whether or not preschoolers' difficulty with false belief is due to a domain-specific problem with mental states. Following Slaughter's (1998) design, 57 children who failed a false-belief (FB) pretest received two sessions of training on either an FB, false sign (FS), or control task. All children were…

Brain activation for spontaneous and explicit false belief tasks overlaps: new fMRI evidence on belief processing and violation of expectation.

PubMed

Bardi, Lara; Desmet, Charlotte; Nijhof, Annabel; Wiersema, Jan R; Brass, Marcel

2017-03-01

There is extensive discussion on whether spontaneous and explicit forms of ToM are based on the same cognitive/neural mechanisms or rather reflect qualitatively different processes. For the first time, we analyzed the BOLD signal for false belief processing by directly comparing spontaneous and explicit ToM task versions. In both versions, participants watched videos of a scene including an agent who acquires a true or false belief about the location of an object (belief formation phase). At the end of the movies (outcome phase), participants had to react to the presence of the object. During the belief formation phase, greater activity was found for false vs true belief trials in the right posterior parietal cortex. The ROI analysis of the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), confirmed this observation. Moreover, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) was active during the outcome phase, being sensitive to violation of both the participant's and agent's expectations about the location of the object. Activity in the TPJ and aMPFC was not modulated by the spontaneous/explicit task. Overall, these data show that neural mechanisms for spontaneous and explicit ToM overlap. Interestingly, a dissociation between TPJ and aMPFC for belief tracking and outcome evaluation, respectively, was also found. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Brain activation for spontaneous and explicit false belief tasks overlaps: new fMRI evidence on belief processing and violation of expectation

PubMed Central

Desmet, Charlotte; Nijhof, Annabel; Wiersema, Jan R.; Brass, Marcel

2017-01-01

Abstract There is extensive discussion on whether spontaneous and explicit forms of ToM are based on the same cognitive/neural mechanisms or rather reflect qualitatively different processes. For the first time, we analyzed the BOLD signal for false belief processing by directly comparing spontaneous and explicit ToM task versions. In both versions, participants watched videos of a scene including an agent who acquires a true or false belief about the location of an object (belief formation phase). At the end of the movies (outcome phase), participants had to react to the presence of the object. During the belief formation phase, greater activity was found for false vs true belief trials in the right posterior parietal cortex. The ROI analysis of the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), confirmed this observation. Moreover, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC) was active during the outcome phase, being sensitive to violation of both the participant’s and agent’s expectations about the location of the object. Activity in the TPJ and aMPFC was not modulated by the spontaneous/explicit task. Overall, these data show that neural mechanisms for spontaneous and explicit ToM overlap. Interestingly, a dissociation between TPJ and aMPFC for belief tracking and outcome evaluation, respectively, was also found. PMID:27683425

Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.

PubMed

Brandt, Silke; Buttelmann, David; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael

2016-11-01

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4years of age (N=64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., "I think the sticker is in the red box" or "The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box", respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others' false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others' false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children's comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children's false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others' beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Eye tracking uncovered great apes' ability to anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs.

PubMed

Kano, Fumihiro; Krupenye, Christopher; Hirata, Satoshi; Call, Josep

2017-01-01

Using a novel eye-tracking test, we recently showed that great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. This finding suggests that, like humans, great apes understand others' false beliefs, at least in an implicit way. One key question raised by our study is why apes have passed our tests but not previous ones. In this article, we consider this question by detailing the development of our task. We considered 3 major differences in our task compared with the previous ones. First, we monitored apes' eye movements, and specifically their anticipatory looks, to measure their predictions about how agents will behave. Second, we adapted our design from an anticipatory-looking false belief test originally developed for human infants. Third, we developed novel test scenarios that were specifically designed to capture the attention of our ape participants. We then discuss how each difference may help explain differences in performance on our task and previous ones, and finally propose some directions for future studies.

Competence and Performance in Belief-Desire Reasoning across Two Cultures: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth about False Belief?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yazdi, Amir Amin; German, Tim P.; Defeyter, Margaret Anne; Siegal, Michael

2006-01-01

There is a change in false belief task performance across the 3-5 year age range, as confirmed in a recent meta-analysis [Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory mind development: The truth about false-belief. "Child Development," 72, 655-684]. This meta-analysis identified several performance factors influencing…

False Belief Understanding in Language Impaired and Typically Developing Spanish-Speaking Preschoolers from Lower Income Backgrounds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guiberson, Mark; Rodriguez, Barbara L.

2013-01-01

Research Findings: The present study describes developmental trends in false belief (in other and self) in 46 Mexican-dialect Spanish-speaking children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with and without language impairment (LI). Results indicate that typically developing children's performance on false belief tasks improves with age, with very…

Implicit and Explicit False Belief Development in Preschool Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grosse Wiesmann, Charlotte; Friederici, Angela D.; Singer, Tania; Steinbeis, Nikolaus

2017-01-01

The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger than 2 years of age have been shown to pass novel implicit false belief tasks. However, the processes…

Matched False-Belief Performance during Verbal and Nonverbal Interference

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dungan, James; Saxe, Rebecca

2012-01-01

Language has been shown to play a key role in the development of a child's theory of mind, but its role in adult belief reasoning remains unclear. One recent study used verbal and nonverbal interference during a false-belief task to show that accurate belief reasoning in adults necessarily requires language (Newton & de Villiers, 2007). The…

Effects of Labeling on Preschoolers' Explicit False Belief Performance: Outcomes of Cognitive Flexibility or Inhibitory Control?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Low, Jason; Simpson, Samantha

2012-01-01

Executive function mechanisms underpinning language-related effects on theory of mind understanding were examined in a sample of 165 preschoolers. Verbal labels were manipulated to identify relevant perspectives on an explicit false belief task. In Experiment 1 with 4-year-olds (N = 74), false belief reasoning was superior in the fully and…

Language, Mental State Vocabulary, and False Belief Understanding in Children with Cochlear Implants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peters, Kimberly; Remmel, Ethan; Richards, Debra

2009-01-01

Purpose: This study examined false belief understanding and its predictors in school-age children who are deaf with cochlear implants and who use spoken language. Method: False belief understanding was measured through an explanation-of-action task in 30 children between the ages of 3 and 12 years who used cochlear implants. Children told a…

Deception Dissociates from False Belief Reasoning in Deaf Children: Implications for the Implicit versus Explicit Theory of Mind Distinction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Villiers, Peter A.; de Villiers, Jill G.

2012-01-01

Deception is a controversial aspect of theory of mind, and researchers disagree about whether it entails an understanding of the false beliefs of one's opponent. The present study asks whether children with delayed language and delayed explicit false belief reasoning can succeed on explicit deception tasks. Participants were 45 orally taught deaf…

Temporo-Parietal Junction Activity in Theory-of-Mind Tasks: Falseness, Beliefs, or Attention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aichhorn, Markus; Perner, Josef; Weiss, Benjamin; Kronbichler, Martin; Staffen, Wolfgang; Ladurner, Gunther

2009-01-01

By combining the false belief (FB) and photo (PH) vignettes to identify theory-of-mind areas with the false sign (FS) vignettes, we re-establish the functional asymmetry between the left and right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). The right TPJ (TPJ-R) is specially sensitive to processing belief information, whereas the left TPJ (TPJ-L) is equally…

The Relationship between Second-Order False Belief and Display Rules Reasoning: The Integration of Cognitive and Affective Social Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Naito, Mika; Seki, Yoshimi

2009-01-01

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications…

A Constructivist Connectionist Model of Transitions on False-Belief Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berthiaume, Vincent G.; Shultz, Thomas R.; Onishi, Kristine H.

2013-01-01

How do children come to understand that others have mental representations, e.g., of an object's location? Preschoolers go through two transitions on verbal false-belief tasks, in which they have to predict where an agent will search for an object that was moved in her absence. First, while three-and-a-half-year-olds usually fail at approach…

True or false: do 5-year-olds understand belief?

PubMed

Fabricius, William V; Boyer, Ty W; Weimer, Amy A; Carroll, Kathleen

2010-11-01

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis.

Theory of Mind Development in Adolescence and Early Adulthood: The Growing Complexity of Recursive Thinking Ability

PubMed Central

Valle, Annalisa; Massaro, Davide; Castelli, Ilaria; Marchetti, Antonella

2015-01-01

This study explores the development of theory of mind, operationalized as recursive thinking ability, from adolescence to early adulthood (N = 110; young adolescents = 47; adolescents = 43; young adults = 20). The construct of theory of mind has been operationalized in two different ways: as the ability to recognize the correct mental state of a character, and as the ability to attribute the correct mental state in order to predict the character’s behaviour. The Imposing Memory Task, with five recursive thinking levels, and a third-order false-belief task with three recursive thinking levels (devised for this study) have been used. The relationship among working memory, executive functions, and linguistic skills are also analysed. Results show that subjects exhibit less understanding of elevated recursive thinking levels (third, fourth, and fifth) compared to the first and second levels. Working memory is correlated with total recursive thinking, whereas performance on the linguistic comprehension task is related to third level recursive thinking in both theory of mind tasks. An effect of age on third-order false-belief task performance was also found. A key finding of the present study is that the third-order false-belief task shows significant age differences in the application of recursive thinking that involves the prediction of others’ behaviour. In contrast, such an age effect is not observed in the Imposing Memory Task. These results may support the extension of the investigation of the third order false belief after childhood. PMID:27247645

A constructivist connectionist model of transitions on false-belief tasks.

PubMed

Berthiaume, Vincent G; Shultz, Thomas R; Onishi, Kristine H

2013-03-01

How do children come to understand that others have mental representations, e.g., of an object's location? Preschoolers go through two transitions on verbal false-belief tasks, in which they have to predict where an agent will search for an object that was moved in her absence. First, while three-and-a-half-year-olds usually fail at approach tasks, in which the agent wants to find the object, children just under four succeed. Second, only after four do children succeed at tasks in which the agent wants to avoid the object. We present a constructivist connectionist model that autonomously reproduces the two transitions and suggests that the transitions are due to increases in general processing abilities enabling children to (1) overcome a default true-belief attribution by distinguishing false- from true-belief situations, and to (2) predict search in avoidance situations, where there is often more than one correct, empty search location. Constructivist connectionist models are rigorous, flexible and powerful tools that can be analyzed before and after transitions to uncover novel and emergent mechanisms of cognitive development. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Exploring links between language and cognition in autism spectrum disorders: Complement sentences, false belief, and executive functioning.

PubMed

Stephanie, Durrleman; Julie, Franck

2015-01-01

A growing body of work indicates a close relation between complement clause sentences and Theory of Mind (ToM) in children with autism (e.g., Tager-Flusberg, & Joseph (2005). In Astington, & Baird (Eds.), Why language matters for theory of mind (pp. 298-318). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, Lind, & Bowler (2009). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(6), 929). However, this link is based primarily on success at a specific complement clause task and a verbal false-belief (FB) task. One cannot exclude that the link found between these tasks may be a by-product of their both presupposing similar levels of language skills. It is also an open question if the role of complementation in ToM success is a privileged one as compared to that of other abilities which have been claimed to be an important factor for ToM understanding in autism, namely executive functioning (EF) (Pellicano (2007). Developmental Psychology 43, 974). Indeed the role played by complementation may be conceived of as an indirect one, mediated by some more general cognitive function related to EF. This study is the first to examine the relation between theory of mind assessed both verbally and non-verbally and various types of complement clause sentences as well as executive functions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Our participants included 17 children and adolescents with ASD (aged 6 to 16) and a younger TD control group matched on non-verbal IQ (aged 4 to 9 years). Three tasks assessing complements of verbs of cognition, verbs of communication and verbs of perception were conducted. ToM tasks involved a verbal ToM task (Sally-Anne, Baron-Cohen et al. (1985). Cognition, 21(1), 37) as well as a non-verbal one (Colle et al. (2007). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(4), 716). Indexes of executive functions were collected via a computerized version of the Dimensional Change Card-Sorting task (Frye et al., 1995). Standardized measures of vocabulary, morphosyntax and non-verbal IQ were also administered. Results show similar performance by children with ASD and TD controls for the understanding of complement sentences, for non-verbal ToM and for executive functions. However, children with ASD were significantly impaired for false belief when this was measured verbally. For both ASD and TD, correlations controlling for IQ were found between the verbal FB task and complement sentences of verbs of communication and cognition, but not with verbs of perception. EF indexes did not significantly correlate with either of the ToM tasks, nor did any of the general language scores. These findings provide support for the view that knowledge of certain specific types of complement clause may serve as a privileged means of 'hacking out' solutions to verbal false belief tasks for individuals on the autistic spectrum. More specifically, complements with a truth-value that is independent of that of the matrix clause (i.e. those occurring with verbs of cognition and of communication, but not of perception) may describe a false event while the whole sentence remains true, making these linguistic structures particularly well suited for representing the minds of others (de Villiers, 2007). Readers will be able to (1) describe and evaluate the hypothesis that complement sentences play a privileged role in false belief task success in autism; (2) describe performance on complement sentences, executive functioning and false belief tasks by children with autism as compared to IQ-matched peers; (3) explain which types of complements specifically relate to false belief task performance and why; and (4) understand that differences in performance by children with autism at different types of false-belief tasks may be related to the nature of the task conducted and the underlying mechanisms involved. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

False belief understanding and "cool" inhibitory control in 3-and 4-years-old Italian children.

PubMed

Bellagamba, Francesca; Addessi, Elsa; Focaroli, Valentina; Pecora, Giulia; Maggiorelli, Valentina; Pace, Beatrice; Paglieri, Fabio

2015-01-01

During preschool years, major developments occur in both executive function and theory of mind (ToM), and several studies have demonstrated a correlation between these processes. Research on the development of inhibitory control (IC) has distinguished between more cognitive, "cool" aspects of self-control, measured by conflict tasks, that require inhibiting an habitual response to generate an arbitrary one, and "hot," affective aspects, such as affective decision making, measured by delay tasks, that require inhibition of a prepotent response. The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on a task measuring false belief understanding, the most widely used index of ToM in preschoolers, and three tasks measuring cognitive versus affective aspects of IC. To this end, we tested 101 Italian preschool children in four tasks: (a) the Unexpected Content False Belief task, (b) the Conflict task (a simplified version of the Day-Night Stroop task), (c) the Delay task, and (d) the Delay Choice task. Children's receptive vocabulary was assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test. Children's performance in the False Belief task was significantly related only to performance in the Conflict task, controlling for vocabulary and age. Importantly, children's performance in the Conflict task did not significantly correlate with their performance in the Delay task or in the Delay Choice task, suggesting that these tasks measure different components of IC. The dissociation between the Conflict and the Delay tasks may indicate that monitoring and regulating a cool process (as flexible categorization) may involve different abilities than monitoring and regulating a hot process (not touching an available and highly attractive stimulus or choosing between a smaller immediate option and a larger delayed one). Moreover, our findings support the view that "cool" aspects of IC and ToM are interrelated, extending to an Italian sample of children previous findings on an association between self-control and ToM.

False belief understanding and “cool” inhibitory control in 3-and 4-years-old Italian children

PubMed Central

Bellagamba, Francesca; Addessi, Elsa; Focaroli, Valentina; Pecora, Giulia; Maggiorelli, Valentina; Pace, Beatrice; Paglieri, Fabio

2015-01-01

During preschool years, major developments occur in both executive function and theory of mind (ToM), and several studies have demonstrated a correlation between these processes. Research on the development of inhibitory control (IC) has distinguished between more cognitive, “cool” aspects of self-control, measured by conflict tasks, that require inhibiting an habitual response to generate an arbitrary one, and “hot,” affective aspects, such as affective decision making, measured by delay tasks, that require inhibition of a prepotent response. The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance on a task measuring false belief understanding, the most widely used index of ToM in preschoolers, and three tasks measuring cognitive versus affective aspects of IC. To this end, we tested 101 Italian preschool children in four tasks: (a) the Unexpected Content False Belief task, (b) the Conflict task (a simplified version of the Day–Night Stroop task), (c) the Delay task, and (d) the Delay Choice task. Children’s receptive vocabulary was assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test. Children’s performance in the False Belief task was significantly related only to performance in the Conflict task, controlling for vocabulary and age. Importantly, children’s performance in the Conflict task did not significantly correlate with their performance in the Delay task or in the Delay Choice task, suggesting that these tasks measure different components of IC. The dissociation between the Conflict and the Delay tasks may indicate that monitoring and regulating a cool process (as flexible categorization) may involve different abilities than monitoring and regulating a hot process (not touching an available and highly attractive stimulus or choosing between a smaller immediate option and a larger delayed one). Moreover, our findings support the view that “cool” aspects of IC and ToM are interrelated, extending to an Italian sample of children previous findings on an association between self-control and ToM. PMID:26175700

Effects of Maternal Negativity and of Early and Recent Recurrent Depressive Disorder on Children's False Belief Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rohrer, Lisa M.; Cicchetti, Dante; Rogosch, Fred A.; Toth, Sheree L.; Maughan, Angeline

2011-01-01

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children's emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, 3 false belief tasks were administered to 5-year-old children whose mothers had either met…

False-Belief Understanding in 2.5-Year-Olds: Evidence From Violation-of-Expectation Change-of-Location and Unexpected-Contents tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

He, Zijing; Bolz, Matthias; Baillargeon, Renee

2011-01-01

Until recently, it was generally assumed that the ability to attribute false beliefs did not emerge until about 4 years of age. However, recent reports using spontaneous- as opposed to elicited-response tasks have suggested that this ability may be present much earlier. To date, researchers have employed two kinds of spontaneous-response…

Cognitive load disrupts implicit theory-of-mind processing.

PubMed

Schneider, Dana; Lam, Rebecca; Bayliss, Andrew P; Dux, Paul E

2012-08-01

Eye movements in Sally-Anne false-belief tasks appear to reflect the ability to implicitly monitor the mental states of other individuals (theory of mind, or ToM). It has recently been proposed that an early-developing, efficient, and automatically operating ToM system subserves this ability. Surprisingly absent from the literature, however, is an empirical test of the influence of domain-general executive processing resources on this implicit ToM system. In the study reported here, a dual-task method was employed to investigate the impact of executive load on eye movements in an implicit Sally-Anne false-belief task. Under no-load conditions, adult participants displayed eye movement behavior consistent with implicit belief processing, whereas evidence for belief processing was absent for participants under cognitive load. These findings indicate that the cognitive system responsible for implicitly tracking beliefs draws at least minimally on executive processing resources. Thus, even the most low-level processing of beliefs appears to reflect a capacity-limited operation.

Executive Function and Children's Understanding of False Belief: How Specific Is the Relation?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muller, U.; Zelazo, P.D.; Imrisek, S.

2005-01-01

The present study examined developmental relations among understanding false belief, understanding ''false'' photographs, performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS), and performance on a picture-sentence verification task in 69 3-5-year-old children. Results showed that performance on the DCCS predicted performance on false belief…

Language Promotes False-Belief Understanding

PubMed Central

Pyers, Jennie E.; Senghas, Ann

2010-01-01

Developmental studies have identified a strong correlation in the timing of language development and false-belief understanding. However, the nature of this relationship remains unresolved. Does language promote false-belief understanding, or does it merely facilitate development that could occur independently, albeit on a delayed timescale? We examined language development and false-belief understanding in deaf learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. The use of mental-state vocabulary and performance on a low-verbal false-belief task were assessed, over 2 years, in adult and adolescent users of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Results show that those adults who acquired a nascent form of the language during childhood produce few mental-state signs and fail to exhibit false-belief understanding. Furthermore, those whose language developed over the period of the study correspondingly developed in false-belief understanding. Thus, language learning, over and above social experience, drives the development of a mature theory of mind. PMID:19515119

Preschoolers' Implicit and Explicit False-Belief Understanding: Relations with Complex Syntactical Mastery

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Low, Jason

2010-01-01

Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a character's mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct…

Young Children's Understanding of Beliefs about Moral and Conventional Rule Violations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Conry-Murray, Clare

2013-01-01

Children of ages 3-5 ("N" = 62) were assessed by using standard theory-of-mind tasks and unusual belief tasks related to false information and beliefs endorsing violations of moral (welfare and fairness) and social conventional (school rules) domains. Younger children (under 5 years) did not accurately attribute unusual factual beliefs…

The Development of Theory of Mind and Positive and Negative Reciprocity in Preschool Children

PubMed Central

Schug, Joanna; Takagishi, Haruto; Benech, Catalina; Okada, Hiroyuki

2016-01-01

This study examined the relation between the acquisition of false-beliefs theory of mind (ToM) and reciprocity in preschoolers. Preschool-aged children completed a task assessing the understanding of false beliefs, and played an Ultimatum Game (UG) with another child in a face-to-face setting. Negative reciprocity was assessed by examining the rejection of unfair offers made by another child in the UG, while positive reciprocity was assessed by examining allocations made by participants in a Dictator Game (DG) following the UG. The results indicated that children who had passed a task assessing first-order false beliefs were more likely to make generous offers in a DG following a fair offer made by their partner in a proceeding UG, but that false beliefs ToM was unrelated to the rejection of unfair offers in the UG. PMID:27445881

The Development of Theory of Mind and Positive and Negative Reciprocity in Preschool Children.

PubMed

Schug, Joanna; Takagishi, Haruto; Benech, Catalina; Okada, Hiroyuki

2016-01-01

This study examined the relation between the acquisition of false-beliefs theory of mind (ToM) and reciprocity in preschoolers. Preschool-aged children completed a task assessing the understanding of false beliefs, and played an Ultimatum Game (UG) with another child in a face-to-face setting. Negative reciprocity was assessed by examining the rejection of unfair offers made by another child in the UG, while positive reciprocity was assessed by examining allocations made by participants in a Dictator Game (DG) following the UG. The results indicated that children who had passed a task assessing first-order false beliefs were more likely to make generous offers in a DG following a fair offer made by their partner in a proceeding UG, but that false beliefs ToM was unrelated to the rejection of unfair offers in the UG.

Effects of maternal negativity and of early and recent recurrent depressive disorder on children's false belief understanding.

PubMed

Rohrer, Lisa M; Cicchetti, Dante; Rogosch, Fred A; Toth, Sheree L; Maughan, Angeline

2011-01-01

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children's emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, 3 false belief tasks were administered to 5-year-old children whose mothers had either met criteria for major depressive disorder within the first 20 months of the child's life (n = 91) or had never been depressed (n = 50). Significant difficulties in performance were found among the children of depressed mothers, especially those whose mothers had experienced early and recent recurrent depressive disorder. Regardless of diagnostic status, children whose mothers exhibited negativity during problem-solving tasks administered at an earlier developmental period also were less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding. These effects remained even after child verbal ability was controlled.

Effects of Maternal Negativity and of Early and Recent Recurrent Depressive Disorder on Children’s False Belief Understanding

PubMed Central

Rohrer, Lisa M.; Cicchetti, Dante; Rogosch, Fred A.; Toth, Sheree L.; Maughan, Angeline

2015-01-01

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children’s emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, three false belief tasks were administered to five-year-old children whose mothers had either met criteria for major depressive disorder within the first 20 months of the child’s life (n = 91) or had never been depressed (n = 50). Significant difficulties in performance were found among the children of depressed mothers, especially those whose mothers had experienced early and recent recurrent depressive disorder. Regardless of diagnostic status, children whose mothers exhibited negativity during problem-solving tasks administered at an earlier developmental period also were less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding. These effects remained even after child verbal ability was controlled. PMID:21244156

The relationship between second-order false belief and display rules reasoning: the integration of cognitive and affective social understanding.

PubMed

Naito, Mika; Seki, Yoshimi

2009-01-01

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications decreasingly and motivational justifications with embedded perspectives increasingly with age. Although not related to either type of display across ages, second-order tasks were associated with both types of display tasks only at 8 years when examined in each age group. Results suggest that children base their second-order theory of mind and display rules understanding on distinct reasoning until middle childhood, during which time the originally distinct aspects of social understanding are integrated.

The Origins of Belief Representation: Monkeys Fail to Automatically Represent Others’ Beliefs

PubMed Central

Martin, Alia; Santos, Laurie R.

2014-01-01

Young infants’ successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)’s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species—the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)—is automatically influenced by another agent’s beliefs when tracking an object’s location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple’s movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys’ belief (true or false) and agent’s belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys’ expectations were not influenced by another agent’s beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans. PMID:24374209

The origins of belief representation: monkeys fail to automatically represent others' beliefs.

PubMed

Martin, Alia; Santos, Laurie R

2014-03-01

Young infants' successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)'s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species--the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)--is automatically influenced by another agent's beliefs when tracking an object's location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple's movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys' belief (true or false) and agent's belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys' expectations were not influenced by another agent's beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A Continuous False Belief Task Reveals Egocentric Biases in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Begeer, Sander; Bernstein, Daniel M.; van Wijhe, Jonas; Scheeren, Anke M.; Koot, Hans M.

2012-01-01

This study reports on a new false belief measure in a sample of 124 children and adolescents with or without high functioning autism (HFASD). In the classic paradigm, a participant predicts in which of two discrete locations a deceived protagonist will look for an object. In the current Sandbox task, the object is buried and reburied in a sandbox,…

Three- and Four-Year-Old Children's Ability to Use Desire- and Belief-Based Reasoning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cassidy, Kimberly Wright

1998-01-01

This study investigated the relationship of 3-year olds' reliance on desire when predicting behavior and their performance on false-belief tasks. Results suggested that young children may use the desires of the agent, rather than their own desires, to predict behavior in standard false-belief paradigms. Older preschoolers also have difficulty…

Neural Correlates of Belief and Emotion Attribution in Schizophrenia.

PubMed

Lee, Junghee; Horan, William P; Wynn, Jonathan K; Green, Michael F

2016-01-01

Impaired mental state attribution is a core social cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study examined the extent to which the core neural system of mental state attribution is involved in mental state attribution, focusing on belief attribution and emotion attribution. Fifteen schizophrenia outpatients and 14 healthy controls performed two mental state attribution tasks in the scanner. In a Belief Attribution Task, after reading a short vignette, participants were asked infer either the belief of a character (a false belief condition) or a physical state of an affair (a false photograph condition). In an Emotion Attribution Task, participants were asked either to judge whether character(s) in pictures felt unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral emotion (other condition) or to look at pictures that did not have any human characters (view condition). fMRI data were analyzing focusing on a priori regions of interest (ROIs) of the core neural systems of mental state attribution: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and precuneus. An exploratory whole brain analysis was also performed. Both patients and controls showed greater activation in all four ROIs during the Belief Attribution Task than the Emotion Attribution Task. Patients also showed less activation in the precuneus and left TPJ compared to controls during the Belief Attribution Task. No significant group difference was found during the Emotion Attribution Task in any of ROIs. An exploratory whole brain analysis showed a similar pattern of neural activations. These findings suggest that while schizophrenia patients rely on the same neural network as controls do when attributing beliefs of others, patients did not show reduced activation in the key regions such as the TPJ. Further, this study did not find evidence for aberrant neural activation during emotion attribution or recruitment of compensatory brain regions in schizophrenia.

A Bayesian Framework for False Belief Reasoning in Children: A Rational Integration of Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory

PubMed Central

Asakura, Nobuhiko; Inui, Toshio

2016-01-01

Two apparently contrasting theories have been proposed to account for the development of children's theory of mind (ToM): theory-theory and simulation theory. We present a Bayesian framework that rationally integrates both theories for false belief reasoning. This framework exploits two internal models for predicting the belief states of others: one of self and one of others. These internal models are responsible for simulation-based and theory-based reasoning, respectively. The framework further takes into account empirical studies of a developmental ToM scale (e.g., Wellman and Liu, 2004): developmental progressions of various mental state understandings leading up to false belief understanding. By representing the internal models and their interactions as a causal Bayesian network, we formalize the model of children's false belief reasoning as probabilistic computations on the Bayesian network. This model probabilistically weighs and combines the two internal models and predicts children's false belief ability as a multiplicative effect of their early-developed abilities to understand the mental concepts of diverse beliefs and knowledge access. Specifically, the model predicts that children's proportion of correct responses on a false belief task can be closely approximated as the product of their proportions correct on the diverse belief and knowledge access tasks. To validate this prediction, we illustrate that our model provides good fits to a variety of ToM scale data for preschool children. We discuss the implications and extensions of our model for a deeper understanding of developmental progressions of children's ToM abilities. PMID:28082941

A Bayesian Framework for False Belief Reasoning in Children: A Rational Integration of Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory.

PubMed

Asakura, Nobuhiko; Inui, Toshio

2016-01-01

Two apparently contrasting theories have been proposed to account for the development of children's theory of mind (ToM): theory-theory and simulation theory. We present a Bayesian framework that rationally integrates both theories for false belief reasoning. This framework exploits two internal models for predicting the belief states of others: one of self and one of others. These internal models are responsible for simulation-based and theory-based reasoning, respectively. The framework further takes into account empirical studies of a developmental ToM scale (e.g., Wellman and Liu, 2004): developmental progressions of various mental state understandings leading up to false belief understanding. By representing the internal models and their interactions as a causal Bayesian network, we formalize the model of children's false belief reasoning as probabilistic computations on the Bayesian network. This model probabilistically weighs and combines the two internal models and predicts children's false belief ability as a multiplicative effect of their early-developed abilities to understand the mental concepts of diverse beliefs and knowledge access. Specifically, the model predicts that children's proportion of correct responses on a false belief task can be closely approximated as the product of their proportions correct on the diverse belief and knowledge access tasks. To validate this prediction, we illustrate that our model provides good fits to a variety of ToM scale data for preschool children. We discuss the implications and extensions of our model for a deeper understanding of developmental progressions of children's ToM abilities.

An fMRI study on the comparison of different types of false belief reasoning: False belief-based emotion and behavior attribution.

PubMed

Döhnel, Katrin; Schuwerk, Tobias; Sodian, Beate; Hajak, Göran; Rupprecht, Rainer; Sommer, Monika

2017-12-01

False belief (FB) reasoning is a key Theory of Mind (ToM) competence. By 4 years of age, children understand that a person's behavior can be based on a FB about reality. Children cannot understand that a person's emotion can also be based on a FB before the age of six. In order to generate hypothesis on basic processes distinguishing these two types of belief reasoning, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study in adults directly compares functional activity associated with these two FB tasks. Both tasks were associated with activity in the ToM network including the medial prefrontal cortex and the left temporo-parietal junction. Differential activity was observed in the anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for FB-based emotion relative to behavior attribution. Contrary to FB behavior attribution, FB-based emotion attribution requires the processing of two different mental states: a belief and an emotion and their relation to each other. The activity pattern may reflect the differential demands on cognitive processes associated with the two different belief-based attribution processes. These results shed new light on the still ongoing debate about the nature of the developmental lag between the two FB tasks.

Understanding of emotions and false beliefs among hearing children versus deaf children.

PubMed

Ziv, Margalit; Most, Tova; Cohen, Shirit

2013-04-01

Emotion understanding and theory of mind (ToM) are two major aspects of social cognition in which deaf children demonstrate developmental delays. The current study investigated these social cognition aspects in two subgroups of deaf children-those with cochlear implants who communicate orally (speakers) and those who communicate primarily using sign language (signers)-in comparison to hearing children. Participants were 53 Israeli kindergartners-20 speakers, 10 signers, and 23 hearing children. Tests included four emotion identification and understanding tasks and one false belief task (ToM). Results revealed similarities among all children's emotion labeling and affective perspective taking abilities, similarities between speakers and hearing children in false beliefs and in understanding emotions in typical contexts, and lower performance of signers on the latter three tasks. Adapting educational experiences to the unique characteristics and needs of speakers and signers is recommended.

Bridging the gap between implicit and explicit understanding: how language development promotes the processing and representation of false belief.

PubMed

San Juan, Valerie; Astington, Janet Wilde

2012-03-01

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the development of false-belief reasoning. In the current paper, we argue that children's performance on disparate measures cannot be used to infer similarities in understanding across different age groups. Instead, we argue that development must continue to occur between the periods when children can reason implicitly and then explicitly about false belief. We then propose mechanisms by which language associated with false-belief tasks facilitates this transition by assisting with both the processes of elicited response selection and the formation of metarepresentational understanding. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

Are emotion and mind understanding differently linked to young children's social adjustment? Relationships between behavioral consequences of emotions, false belief, and SCBE.

PubMed

Deneault, Joane; Ricard, Marcelle

2013-01-01

According to empirical findings, emotional knowledge and false belief understanding seem to be differently linked to social adjustment. However, whereas false belief is assessed through the capacity to identify its behavioral consequences, emotion tasks usually rely on the comprehension of facial expressions and of the situational causes of emotions. The authors examined if the documented relationship between social adjustment and emotion knowledge in children extends to the understanding of behavioral consequences of emotions. Eighty French-speaking preschoolers undertook false belief and consequence-of-emotion tasks. Their social adjustment was measured by the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation. Children's language ability, their parent's level of education, and the familial socioeconomic score were taken into account. Results showed that children's social adjustment was significantly predicted by their knowledge of emotion, but not by their understanding of false belief. The findings confirm the special status of emotion among mental states for social adaptation and specify which dimensions of adaptation to peers and adults are predicted by the child's emotion understanding. They also suggest that the distinction between mind and emotion understanding may be conceptual rather than methodological.

Theory of mind through the ages: older and middle-aged adults exhibit more errors than do younger adults on a continuous false belief task.

PubMed

Bernstein, Daniel M; Thornton, Wendy Loken; Sommerville, Jessica A

2011-10-01

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to understand mental states, is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Previous research has documented marked advances in ToM in preschoolers, and declines in ToM in older-aged adults. In the present study, younger (n=37), middle-aged (n=20), and older (n=37) adults completed a continuous false belief task measuring ToM. Middle-aged and older adults exhibited more false belief bias than did younger adults, irrespective of language ability, executive function, processing speed, and memory. The authors conclude that ToM declines from younger to older adulthood, independent of age-related changes to domain-general cognitive functioning.

Aging of theory of mind: the influence of educational level and cognitive processing.

PubMed

Li, Xiaoming; Wang, Kai; Wang, Fan; Tao, Qian; Xie, Yu; Cheng, Qi

2013-01-01

Previous studies of theory of mind (ToM) in old age have provided mixed results. We predicted that educational level and cognitive processing are two factors influencing the pattern of the aging of ToM. To test this hypothesis, a younger group who received higher education (mean age 20.46 years), an older group with an education level equal to that of the young group (mean age 76.29 years), and an older group with less education (mean age 73.52 years) were recruited. ToM tasks included the following tests: the second-order false-belief task, the faux-pas task, the eyes test, and tests of fundamental aspects of cognitive function that included two background tests (memory span and processing speed) and three subcomponents of executive function (inhibition, updating, and shifting). We found that the younger group and the older group with equally high education outperformed the older group with less education in false-belief and faux-pas tasks. However, there was no significant difference between the two former groups. The three groups of participants performed equivalently in the eyes test as well as in control tasks (false-belief control question, faux-pas control question, faux-pas control story, and Eyes Test control task). The younger group outperformed the other two groups in the cognitive processing tasks. Mediation analyses showed that difficulties in inhibition, memory span, and processing speed mediated the age differences in false-belief reasoning. Also, the variables of inhibition, updating, memory span, and processing speed mediated age-related variance in faux-pas. Discussion focused on the links between ToM aging, educational level, and cognitive processing. Supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (number: 30870766) and Anhui Province Natural Science Foundation (number: 11040606M166).

Do false belief and verb non-factivity share similar neural circuits?

PubMed

Chen, Lan; Cheung, Him; Szeto, Ching-Yee; Zhu, Zude; Wang, Suiping

2012-02-21

The present study investigates whether the complement falsity elicited by strong non-factive verbs and the false belief activated by a standard nonverbal false belief task produce similar electrophysiological activities in the brain. The hypothesis is based on the notion that both complement falsity and false belief involve decoupling a false mental representation from reality. Some previous studies have reported a behavioral correlation between children's false belief reasoning and interpretation of strong non-factive verbs together with their false complements, but a neural basis for this correlation has not been found. Our event-related potential (ERP) results with normal adults showed that both nonverbal false belief and strong non-factive verb comprehension elicited a negative late slow waveform divergence compared to their respective baselines. Although these slow waves due to the two types of stimuli had slightly different scalp distributions, both were regarded as reflecting primarily frontal activation. Such ERP similarity provides evidence for a common neural basis shared by nonverbal false belief reasoning and comprehension of strong non-factive verbs. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children.

PubMed

Cheung, Him; Chen, Hsuan-Chih; Yeung, William

2009-10-01

Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children's false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children's false belief understanding. Independent tasks were used to measure verb meaning, complements, and false belief understanding such that the verbs in question were present only in the verb meaning test, and no linguistic devices biased toward false belief were used in the false belief test. We focused on (a) some mental verbs that obligatorily affirm or negate what follows and (b) sentential complements, the content of which is to be evaluated against the mind of another person, not reality. Results showed that only (a) predicted false belief understanding in a group of Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds, controlling for nonverbal intelligence and general language ability. In particular, children's understanding of the strong nonfactive semantics of the Cantonese verbs /ji5-wai4/ ("falsely think") predicted false belief understanding most strongly. The current findings suggest that false belief understanding is specifically related to the comprehension of mental verbs that entail false thought in their semantics.

29 CFR 1960.46 - Agency responsibility.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false Agency responsibility. 1960.46 Section 1960.46 Labor... to perform his or her assigned task because of a reasonable belief that, under the circumstances the task poses an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm coupled with a reasonable belief that there...

29 CFR 1960.46 - Agency responsibility.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false Agency responsibility. 1960.46 Section 1960.46 Labor... to perform his or her assigned task because of a reasonable belief that, under the circumstances the task poses an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm coupled with a reasonable belief that there...

29 CFR 1960.46 - Agency responsibility.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Agency responsibility. 1960.46 Section 1960.46 Labor... to perform his or her assigned task because of a reasonable belief that, under the circumstances the task poses an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm coupled with a reasonable belief that there...

29 CFR 1960.46 - Agency responsibility.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2014-07-01 2014-07-01 false Agency responsibility. 1960.46 Section 1960.46 Labor... to perform his or her assigned task because of a reasonable belief that, under the circumstances the task poses an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm coupled with a reasonable belief that there...

29 CFR 1960.46 - Agency responsibility.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Agency responsibility. 1960.46 Section 1960.46 Labor... to perform his or her assigned task because of a reasonable belief that, under the circumstances the task poses an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm coupled with a reasonable belief that there...

The Cost of Thinking about False Beliefs: Evidence from Adults' Performance on a Non-Inferential Theory of Mind Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apperly, Ian A.; Back, Elisa; Samson, Dana; France, Lisa

2008-01-01

Much of what we know about other people's beliefs comes non-inferentially from what people tell us. Developmental research suggests that 3-year-olds have difficulty processing such information: they suffer interference from their own knowledge of reality when told about someone's false belief (e.g., [Wellman, H. M., & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young…

Modulation of the cortical false belief network during development.

PubMed

Sommer, Monika; Meinhardt, Jörg; Eichenmüller, Kerstin; Sodian, Beate; Döhnel, Katrin; Hajak, Göran

2010-10-01

The ability to represent false beliefs is commonly considered as to be the critical test for having a Theory of Mind (ToM). For correct predictions or explanations of other peoples' behavior it is necessary to understand that mental states are sometimes independent of reality and misrepresent the real state of the world. In contrast, when people hold true beliefs, predictions and explanations about behavior can simply be derived from reality. Previous neuroimaging studies with adults suggest that the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) are engaged in false belief reasoning. However, studies investigating the neural correlates of belief reasoning in children are rare. Using cartoon stories that depicted an unexpected transfer, we compared false belief reasoning with true belief reasoning in children of a narrow age range between 10 and 12years and in adults. In both groups, the dorsal medial frontal cortex was activated during false versus true belief reasoning. In contrast to adults, children did not selectively recruit the rTPJ during false belief reasoning. We found a group by belief interaction in the right rostral PFC and the posterior cingulate cortex. In these areas, children compared to adults showed increased activity associated with false belief reasoning in contrast to true belief reasoning. These results implicate modulation of the cortical network that underlies false belief reasoning during development and far beyond the time children successfully master false belief tasks. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of true and false belief reasoning.

PubMed

Sommer, Monika; Döhnel, Katrin; Sodian, Beate; Meinhardt, Jörg; Thoermer, Claudia; Hajak, Göran

2007-04-15

Belief reasoning plays a central role in making inferences about other people's mental states. The ability to reason about false beliefs is considered as a critical test for having a Theory of Mind (ToM). There is some controversy as to whether it is the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) or the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) that is centrally involved in belief reasoning. According to developmental studies of belief reasoning we conducted an fMRI experiment with a carefully controlled paradigm (Sally Anne scenario). We compared false belief reasoning with true belief reasoning in parallel tasks, using a series of cartoon stories depicting transfer of an object unbeknownst to the protagonist (false belief) or with the protagonist witnessing (true belief). The false belief versus true belief contrast revealed activation of the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the right lateral rostral prefrontal cortex and the right TPJ associated with false belief. We suggest that the activation of the dACC and the lateral PFC might be associated with action monitoring and stimulus-independent cognitive processing whereas the activation of the TPJ might be related to the computation of mental representations that create perspective differences, such as a person's false belief that contrasts with reality and therefore might be centrally involved in the decoupling mechanism. Additionally we found common patterns of activation for true and false belief reasoning, including inferior parietal and precuneus activation, but we found no activation of the MPFC or the TPJ in general belief reasoning.

Three-Year-Olds Express Suspense when an Agent Approaches a Scene with a False Belief

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moll, Henrike; Kane, Sarah; McGowan, Luke

2016-01-01

Research on early false belief understanding has entirely relied on affect-neutral measures such as judgments (standard tasks), attentional allocation (looking duration, preferential looking, anticipatory looking), or active intervention. We used a novel, affective measure to test whether preschoolers affectively anticipate another's misguided…

A Second Look at Second-Order Belief Attribution in Autism.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tager-Flusberg, Helen; Sullivan, Kate

1994-01-01

Twelve students with autism and 12 with mental retardation, who had passed a first-order test of false belief, were given a second-order reasoning task. No intergroup performance differences were seen. Findings suggest that the difficulty for both groups with the second-order task lies in information processing demands rather than conceptual…

Task constraints distinguish perspective inferences from perspective use during discourse interpretation in a false belief task.

PubMed

Ferguson, Heather J; Apperly, Ian; Ahmad, Jumana; Bindemann, Markus; Cane, James

2015-06-01

Interpreting other peoples' actions relies on an understanding of their current mental states (e.g. beliefs, desires and intentions). In this paper, we distinguish between listeners' ability to infer others' perspectives and their explicit use of this knowledge to predict subsequent actions. In a visual-world study, two groups of participants (passive observers vs. active participants) watched short videos, depicting transfer events, where one character ('Jane') either held a true or false belief about an object's location. We tracked participants' eye-movements around the final visual scene, time-locked to related auditory descriptions (e.g. "Jane will look for the chocolates in the container on the left".). Results showed that active participants had already inferred the character's belief in the 1s preview period prior to auditory onset, before it was possible to use this information to predict an outcome. Moreover, they used this inference to correctly anticipate reference to the object's initial location on false belief trials at the earliest possible point (i.e. from "Jane" onwards). In contrast, passive observers only showed evidence of a belief inference from the onset of "Jane", and did not show reliable use of this inference to predict Jane's behaviour on false belief trials until much later, when the location ("left/right") was auditorily available. These results show that active engagement in a task activates earlier inferences about others' perspectives, and drives immediate use of this information to anticipate others' actions, compared to passive observers, who are susceptible to influences from egocentric or reality biases. Finally, we review evidence that using other peoples' perspectives to predict their behaviour is more cognitively effortful than simply using one's own. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural Correlates of Belief and Emotion Attribution in Schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Lee, Junghee; Horan, William P.; Wynn, Jonathan K.; Green, Michael F.

2016-01-01

Impaired mental state attribution is a core social cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study examined the extent to which the core neural system of mental state attribution is involved in mental state attribution, focusing on belief attribution and emotion attribution. Fifteen schizophrenia outpatients and 14 healthy controls performed two mental state attribution tasks in the scanner. In a Belief Attribution Task, after reading a short vignette, participants were asked infer either the belief of a character (a false belief condition) or a physical state of an affair (a false photograph condition). In an Emotion Attribution Task, participants were asked either to judge whether character(s) in pictures felt unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral emotion (other condition) or to look at pictures that did not have any human characters (view condition). fMRI data were analyzing focusing on a priori regions of interest (ROIs) of the core neural systems of mental state attribution: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and precuneus. An exploratory whole brain analysis was also performed. Both patients and controls showed greater activation in all four ROIs during the Belief Attribution Task than the Emotion Attribution Task. Patients also showed less activation in the precuneus and left TPJ compared to controls during the Belief Attribution Task. No significant group difference was found during the Emotion Attribution Task in any of ROIs. An exploratory whole brain analysis showed a similar pattern of neural activations. These findings suggest that while schizophrenia patients rely on the same neural network as controls do when attributing beliefs of others, patients did not show reduced activation in the key regions such as the TPJ. Further, this study did not find evidence for aberrant neural activation during emotion attribution or recruitment of compensatory brain regions in schizophrenia. PMID:27812142

Synchrony in the onset of mental-state reasoning: evidence from five cultures.

PubMed

Callaghan, Tara; Rochat, Philippe; Lillard, Angeline; Claux, Mary Louise; Odden, Hal; Itakura, Shoji; Tapanya, Sombat; Singh, Saraswati

2005-05-01

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.

The influence of a bystander agent's beliefs on children's and adults' decision-making process.

PubMed

Buttelmann, Frances; Buttelmann, David

2017-01-01

The ability to attribute and represent others' mental states (e.g., beliefs; so-called "theory of mind") is essential for participation in human social interaction. Despite a considerable body of research using tasks in which protagonists in the participants' attentional focus held false or true beliefs, the question of automatic belief attribution to bystander agents has received little attention. In the current study, we presented adults and 6-year-olds (N=92) with an implicit computer-based avoidance false-belief task in which participants were asked to place an object into one of three boxes. While doing so, we manipulated the beliefs of an irrelevant human-like or non-human-like bystander agent who was visible on the screen. Importantly, the bystander agent's beliefs were irrelevant for solving the task. Still, children's decision making was significantly influenced by the bystander agent's beliefs even if this was a non-human-like self-propelled object. Such an influence did not become obvious in adults' deliberate decisions but occurred only in their reaction times, which suggests that they also processed the bystander agent's beliefs but were able to suppress the influence of such beliefs on their behavior regulation. The results of a control study (N=53) ruled out low-level explanations and confirmed that self-propelledness of agents is a necessary factor for belief attribution to occur. Thus, not only do humans spontaneously ascribe beliefs to self-propelled bystander agents, but those beliefs even influence meaningful decisions in children. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Belief and sign, true and false: the unique of false belief reasoning.

PubMed

Zhang, Ting; Zhang, Qin; Li, Yiyuan; Long, Changquan; Li, Hong

2013-11-01

For a long time, a controversy has been proposed that whether the process of theory of mind is a result of domain-specific or domain-general changes (Wellman in The handbook of childhood cognitive development. Blackwell Publication, New Jersey, 2011). This event-related potential study explored the neural time course of domain-general and domain-specific components in belief reasoning. Fourteen participants completed location transfer false belief (FB), true belief (TB), false sign (FS) and true sign (TS) tasks, in which two pictures told a story related to a dog that ran from a green into a red box. In the TB and FB tasks, a boy saw or did not see the transfer of the dog, respectively. In the FS and TS tasks, an arrow that pointed to the green box either altered its direction to the red box or did not alter following the transfer of the dog. Participants then inferred where the boy thought of, or the arrow indicated the location of the dog. FB and TB reasoning elicited lower N2 amplitudes than FS and TS reasoning, which is associated with domain-general components, the detection, and classification. The late slow wave (LSW) for FB was more positive at frontal, central, and parietal sites than FS because of the domain-specific component involved in FB reasoning. However, the LSW was less positive for TB than for FB but did not differ from the TS condition, which implies that mental representation might not be involved in TB reasoning.

Language and False-Belief Task Performance in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Farrar, M. Jeffrey; Seung, Hye Kyeung; Lee, Hyeonjin

2017-01-01

Purpose: Language is related to false-belief (FB) understanding in both typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study examined the role of complementation and general language in FB understanding. Of interest was whether language plays similar or different roles in the groups' FB performance.…

A reaction time advantage for calculating beliefs over public representations signals domain specificity for 'theory of mind'.

PubMed

Cohen, Adam S; German, Tamsin C

2010-06-01

In a task where participants' overt task was to track the location of an object across a sequence of events, reaction times to unpredictable probes requiring an inference about a social agent's beliefs about the location of that object were obtained. Reaction times to false belief situations were faster than responses about the (false) contents of a map showing the location of the object (Experiment 1) and about the (false) direction of an arrow signaling the location of the object (Experiment 2). These results are consistent with developmental, neuro-imaging and neuropsychological evidence that there exist domain specific mechanisms within human cognition for encoding and reasoning about mental states. Specialization of these mechanisms may arise from either core cognitive architecture or via the accumulation of expertise in the social domain.

Encoding of Others' Beliefs without Overt Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen, Adam S.; German, Tamsin C.

2009-01-01

Under what conditions do people automatically encode and track the mental states of others? A recent investigation showed that when subjects are instructed to track the location of an object but are not instructed to track a belief about that location in a non-verbal false-belief task, they respond more slowly to questions about an agent's belief,…

Do Humans Have Two Systems to Track Beliefs and Belief-Like States?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apperly, Ian A.; Butterfill, Stephen A.

2009-01-01

The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans' capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years of age (H. Wellman, D. Cross, & J. Watson, 2001; H. Wimmer & J. Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false-belief tasks at 13 or 15…

Children's understanding of promising, lying, and false belief.

PubMed

Maas, Fay K

2008-07-01

Understanding promising and lying requires an understanding of intention and the ability to interpret mental states. The author examined (a) the extent to which 4- to 6-year-olds focus on the sincerity of the speaker's intention when the 4-to 6-year-olds make judgments about promises and lies and (b) whether false-belief reasoning skills are related to understanding promising and lying. Participants watched videotaped stories and made promise and lie judgments from their own perspective and from the listener-character's perspective. Children also completed false-belief reasoning tasks. Older children made more correct promise judgments from both perspectives. All children made correct lie judgments from the listener's perspective. The author found that Ist-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the participant's perspective; 2nd-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the listener-character's perspective. Results suggest that children's understanding of promising and lying moves from a focus on outcome toward a focus on the belief that each utterance is designed to create.

Deaf Children's Use of Beliefs and Desires in Negotiation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Terwogt, Mark Meerum; Rieffe, Carolien

2004-01-01

Although several studies have shown that deaf children demonstrated impaired performances on false-belief tasks, the children's belief understanding appeared intact when asked to explain emotions or behavior. However, this finding does not necessarily indicate a full-fledged theory of mind. This study aimed to investigate deaf children's…

False Belief Understanding: Children Catch It from Classmates of Different Ages

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Yifang; Su, Yanjie

2009-01-01

Two experiments were conducted to compare the false belief understanding of children who have no siblings, but have classmates of different ages in kindergarten. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds completed two unexpected location tasks. We found that 4-year-olds with classmates of different ages performed significantly better than those with…

Five-Year-Olds' Systematic Errors in Second-Order False Belief Tasks Are Due to First-Order Theory of Mind Strategy Selection: A Computational Modeling Study.

PubMed

Arslan, Burcu; Taatgen, Niels A; Verbrugge, Rineke

2017-01-01

The focus of studies on second-order false belief reasoning generally was on investigating the roles of executive functions and language with correlational studies. Different from those studies, we focus on the question how 5-year-olds select and revise reasoning strategies in second-order false belief tasks by constructing two computational cognitive models of this process: an instance-based learning model and a reinforcement learning model. Unlike the reinforcement learning model, the instance-based learning model predicted that children who fail second-order false belief tasks would give answers based on first-order theory of mind (ToM) reasoning as opposed to zero-order reasoning. This prediction was confirmed with an empirical study that we conducted with 72 5- to 6-year-old children. The results showed that 17% of the answers were correct and 83% of the answers were wrong. In line with our prediction, 65% of the wrong answers were based on a first-order ToM strategy, while only 29% of them were based on a zero-order strategy (the remaining 6% of subjects did not provide any answer). Based on our instance-based learning model, we propose that when children get feedback "Wrong," they explicitly revise their strategy to a higher level instead of implicitly selecting one of the available ToM strategies. Moreover, we predict that children's failures are due to lack of experience and that with exposure to second-order false belief reasoning, children can revise their wrong first-order reasoning strategy to a correct second-order reasoning strategy.

Five-Year-Olds’ Systematic Errors in Second-Order False Belief Tasks Are Due to First-Order Theory of Mind Strategy Selection: A Computational Modeling Study

PubMed Central

Arslan, Burcu; Taatgen, Niels A.; Verbrugge, Rineke

2017-01-01

The focus of studies on second-order false belief reasoning generally was on investigating the roles of executive functions and language with correlational studies. Different from those studies, we focus on the question how 5-year-olds select and revise reasoning strategies in second-order false belief tasks by constructing two computational cognitive models of this process: an instance-based learning model and a reinforcement learning model. Unlike the reinforcement learning model, the instance-based learning model predicted that children who fail second-order false belief tasks would give answers based on first-order theory of mind (ToM) reasoning as opposed to zero-order reasoning. This prediction was confirmed with an empirical study that we conducted with 72 5- to 6-year-old children. The results showed that 17% of the answers were correct and 83% of the answers were wrong. In line with our prediction, 65% of the wrong answers were based on a first-order ToM strategy, while only 29% of them were based on a zero-order strategy (the remaining 6% of subjects did not provide any answer). Based on our instance-based learning model, we propose that when children get feedback “Wrong,” they explicitly revise their strategy to a higher level instead of implicitly selecting one of the available ToM strategies. Moreover, we predict that children’s failures are due to lack of experience and that with exposure to second-order false belief reasoning, children can revise their wrong first-order reasoning strategy to a correct second-order reasoning strategy. PMID:28293206

Implicit false-belief processing in the human brain.

PubMed

Schneider, Dana; Slaughter, Virginia P; Becker, Stefanie I; Dux, Paul E

2014-11-01

Eye-movement patterns in 'Sally-Anne' tasks reflect humans' ability to implicitly process the mental states of others, particularly false-beliefs - a key theory of mind (ToM) operation. It has recently been proposed that an efficient ToM system, which operates in the absence of awareness (implicit ToM, iToM), subserves the analysis of belief-like states. This contrasts to consciously available belief processing, performed by the explicit ToM system (eToM). The frontal, temporal and parietal cortices are engaged when humans explicitly 'mentalize' about others' beliefs. However, the neural underpinnings of implicit false-belief processing and the extent to which they draw on networks involved in explicit general-belief processing are unknown. Here, participants watched 'Sally-Anne' movies while fMRI and eye-tracking measures were acquired simultaneously. Participants displayed eye-movements consistent with implicit false-belief processing. After independently localizing the brain areas involved in explicit general-belief processing, only the left anterior superior temporal sulcus and precuneus revealed greater blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity for false- relative to true-belief trials in our iToM paradigm. No such difference was found for the right temporal-parietal junction despite significant activity in this area. These findings fractionate brain regions that are associated with explicit general ToM reasoning and false-belief processing in the absence of awareness. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Developmental Progression of Understanding of Mind during a Hiding Game

PubMed Central

Nelson, P. Brooke; Adamson, Lauren B.; Bakeman, Roger

2011-01-01

In this longitudinal study, 52 typically developing preschoolers engaged in a hiding game with their mothers when children were 42-, 54-, and 66-months old. Children's understanding of mind, positive affect, and engagement with the task were rated, and mothers' utterances were coded for role and content. Analyses confirmed that some facets of children's understanding of mind developed sequentially; specifically, they expressed an understanding of knowledge access before an understanding of deception and false beliefs, and expressed an understanding of deception before an understanding of false beliefs. Children's understanding of mind increased across visits and positively correlated with false belief task performance. Results suggest that mothers may tailor the content of their utterances to the child's growing expertise, but the role of mothers' utterances did not change. Observing preschoolers engaged in a playful hiding game revealed that children's understanding of mind not only increased with age but also developed sequentially. PMID:25960610

Oscillatory brain activity differentially reflects false belief understanding and complementation syntax processing.

PubMed

Guan, Yao; Farrar, M Jeffrey; Keil, Andreas

2018-02-01

False belief understanding (FBU) enables people to consider conflicting beliefs about the same situation. While language has been demonstrated to be a correlate of FBU, there is still controversy about the extent to which a specific aspect of language, complementation syntax, is a necessary condition for FBU. The present study tested an important notion from the debate proposing that complementation syntax task is redundant to FBU measures. Specifically, we examined electrophysiological correlates of false belief, false complementation, and their respective true conditions in adults using electroencephalography (EEG), focusing on indices of oscillatory brain activity and large-scale connectivity. The results showed strong modulation of parieto-occipital alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (13-20 Hz) power by the experimental manipulations, with heightened sustained alpha power reflective of effortful internal processing observed in the false compared to the true conditions and reliable beta power reductions sensitive to mentalizing and/or syntactic demands in the belief versus the complementation conditions. In addition, higher coupling between parieto-occipital regions and widespread frontal sites in the beta band was found for the false-belief condition selectively. The result of divergence in beta oscillatory activity and in connectivity between false belief and false complementation does not support the redundancy hypothesis.

Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task

PubMed Central

Buttelmann, Frances; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2017-01-01

Understanding the behavior of others in a wide variety of circumstances requires an understanding of their psychological states. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, the great apes, understand many psychological states of others, for example, perceptions, goals, and desires. However, so far there is little evidence that they possess the key marker of advanced human social cognition: an understanding of false beliefs. Here we demonstrate that in a nonverbal (implicit) false-belief test which is passed by human 1-year-old infants, great apes as a group, including chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus), and orangutans (Pongo abelii), distinguish between true and false beliefs in their helping behavior. Great apes thus may possess at least some basic understanding that an agent’s actions are based on her beliefs about reality. Hence, such understanding might not be the exclusive province of the human species. PMID:28379987

Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task.

PubMed

Buttelmann, David; Buttelmann, Frances; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2017-01-01

Understanding the behavior of others in a wide variety of circumstances requires an understanding of their psychological states. Humans' nearest primate relatives, the great apes, understand many psychological states of others, for example, perceptions, goals, and desires. However, so far there is little evidence that they possess the key marker of advanced human social cognition: an understanding of false beliefs. Here we demonstrate that in a nonverbal (implicit) false-belief test which is passed by human 1-year-old infants, great apes as a group, including chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus), and orangutans (Pongo abelii), distinguish between true and false beliefs in their helping behavior. Great apes thus may possess at least some basic understanding that an agent's actions are based on her beliefs about reality. Hence, such understanding might not be the exclusive province of the human species.

Assessing true and false belief in young children with cerebral palsy through anticipatory gaze behaviours: a pilot study.

PubMed

Clarke, Michael T; Loganathan, Deborah; Swettenham, John

2012-01-01

Children with a clinical description of cerebral palsy (CP) commonly experience cognitive and sensory difficulties that co-occur with motor impairment, and for some children this can include impairments in social communication. While research has begun to examine theory of mind abilities in children with CP, relatively little is known about social communication difficulties in this population. Assessing theory of mind abilities in children with CP using traditional procedures such as the classic Sally-Anne task can be problematic if performance is affected by physical difficulties in signalling responses and/or by cognitive and language demands inherent to the task itself. The central aim of this study therefore was to examine the potential of using a new action anticipation task and eye-tracking technique to assess implicit true and false belief understanding in four developmentally young children with quadriplegic cerebral palsy who had little or no functional speech, and one language age matched child with Down syndrome who did not have severe motor impairment. All children in this study consistently demonstrated anticipatory gaze behaviours in the context of the true belief task. One child with CP and the child with Down syndrome demonstrated anticipatory gaze behaviours indicative of an ability to attribute false belief. The findings are discussed in relation to the application of action anticipation and eye-tracking paradigms in research and clinical practice. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Tracking Speakers' False Beliefs: Is Theory of Mind Available Earlier for Word Learning?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Houston-Price, Carmel; Goddard, Kate; Seclier, Catherine; Grant, Sally C.; Reid, Caitlin J. B.; Boyden, Laura E.; Williams, Rhiannon

2011-01-01

Happe and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a "privileged domain" in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of…

How Children with Autism Reason about Other's Intentions: False-Belief and Counterfactual Inferences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rasga, Célia; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M. J.

2017-01-01

We examine false belief and counterfactual reasoning in children with autism with a new change-of-intentions task. Children listened to stories, for example, Anne is picking up toys and John hears her say she wants to find her ball. John goes away and the reason for Anne's action changes--Anne's mother tells her to tidy her bedroom. We asked,…

True or False: Do 5-Year-Olds Understand Belief?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fabricius, William V.; Boyer, Ty W.; Weimer, Amy A.; Carroll, Kathleen

2010-01-01

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds…

From self to social cognition: Theory of Mind mechanisms and their relation to Executive Functioning.

PubMed

Bradford, Elisabeth E F; Jentzsch, Ines; Gomez, Juan-Carlos

2015-05-01

'Theory of Mind' refers to the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and other people (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). This study examined the extent to which 'Self' and 'Other' belief-attribution processes within the Theory of Mind (ToM) mechanism could be distinguished behaviourally, and whether these separable components differentially related to Executive Functioning (EF) abilities. A computerized false-belief task, utilizing a matched-design to allow direct comparison of self-oriented vs. other-oriented belief-attribution, was used to assess ToM, and a face-image Stroop task was employed to assess EF, within a population of typically-developed adults. Results revealed significantly longer reaction times when attributing beliefs to other people as opposed to recognizing and attributing beliefs to oneself. Intriguingly, results revealed that 'perspective-shift' requirements (i.e. changing from adoption of the 'self' perspective to the perspective of the 'other', or vice versa) across false-belief trials influenced reaction times. Reaction times were significantly longer when the perspective shift was from self-to-other than from other-to-self. It is suggested that the 'self' forms the stem of understanding the 'other', and is therefore processed regardless of ultimate task demands; in contrast, the 'other' perspective is only processed when explicitly required. We conclude that adopting another person's perspective, even when their belief state is matched to one's own, requires more cognitive effort than recalling and reflecting on self-oriented belief-states. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

I can talk you into it: theory of mind and persuasion behavior in young children.

PubMed

Slaughter, Virginia; Peterson, Candida C; Moore, Chris

2013-02-01

We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also given a battery of first-order and advanced false belief tests. As predicted, the number of independent persuasive arguments children produced was significantly associated with false belief scores, even after controlling for age and verbal ability. (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Theory-of-mind use in remitted schizophrenia patients: The role of inhibition and perspective-switching.

PubMed

Wang, Yong-Guang; Shi, Jian-fei; Roberts, David L; Jiang, Xiao-ying; Shen, Zhi-hua; Wang, Yi-quan; Wang, Kai

2015-09-30

In social interaction, Theory of Mind (ToM) enables us to construct representations of others' mental states, and to use those representations flexibly to explain or predict others' behavior. Although previous literature has documented that schizophrenia is associated with poor ToM ability, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying their difficulty in ToM use. This study developed a new methodology to test whether the difficulty in false-belief-use might be related to deficits in perspective-switching or impaired inhibitory control among 23 remitted schizophrenia patients and 18 normal controls. Patients showed a significantly greater error rate in a perspective-switching condition than a perspective-repeating position in a false-belief-use task, whereas normal controls did not show a difference between the two conditions. In addition, a larger main effect of inhibition was found in remitted schizophrenia patients than normal controls in both a false-belief-use task and control task. Thus, remitted schizophrenia patients' impairment in ToM use might be accounted for, at least partially, by deficits in perspective-switching and impaired inhibitory control. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Multiple cognitive capabilities/deficits in children with an autism spectrum disorder: "weak" central coherence and its relationship to theory of mind and executive control.

PubMed

Pellicano, Elizabeth; Maybery, Murray; Durkin, Kevin; Maley, Alana

2006-01-01

This study examined the validity of "weak" central coherence (CC) in the context of multiple cognitive capabilities/deficits in autism. Children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and matched typically developing children were administered tasks tapping visuospatial coherence, false-belief understanding and aspects of executive control. Significant group differences were found in all three cognitive domains. Evidence of local processing on coherence tasks was widespread in the ASD group, but difficulties in attributing false beliefs and in components of executive functioning were present in fewer of the children with ASD. This cognitive profile was generally similar for younger and older children with ASD. Furthermore, weak CC was unrelated to false-belief understanding, but aspects of coherence (related to integration) were associated with aspects of executive control. Few associations were found between cognitive variables and indices of autistic symptomatology. Implications for CC theory are discussed.

Competition as rational action: Why young children cannot appreciate competitive games

PubMed Central

Priewasser, Beate; Roessler, Johannes; Perner, Josef

2013-01-01

Understanding rational actions requires perspective taking both with respect to means and with respect to objectives. This study addresses the question of whether the two kinds of perspective taking develop simultaneously or in sequence. It is argued that evidence from competitive behavior is best suited for settling this issue. A total of 71 kindergarten children between 3 and 5 years of age participated in a competitive game of dice and were tested on two traditional false belief stories as well as on several control tasks (verbal intelligence, inhibitory control, and working memory). The frequency of competitive poaching moves in the game correlated with correct predictions of mistaken actions in the false belief task. Hierarchical linear regression after controlling for age and control variables showed that false belief understanding significantly predicted the amount of poaching moves. The results speak for an interrelated development of the capacity for “instrumental” and “telic” perspective taking. They are discussed in the light of teleology as opposed to theory use and simulation. PMID:23182381

Thinking about False Belief: It's Not Just What Children Say, but How Long It Takes Them to Say It

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Atance, Cristina M.; Bernstein, Daniel M.; Meltzoff, Andrew N.

2010-01-01

We examined 240 children's (3.5-, 4.5-, and 5.5-year-olds) latency to respond to questions on a battery of false-belief tasks. Response latencies exhibited a significant cross-over interaction as a function of age and response type (correct vs. incorrect). 3.5-year-olds' "in"correct latencies were faster than their correct latencies, whereas the…

The Development of Interindividual Sharing of Knowledge and Beliefs in 5- to 9-Year-Old Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bradmetz, Joel; Gauthier, Cecile

2005-01-01

The authors studied the evolution of interindividual intentionality in children and showed that the sharing of knowledge and beliefs requires more complex operations than those involved in usual false-belief tasks. The authors conducted 3 experiments on 380 children (aged 5 years, 0 months to 9 years, 6 months). They assessed the children's…

Theory of Mind in Williams Syndrome Assessed Using a Nonverbal Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Porter, Melanie A.; Coltheart, Max; Langdon, Robyn

2008-01-01

This study examined Theory of Mind in Williams syndrome (WS) and in normal chronological age-matched and mental age-matched control groups, using a picture sequencing task. This task assesses understanding of pretence, intention and false belief, while controlling for social-script knowledge and physical cause-and-effect reasoning. The task was…

Children's difficulty with true belief tasks: Competence deficit or performance problem?

PubMed

Oktay-Gür, Nese; Rakoczy, Hannes

2017-09-01

According to the standard picture of explicit theory of mind (ToM) development, children begin to (explicitly) ascribe beliefs to others and themselves from around age 4. The empirical basis of this picture comes from numerous studies consistently showing that children master verbal false belief (FB) tasks from around age 4 while children much younger have no difficulty in mastering structurally analogous true belief (TB) tasks. The standard picture, though, has come under serious attack from recent studies using TB tasks with wider age ranges. These studies have found that, paradoxically, children begin to fail TB tasks once they master FB tasks. Such findings cast doubt on the standard picture and suggest, instead, that FB tasks may be solved by much simpler strategies than proper belief reasoning. In the present study, we tested for the development of FB and TB performance in comprehensive and systematic ways. In particular, we tested the competing predictions of competence accounts (according to which TB failure reflects lack of conceptual competence) versus performance limitation accounts (according to which the standard picture is true yet children from around age 4 fail TB tasks due to performance factors). Studies 1 and 2 showed that performance in a variety of novel TB tasks showed a clear U-shaped curve, with children until age 3 and from age 10 performing competently and children in between failing, with strong negative correlations between TB and FB. Crucially, these patterns were found for various kinds of TB tasks, including those for which existing competence limitation accounts would not even predict any difficulty. Study 3, therefore, directly tested performance limitation accounts in terms of pragmatic and related factors and found that these patterns (failure in TB and negative TB-FB correlations) disappear once the relevant performance factors have been removed from the TB tasks. Taken together, these findings suggest that previous TB findings constitute false negatives, clearly speak for performance limitation accounts and thus corroborate the standard picture of the development of explicit theory of mind. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

[Theory of mind in Asperger syndrome].

PubMed

Duverger, H; Da Fonseca, D; Bailly, D; Deruelle, C

2007-09-01

Theory of mind deficit can be used to explain social and communication impairments that define the autism spectrum disorder. Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to self and others in order to understand and predict behavior. It involves the distinction between the real world and mental representations of the world. Several studies established that high functioning autistic individuals and individuals with Asperger syndrome (ASP) tend to be as proficient as controls in understanding first order false belief tasks. In contrast, they still lag behind their typical peers in understanding second order false belief tasks or more advanced tasks of theory of mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1993). Most of these studies focus on the adult population and it seems particularly interesting to investigate whether children with ASP would present the same pattern of strengths and deficits as adults. In our research, children with ASP were tested in an advanced task of theory of mind based on a visual presentation of comic strips and in a more traditional assessment of false belief understanding: the Smarties test. Two experimental groups participated in this study: a group of 16 high functioning children and adolescents with autism or with Asperger syndrome (ASP) and a group of 16 typically developing children matched on gender and age (CONT). The task was designed to assess the ability of children with ASP to infer the mental state of others. Stimuli were 26 different comic strips depicting a short story. Each comic strip was composed of three pictures and was shown on the upper half of the screen. Then three pictures numbered 1 to 3 showing possible outcomes of the scenario were superimposed on the bottom half of the screen. Only one of these three pictures represented a plausible conclusion to the scenario. This experiment contained two conditions: A Character intention (CI) condition and a Physical causality (PC) condition. The comic strips in the CI condition involved one character whose intentions had to be inferred by the subject in order to choose the correct picture. Comic strips in PC condition only required to understand physical causalities. Subjects were asked to watch the comic strip attentively and then they were required to make a choice between the three story endings by pressing the corresponding keyboard button. Both answers and response times were recorded. Additionally, all participants were enrolled in the classical false belief (Smarties) task. Comic strips: An ANOVA [2 groups (CONT/ASP) x 2 conditions (CI/PC)] was performed on the number of correct responses. Neither the Group nor the Condition factor was significant (p>0.05). In contrast, the interaction Group x Condition reached significance level [F(1-30)=4.3, p<0.05)]. Further analysis revealed that performance of the ASP group was significantly higher in the CP (M=10.8, SD=2.5) than in the CI (M=9.8, SD=2) condition [t (1-14)=2.9, p<0.001)], whereas there was no condition difference in the control group (p>0.05). False belief: all ASP participants succeeded in the task. Our data clearly demonstrated that children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism exhibited an impairment in understanding the intention of others. In the comic strip task, children with ASP have more difficulties in the character's intention condition than in the physical causality condition. This impairment is not imputable to a deficit in taking into account the context (Weack Central Coherence theory) since they performed as well as controls in the physical causality condition which also required the processing of the whole scene. In contrast, all children with ASP succeeded at the false belief task. These contradictory findings suggest that, although testing theory of mind, the two tasks do not tap similar mechanisms. It is possible that the use of verbal material in the false belief task improved performance of the ASP children who are known to present particular strengths in this domain. Another possible explanation that needs further testing would be that the level of complexity differs between the two tasks.

Differentiating between self and others: an ALE meta-analysis of fMRI studies of self-recognition and theory of mind.

PubMed

van Veluw, Susanne J; Chance, Steven A

2014-03-01

The perception of self and others is a key aspect of social cognition. In order to investigate the neurobiological basis of this distinction we reviewed two classes of task that study self-awareness and awareness of others (theory of mind, ToM). A reliable task to measure self-awareness is the recognition of one's own face in contrast to the recognition of others' faces. False-belief tasks are widely used to identify neural correlates of ToM as a measure of awareness of others. We performed an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis, using the fMRI literature on self-face recognition and false-belief tasks. The brain areas involved in performing false-belief tasks were the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), bilateral temporo-parietal junction, precuneus, and the bilateral middle temporal gyrus. Distinct self-face recognition regions were the right superior temporal gyrus, the right parahippocampal gyrus, the right inferior frontal gyrus/anterior cingulate cortex, and the left inferior parietal lobe. Overlapping brain areas were the superior temporal gyrus, and the more ventral parts of the MPFC. We confirmed that self-recognition in contrast to recognition of others' faces, and awareness of others involves a network that consists of separate, distinct neural pathways, but also includes overlapping regions of higher order prefrontal cortex where these processes may be combined. Insights derived from the neurobiology of disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are consistent with this notion.

Visible Social Interactions Do Not Support the Development of False Belief Understanding in the Absence of Linguistic Input: Evidence from Deaf Adult Homesigners.

PubMed

Gagne, Deanna L; Coppola, Marie

2017-01-01

Congenitally deaf individuals exhibit enhanced visuospatial abilities relative to normally hearing individuals. An early example is the increased sensitivity of deaf signers to stimuli in the visual periphery (Neville and Lawson, 1987a). While these enhancements are robust and extend across a number of visual and spatial skills, they seem not to extend to other domains which could potentially build on these enhancements. For example, congenitally deaf children, in the absence of adequate language exposure and acquisition, do not develop typical social cognition skills as measured by traditional Theory of Mind tasks. These delays/deficits occur despite their presumed lifetime use of visuo-perceptual abilities to infer the intentions and behaviors of others (e.g., Pyers and Senghas, 2009; O'Reilly et al., 2014). In a series of studies, we explore the limits on the plasticity of visually based socio-cognitive abilities, from perspective taking to Theory of Mind/False Belief, in rarely studied individuals: deaf adults who have not acquired a conventional language (Homesigners). We compared Homesigners' performance to that of two other understudied groups in the same culture: Deaf signers of an emerging language (Cohort 1 of Nicaraguan Sign Language), and hearing speakers of Spanish with minimal schooling. We found that homesigners performed equivalently to both comparison groups with respect to several visual socio-cognitive abilities: Perspective Taking (Levels 1 and 2), adapted from Masangkay et al. (1974), and the False Photograph task, adapted from Leslie and Thaiss (1992). However, a lifetime of visuo-perceptual experiences (observing the behavior and interactions of others) did not support success on False Belief tasks, even when linguistic demands were minimized. Participants in the comparison groups outperformed the Homesigners, but did not universally pass the False Belief tasks. Our results suggest that while some of the social development achievements of young typically developing children may be dissociable from their linguistic experiences, language and/or educational experiences clearly scaffolds the transition into False Belief understanding. The lack of experience using a shared language cannot be overcome, even with the benefit of many years of observing others' behaviors and the potential neural reorganization and visuospatial enhancements resulting from deafness.

Visible Social Interactions Do Not Support the Development of False Belief Understanding in the Absence of Linguistic Input: Evidence from Deaf Adult Homesigners

PubMed Central

Gagne, Deanna L.; Coppola, Marie

2017-01-01

Congenitally deaf individuals exhibit enhanced visuospatial abilities relative to normally hearing individuals. An early example is the increased sensitivity of deaf signers to stimuli in the visual periphery (Neville and Lawson, 1987a). While these enhancements are robust and extend across a number of visual and spatial skills, they seem not to extend to other domains which could potentially build on these enhancements. For example, congenitally deaf children, in the absence of adequate language exposure and acquisition, do not develop typical social cognition skills as measured by traditional Theory of Mind tasks. These delays/deficits occur despite their presumed lifetime use of visuo-perceptual abilities to infer the intentions and behaviors of others (e.g., Pyers and Senghas, 2009; O’Reilly et al., 2014). In a series of studies, we explore the limits on the plasticity of visually based socio-cognitive abilities, from perspective taking to Theory of Mind/False Belief, in rarely studied individuals: deaf adults who have not acquired a conventional language (Homesigners). We compared Homesigners’ performance to that of two other understudied groups in the same culture: Deaf signers of an emerging language (Cohort 1 of Nicaraguan Sign Language), and hearing speakers of Spanish with minimal schooling. We found that homesigners performed equivalently to both comparison groups with respect to several visual socio-cognitive abilities: Perspective Taking (Levels 1 and 2), adapted from Masangkay et al. (1974), and the False Photograph task, adapted from Leslie and Thaiss (1992). However, a lifetime of visuo-perceptual experiences (observing the behavior and interactions of others) did not support success on False Belief tasks, even when linguistic demands were minimized. Participants in the comparison groups outperformed the Homesigners, but did not universally pass the False Belief tasks. Our results suggest that while some of the social development achievements of young typically developing children may be dissociable from their linguistic experiences, language and/or educational experiences clearly scaffolds the transition into False Belief understanding. The lack of experience using a shared language cannot be overcome, even with the benefit of many years of observing others’ behaviors and the potential neural reorganization and visuospatial enhancements resulting from deafness. PMID:28626432

Two sources of evidence on the non-automaticity of true and false belief ascription.

PubMed

Back, Elisa; Apperly, Ian A

2010-04-01

A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by "default" (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the location of an object and a character's belief about the location of the object often changed. During the picture sequences participants responded to an unpredictable probe picture about where the character believed the object to be located or where the object was located in reality. In Experiment 1 participants were not directly instructed to track the character's beliefs about the object. There was a significant reaction time cost for belief probes compared with matched reality probes, whether the character's belief was true or false. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to track where the character thought the object was located, responses to belief probes were faster than responses to reality probes, suggesting that the difference observed in Experiment 1 was not due to intrinsic differences between the probes, but was more likely to be due to participants inferring beliefs ad hoc in response to the probe. In both Experiments 1 and 2, responses to belief and reality probes were faster in the true belief condition than in the false belief condition. In Experiment 3 this difference was largely eliminated when participants had fewer reasons to make belief inferences spontaneously. These two lines of evidence are neatly explained by the proposition that neither true nor false beliefs are ascribed automatically, but that belief ascription may occur spontaneously in response to task demands. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Pulling smarties out of a bag: a Headed Records analysis of children's recall of their own past beliefs.

PubMed

Barreau, S; Morton, J

1999-11-09

The work reported provides an information processing account of young children's performance on the Smarties task (Perner, J., Leekam, S.R., & Wimmer, H. 1987, Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief: the case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125-137). In this task, a 3-year-old is shown a Smarties tube and asked about the supposed contents. The true contents, pencils, is then revealed, and the majority of 3-year-olds cannot recall their initial belief that the tube contained Smarties. The theoretical analysis, based on the Headed Records framework (Morton, J., Hammersley, R.J., & Bekerian, D.A. 1985, Headed records: a model for memory and its failures, Cognition, 20, 1-23), focuses on the computational conditions that are required to resolve the Smarties task; on the possible limitations in the developing memory system that may lead to a computational breakdown; and on ways of bypassing such limitations to ensure correct resolution. The design, motivated by this analysis, is a variation on Perner's Smarties task. Instead of revealing the tube's contents immediately after establishing the child's beliefs about it, these contents were then transferred to a bag and a (false) belief about the bag's contents established. Only then were the true contents of the bag revealed. The same procedure (different contents) was carried out a week later. As predicted children's performance was better (a) in the 'tube' condition; and (b) on the second test. Consistent with the proposed analysis, the data show that when the computational demands imposed by the original task are reduced, young children can and do remember what they had thought about the contents of the tube even after its true contents are revealed.

Belief attribution despite verbal interference.

PubMed

Forgeot d'Arc, Baudouin; Ramus, Franck

2011-05-01

False-belief (FB) tasks have been widely used to study the ability of individuals to represent the content of their conspecifics' mental states (theory of mind). However, the cognitive processes involved are still poorly understood, and it remains particularly debated whether language and inner speech are necessary for the attribution of beliefs to other agents. We present a completely nonverbal paradigm consisting of silent animated cartoons in five closely related conditions, systematically teasing apart different aspects of scene analysis and allowing the assessment of the attribution of beliefs, goals, and physical causation. In order to test the role of language in belief attribution, we used verbal shadowing as a dual task to inhibit inner speech. Data on 58 healthy adults indicate that verbal interference decreases overall performance, but has no specific effect on belief attribution. Participants remained able to attribute beliefs despite heavy concurrent demands on their verbal abilities. Our results are most consistent with the hypothesis that belief attribution is independent from inner speech.

Scaling of Theory-of-Mind Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wellman, Henry M.; Liu, David

2004-01-01

Two studies address the sequence of understandings evident in preschoolers' developing theory of mind. The first, preliminary study provides a meta-analysis of research comparing different types of mental state understandings (e.g., desires vs. beliefs, ignorance vs. false belief). The second, primary study tests a theory-of-mind scale for…

Nondecomposable idiom understanding in children: recursive theory of mind and working memory.

PubMed

Caillies, Stéphanie; Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Sandrine

2013-06-01

Which skills are required to start understanding ambiguous, unfamiliar nondecomposable idioms in context? In this study, we examined the contributions of both second-order false-belief understanding and working memory to the understanding of unfamiliar nondecomposable idioms in children aged 6, 7 and 8 years old. We assumed that, in order to process these idioms, children would have to be able to (a) take a double perspective (Perner & Wimmer, 1985), (b) maintain both literal and figurative meanings as being different from the expression itself, and (c) take the context into account. Six-, 7- and 8-year-old children performed three, second-order false-belief tasks and three working-memory tasks, and listened to 15 nondecomposable idioms inserted into a context, before performing a multiple-choice task. Results indicated that nondecomposable idiom understanding was explained by theory-of-mind skills.

False Belief Reasoning in Adults with and without Autistic Spectrum Disorder: Similarities and Differences.

PubMed

Sommer, Monika; Döhnel, Katrin; Jarvers, Irina; Blaas, Lore; Singer, Manuela; Nöth, Victoria; Schuwerk, Tobias; Rupprecht, Rainer

2018-01-01

A central diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and a prominent hypotheses that tried to explain this impairment is the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit hypotheses. On a behavioral level the critical test for having a ToM, the understanding of false beliefs (FB), is often used for testing ToM abilities in individuals with ASD. Investigating the neural underpinnings several neuroimaging studies revealed a network of areas involved in FB reasoning in neurotypical individuals. For ASD individuals the neural correlates of false belief processing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and an adapted unexpected transfer task, that makes it possible to distinguish between the computation of diverging beliefs and the selection of a belief-associated response, we investigated a group of adult high-functioning individuals with ASD ( N = 15) and an age and IQ matched group of neurotypical adults (NT; N = 15). On the behavioral level we found no group differences. On the neural level, results were two-fold: In the story phase, in which participants had to compute whether the character's belief is congruent or incongruent to their own belief, there were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with ASD. But, in the subsequent question phase, participants with ASD showed increased activity in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex, the left posterior frontal cortex, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the left temporoparietal area. These results suggest that during the story phase in which the participants processed observable actions the neural correlates do not differ between adult individuals with ASD and NT individuals. But in the question phase in which participants had to infer an unobservable mental state results revealed neural differences between the two groups. Possibly, these subtle neural processing differences may contribute to the fact that adult ASD individuals are able to master explicit false belief tasks but fail to apply their strategies during everyday social interaction.

False Belief Reasoning in Adults with and without Autistic Spectrum Disorder: Similarities and Differences

PubMed Central

Sommer, Monika; Döhnel, Katrin; Jarvers, Irina; Blaas, Lore; Singer, Manuela; Nöth, Victoria; Schuwerk, Tobias; Rupprecht, Rainer

2018-01-01

A central diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and a prominent hypotheses that tried to explain this impairment is the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit hypotheses. On a behavioral level the critical test for having a ToM, the understanding of false beliefs (FB), is often used for testing ToM abilities in individuals with ASD. Investigating the neural underpinnings several neuroimaging studies revealed a network of areas involved in FB reasoning in neurotypical individuals. For ASD individuals the neural correlates of false belief processing are largely unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and an adapted unexpected transfer task, that makes it possible to distinguish between the computation of diverging beliefs and the selection of a belief-associated response, we investigated a group of adult high-functioning individuals with ASD (N = 15) and an age and IQ matched group of neurotypical adults (NT; N = 15). On the behavioral level we found no group differences. On the neural level, results were two-fold: In the story phase, in which participants had to compute whether the character's belief is congruent or incongruent to their own belief, there were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with ASD. But, in the subsequent question phase, participants with ASD showed increased activity in the bilateral anterior prefrontal cortex, the left posterior frontal cortex, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the left temporoparietal area. These results suggest that during the story phase in which the participants processed observable actions the neural correlates do not differ between adult individuals with ASD and NT individuals. But in the question phase in which participants had to infer an unobservable mental state results revealed neural differences between the two groups. Possibly, these subtle neural processing differences may contribute to the fact that adult ASD individuals are able to master explicit false belief tasks but fail to apply their strategies during everyday social interaction. PMID:29503627

Are there signature limits in early theory of mind?

PubMed

Fizke, Ella; Butterfill, Stephen; van de Loo, Lea; Reindl, Eva; Rakoczy, Hannes

2017-10-01

Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief (FB) tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on fully developed concepts of belief and other propositional attitudes. One prediction of such theories is that the early-developing system has signature limits concerning aspectuality. We tested this prediction in two experiments. The first experiment showed (in line with previous findings) that 2- and 3-year-olds take into account a protagonist's true or false belief about the location of an object in their active helping behavior. In contrast, toddlers' helping behavior did not differentiate between true and false belief conditions when the protagonist's belief essentially involved aspectuality. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more stringent method designed to rule out more parsimonious explanations. Taken together, the current findings are compatible with the possibility that early theory-of-mind reasoning is subject to signature limits as predicted by the two-systems account. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Quechua Children's Theory of Mind.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCormick, Penelope G.; Olson, David R.

Three different theory of mind tasks were conducted with 4- to 8-year-old Quechua peasant children in the Peruvian Andes. The study investigated the ways in which children in preliterate cultures think and the possibility that they think differently than children in literate cultures. The tasks included: (1) a false-belief task, which tested the…

Not just a sum of its parts: How tasks of the theory of mind scale relate to executive function across time.

PubMed

Doenyas, Ceymi; Yavuz, H Melis; Selcuk, Bilge

2018-02-01

There is a well-established relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) during the preschool years. However, less is known about the concurrent and longitudinal relations between EF and specific tasks tapping different aspects of ToM. The current study investigated the ToM-EF relationship across 1 year in 3- to 5-year-old Turkish children using the ToM battery of Wellman and Liu (2004), which measures understanding of diverse desires (DD), diverse beliefs (DB), knowledge access (KA), contents false belief (CFB), explicit false belief (EFB), and hidden emotion (HE). This battery has not yet been used in its entirety to test the predictive relations between ToM and EF. We used peg-tapping and day-night tasks to measure EF. Our sample comprised 150 Turkish preschool children (69 girls) aged 36-60 months at Time 1 (T1) and 49-73 months at Time 2 (T2). Using the ToM composite with all six tasks, when child's age, receptive language, and T1 ability level (EF or ToM) were controlled, T1 EF significantly predicted T2 ToM, whereas T1 ToM did not predict T2 EF. Among DD, DB, KA, false belief understanding (FBU: the composite score of CFB and EFB), and HE, only KA and FBU were significantly associated with EF at T1 and T2. Further regression analyses showed that KA did not have a predictive relationship with EF. Instead, FBU drove the predictive EF-ToM relationship across time. Thus, in Turkish children, earlier EF predicts later ToM, but especially the FBU component, in this well-validated battery. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Implicit and explicit Theory of Mind reasoning in autism spectrum disorders: the impact of experience.

PubMed

Schuwerk, Tobias; Vuori, Maria; Sodian, Beate

2015-05-01

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with autism spectrum disorders did not differ from neurotypical adults in their performance in the Strange Stories Test, but scored significantly lower on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. Furthermore, in an implicit false-belief task, individuals with autism spectrum disorders differed from neurotypical adults in false belief-congruent anticipatory looking. However, this group difference disappeared by (1) providing participants with the outcome of a false belief-based action and (2) subsequently repeating this test trial. Although the tendency to fixate the false belief-congruent location significantly increased from the first to the second test trial in individuals with autism spectrum disorders, it differed in neither test trial from chance. These findings support the notion of an implicit Theory of Mind deficit in autism spectrum disorders, but give rise to the idea that anticipatory looking behaviors in autism spectrum disorders may be affected by experience. Additionally, the pattern of results from implicit and explicit Theory of Mind measures supports the theory of two independent Theory of Mind reasoning systems. © The Author(s) 2014.

Oxytocin improves behavioural and neural deficits in inferring others' social emotions in autism.

PubMed

Aoki, Yuta; Yahata, Noriaki; Watanabe, Takamitsu; Takano, Yosuke; Kawakubo, Yuki; Kuwabara, Hitoshi; Iwashiro, Norichika; Natsubori, Tatsunobu; Inoue, Hideyuki; Suga, Motomu; Takao, Hidemasa; Sasaki, Hiroki; Gonoi, Wataru; Kunimatsu, Akira; Kasai, Kiyoto; Yamasue, Hidenori

2014-11-01

Recent studies have suggested oxytocin's therapeutic effects on deficits in social communication and interaction in autism spectrum disorder through improvement of emotion recognition with direct emotional cues, such as facial expression and voice prosody. Although difficulty in understanding of others' social emotions and beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues also plays an important role in autism spectrum disorder, no study has examined the potential effect of oxytocin on this difficulty. Here, we sequentially conducted both a case-control study and a clinical trial to investigate the potential effects of oxytocin on this difficulty at behavioural and neural levels measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a psychological task. This task was modified from the Sally-Anne Task, a well-known first-order false belief task. The task was optimized for investigation of the abilities to infer another person's social emotions and beliefs distinctively so as to test the hypothesis that oxytocin improves deficit in inferring others' social emotions rather than beliefs, under conditions without direct emotional cues. In the case-control study, 17 males with autism spectrum disorder showed significant behavioural deficits in inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.018) but not in inferring others' beliefs (P = 0.064) compared with 17 typically developing demographically-matched male participants. They also showed significantly less activity in the right anterior insula and posterior superior temporal sulcus during inferring others' social emotions, and in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during inferring others' beliefs compared with the typically developing participants (P < 0.001 and cluster size > 10 voxels). Then, to investigate potential effects of oxytocin on these behavioural and neural deficits, we conducted a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover within-subject trial for single-dose intranasal administration of 24 IU oxytocin in an independent group of 20 males with autism spectrum disorder. Behaviourally, oxytocin significantly increased the correct rate in inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.043, one-tail). At the neural level, the peptide significantly enhanced the originally-diminished brain activity in the right anterior insula during inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.004), but not in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during inferring others' beliefs (P = 0.858). The present findings suggest that oxytocin enhances the ability to understand others' social emotions that have also required second-order false belief rather than first-order false beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues in autism spectrum disorder at both the behaviour and neural levels. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Competition as rational action: why young children cannot appreciate competitive games.

PubMed

Priewasser, Beate; Roessler, Johannes; Perner, Josef

2013-10-01

Understanding rational actions requires perspective taking both with respect to means and with respect to objectives. This study addresses the question of whether the two kinds of perspective taking develop simultaneously or in sequence. It is argued that evidence from competitive behavior is best suited for settling this issue. A total of 71 kindergarten children between 3 and 5 years of age participated in a competitive game of dice and were tested on two traditional false belief stories as well as on several control tasks (verbal intelligence, inhibitory control, and working memory). The frequency of competitive poaching moves in the game correlated with correct predictions of mistaken actions in the false belief task. Hierarchical linear regression after controlling for age and control variables showed that false belief understanding significantly predicted the amount of poaching moves. The results speak for an interrelated development of the capacity for "instrumental" and "telic" perspective taking. They are discussed in the light of teleology as opposed to theory use and simulation. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The link between impaired theory of mind and executive function in children with cerebral palsy.

PubMed

Li, Xiaoming; Wang, Kai; Wu, Jianxian; Hong, Yongfeng; Zhao, Jingpu; Feng, Xiaojun; Xu, Mei; Wang, Min; Ndasauka, Yamikani; Zhang, Xiaochu

2014-07-01

The aim of the study was to explore the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) deficits and executive function (EF) impairments in children with cerebral palsy (CP), 42 CP with children and 42 typically developing (TD) children, acting as controls, were assessed on the tasks of ToM (false belief and faux pas) and EF (inhibition, updating and shifting). Results showed that CP children had deficits both in ToM and EF tasks. The correlation analyses showed that two EF components (inhibition and updating) were strongly related to false belief and faux pas in both two groups. We also found correlation between shifting and false belief and faux pas. However, this correlation was only found in TD children and not in children with CP. These findings suggest that children with CP lag behind TD children in both ToM and EF. Further, the results reveal, interestingly, that ToM deficits in CP children might be related to their inhibition and updating impairments, but not to shifting impairments. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The cost of thinking about false beliefs: evidence from adults' performance on a non-inferential theory of mind task.

PubMed

Apperly, Ian A; Back, Elisa; Samson, Dana; France, Lisa

2008-03-01

Much of what we know about other people's beliefs comes non-inferentially from what people tell us. Developmental research suggests that 3-year-olds have difficulty processing such information: they suffer interference from their own knowledge of reality when told about someone's false belief (e.g., [Wellman, H. M., & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young children's reasoning about beliefs. Cognition, 30, 239-277.]). The current studies examined for the first time whether similar interference occurs in adult participants. In two experiments participants read sentences describing the real colour of an object and a man's false belief about the colour of the object, then judged the accuracy of a picture probe depicting either reality or the man's belief. Processing costs for picture probes depicting reality were consistently greater in this false belief condition than in a matched control condition in which the sentences described the real colour of one object and a man's unrelated belief about the colour of another object. A similar pattern was observed for picture probes depicting the man's belief in most cases. Processing costs were not sensitive to the time available for encoding the information presented in the sentences: costs were observed when participants read the sentences at their own pace (Experiment 1) or at a faster or a slower pace (Experiment 2). This suggests that adults' difficulty was not with encoding information about reality and a conflicting false belief, but with holding this information in mind and using it to inform a subsequent judgement.

False Belief Performance of Children Adopted Internationally.

PubMed

Hwa-Froelich, Deborah A; Matsuo, Hisako; Jacobs, Kristal

2017-02-01

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships among adoption, individual, and family variables on false belief performance of children adopted internationally (CAI). Using a quasiexperimental design, thirty-five 4-year-old children adopted from Asian and Eastern European countries before age 2 years were compared with a U.S. group of 33 nonadopted 4-year-old children on a standardized English-language measure, 3 false belief tasks, and a go/no-go inhibition measure. The adopted group differed significantly from the U.S. nonadopted group in expressive language and false belief performance. For the adopted group, inhibition measures were significantly correlated with core language scores. Core language scores and number of older siblings predicted false belief performance. Similar to children who are not adopted, language competence and living with older siblings positively influenced social understanding in CAI. Because CAI experience interrupted language acquisition and live with fewer older siblings, they are at risk of having weaker language competence and social understanding in their adopted language. When working with CAI, practitioners should assess social communication, language competence, and inhibition skills. They should assist adoptive families in providing socially mentored opportunities for their children to observe and interact with older children.

How Children with Autism Reason about Other's Intentions: False-Belief and Counterfactual Inferences.

PubMed

Rasga, Célia; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M J

2017-06-01

We examine false belief and counterfactual reasoning in children with autism with a new change-of-intentions task. Children listened to stories, for example, Anne is picking up toys and John hears her say she wants to find her ball. John goes away and the reason for Anne's action changes-Anne's mother tells her to tidy her bedroom. We asked, 'What will John believe is the reason that Anne is picking up toys?' which requires a false-belief inference, and 'If Anne's mother hadn't asked Anne to tidy her room, what would have been the reason she was picking up toys?' which requires a counterfactual inference. We tested children aged 6, 8 and 10 years. Children with autism made fewer correct inferences than typically developing children at 8 years, but by 10 years there was no difference. Children with autism made fewer correct false-belief than counterfactual inferences, just like typically developing children.

Parental mind-mindedness but not false belief understanding predicts Hong Kong children's lie-telling behavior in a temptation resistance task.

PubMed

Wang, Lamei; Zhu, Liqi; Wang, Zhenlin

2017-10-01

Children can tell lies before they understand the concept of false belief. This study investigated the relationship between parental mind-mindedness, defined as the propensity of parents to view their children as mental agents with independent thoughts and feelings, and the lie-telling behavior of Hong Kong children aged 3-6years. The results confirmed earlier findings indicating that Hong Kong children's understanding of false belief is delayed; nevertheless, the participants appeared to lie just as well as children from other cultures. The lie-telling behavior of Hong Kong children was predicted by parental mind-mindedness and children's age but was unrelated to children's false belief understanding. It is suggested that children of mind-minded parents are more likely to exercise autonomy in socially ambiguous situations. Future studies should focus on the roles of parenting and children's multifaceted autonomy when addressing children's adaptive lie telling. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Alterations in theory of mind in patients with schizophrenia and non-psychotic relatives.

PubMed

Janssen, I; Krabbendam, L; Jolles, J; van Os, Jim

2003-08-01

It has been proposed that alterations in theory of mind underlie specific symptoms of psychosis. The present study examined whether alterations in theory of mind reflect a trait that can be detected in non-psychotic relatives of patients with schizophrenia. Participants were 43 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, 41 first-degree non-psychotic relatives and 43 controls from the general population. Theory of mind was assessed using a hinting task and a false-belief task. There was a significant association between schizophrenia risk and failure on the hinting task (OR linear trend = 2.01, 95% CI: 1.22-3.31), with relatives having intermediate values between patients and controls. Adjustment for IQ and neuropsychological factors reduced the association by small amounts. The association between schizophrenia risk and failure on the false-belief tasks was not significant. Changes in theory of mind are associated with schizophrenia liability. General cognitive ability and neuropsychological measures seem to mediate only part of this association.

Assessing False-Belief Understanding in Children with Autism Using a Computer Application: A Pilot Study.

PubMed

Carlsson, Emilia; Miniscalco, Carmela; Gillberg, Christopher; Åsberg Johnels, Jakob

2018-03-26

We have developed a False-Belief (FB) understanding task for use on a computer tablet, trying to assess FB understanding in a less social way. It is based on classical FB protocols, and additionally includes a manipulation of language in an attempt to explore the facilitating effect of linguistic support during FB processing. Specifically, the FB task was presented in three auditory conditions: narrative, silent, and interference. The task was assumed to shed new light on the FB difficulties often observed in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Sixty-eight children with ASD (M = 7.5 years) and an age matched comparison group with 98 typically developing (TD) children were assessed with the FB task. The children with ASD did not perform above chance level in any condition, and significant differences in success rates were found between the groups in two conditions (silent and narrative), with TD children performing better. We discuss implications, limitations, and further developments.

Impaired theory of mind for moral judgment in high-functioning autism.

PubMed

Moran, Joseph M; Young, Liane L; Saxe, Rebecca; Lee, Su Mei; O'Young, Daniel; Mavros, Penelope L; Gabrieli, John D

2011-02-15

High-functioning autism (ASD) is characterized by real-life difficulties in social interaction; however, these individuals often succeed on laboratory tests that require an understanding of another person's beliefs and intentions. This paradox suggests a theory of mind (ToM) deficit in adults with ASD that has yet to be demonstrated in an experimental task eliciting ToM judgments. We tested whether ASD adults would show atypical moral judgments when they need to consider both the intentions (based on ToM) and outcomes of a person's actions. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical (NT) participants performed a ToM task designed to test false belief understanding. In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of NT participants judged the moral permissibility of actions, in a 2 (intention: neutral/negative) × 2 (outcome: neutral/negative) design. Though there was no difference between groups on the false belief task, there was a selective difference in the moral judgment task for judgments of accidental harms, but not neutral acts, attempted harms, or intentional harms. Unlike the NT group, which judged accidental harms less morally wrong than attempted harms, the ASD group did not reliably judge accidental and attempted harms as morally different. In judging accidental harms, ASD participants appeared to show an underreliance on information about a person's innocent intention and, as a direct result, an overreliance on the action's negative outcome. These findings reveal impairments in integrating mental state information (e.g., beliefs, intentions) for moral judgment.

Early Development of Metalinguistic Awareness in Japanese: Evidence from Pragmatic and Phonological Aspects of Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tsuji, Hiromi; Doherty, Martin J.

2014-01-01

The development of metalinguistic awareness for linguistic politeness was examined in 68 Japanese-speaking children aged between three and five years old. A politeness judgement task was administered together with several phonological judgement tasks and false-belief tasks. Four- and five-year old Japanese children, but not three-year-olds, made…

How Do Alternative Ways of Responding Influence 3- and 4-Year-Olds' Performance on Tests of Executive Function and Theory of Mind?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carroll, Daniel J.; Riggs, Kevin J.; Apperly, Ian A.; Graham, Kate; Geoghegan, Ceara

2012-01-01

A total of 69 preschool children were tested on measures of false belief understanding (the Unexpected Transfer task), inhibitory control (the Grass/Snow task), and strategic reasoning (the Windows task). For each task, children indicated their response either by pointing with their index finger or by using a nonstandard response mode (pointing…

Social-cognitive deficits in normal aging

PubMed Central

Moran, Joseph M.; Jolly, Eshin; Mitchell, Jason P.

2012-01-01

A sizeable number of studies have implicated the default network (e.g., medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) in tasks that require participants to infer the mental states of others—that is, to mentalize. Parallel research has demonstrated that default network function declines over the lifespan, suggesting that older adults may show impairments in social-cognitive tasks that require mentalizing. Older and younger human adults were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing three different social-cognitive tasks. Across three mentalizing paradigms, younger and older adults viewed animated shapes in brief social vignettes, stories about a person's moral actions and false belief stories. Consistent with predictions, older adults responded less accurately to stories about others' false beliefs and made less use of actors' intentions to judge the moral permissibility of behavior. These impairments in performance during social-cognitive tasks were accompanied by age-related decreases across all three paradigms in the BOLD response of a single brain region—dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest specific, task-independent age-related deficits in mentalizing that are localizeable to changes in circumscribed subregions of the default network. PMID:22514317

The role of the right temporoparietal junction in attention and social interaction as revealed by ALE meta-analysis

PubMed Central

Rottschy, C.; Oberwelland, E.; Bzdok, D.; Fox, P. T.; Eickhoff, S. B.; Fink, G. R.; Konrad, K.

2016-01-01

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is frequently associated with different capacities that to shift attention to unexpected stimuli (reorienting of attention) and to understand others’ (false) mental state [theory of mind (ToM), typically represented by false belief tasks]. Competing hypotheses either suggest the rTPJ representing a unitary region involved in separate cognitive functions or consisting of subregions subserving distinct processes. We conducted activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to test these hypotheses. A conjunction analysis across ALE meta-analyses delineating regions consistently recruited by reorienting of attention and false belief studies revealed the anterior rTPJ, suggesting an overarching role of this specific region. Moreover, the anatomical difference analysis unravelled the posterior rTPJ as higher converging in false belief compared with reorienting of attention tasks. This supports the concept of an exclusive role of the posterior rTPJ in the social domain. These results were complemented by meta-analytic connectivity mapping (MACM) and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) analysis to investigate whole-brain connectivity patterns in task-constrained and task-free brain states. This allowed for detailing the functional separation of the anterior and posterior rTPJ. The combination of MACM and RSFC mapping showed that the posterior rTPJ has connectivity patterns with typical ToM regions, whereas the anterior part of rTPJ co-activates with the attentional network. Taken together, our data suggest that rTPJ contains two functionally fractionated subregions: while posterior rTPJ seems exclusively involved in the social domain, anterior rTPJ is involved in both, attention and ToM, conceivably indicating an attentional shifting role of this region. PMID:24915964

Theory of mind and language development in Japanese children with hearing loss.

PubMed

Fujino, Hiroshi; Fukushima, Kunihiro; Fujiyoshi, Akie

2017-05-01

This study investigates the development of theory of mind (ToM) in Japanese children with hearing loss (HL) and its relationship with language abilities using the data of a large sample size. Participants were 369 children with HL, ranging from 4 to 12 years of age. The mean hearing level of the better ear was 100.7 dB. A "change in location"-type false belief task similar to the "Sally-Anne test" was given to the participants. The pass rates for the false belief task were in the 20% range for 4 to 6-year-olds, 35.6% for 7-year-olds, 47.6% for 8-year-olds, and 63.6% for 9-year-olds. However, no children, even 12-year-olds, achieved a pass rate of 70%. A logistic regression analysis showed that the significant independent predictors of the false belief task performance were vocabulary age and syntactic comprehension level, and chronological age, hearing level, syntactic production level, and nonverbal intelligence were excluded. The results demonstrate that there is a delay in the development of ToM in Japanese children with HL. This finding is consistent with findings in English-speaking countries. Additionally, it is suggested that language abilities play an important role in the acquisition of ToM for children with HL. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Individual Differences in Executive Functioning Predict Preschoolers' Improvement from Theory-of-Mind Training

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benson, Jeannette E.; Sabbagh, Mark A.; Carlson, Stephanie M.; Zelazo, Philip David

2013-01-01

Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks.…

Language and False-Belief Task Performance in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Jeffrey Farrar, M; Seung, Hye Kyeung; Lee, Hyeonjin

2017-07-12

Language is related to false-belief (FB) understanding in both typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study examined the role of complementation and general language in FB understanding. Of interest was whether language plays similar or different roles in the groups' FB performance. Participants were 16 typically developing children (mean age = 5.0 years; mental age = 6.7) and 18 with ASD (mean age = 7.3 years; mental age = 8.3). Children were administered FB and language tasks (say- and think-complements), receptive and expressive vocabulary tests, and relative clauses. When mental age and receptive and expressive vocabulary were used as separate covariates, the typical control group outperformed the children with ASD in FB task performance. Chi-square analyses indicated that passing both complementation tasks was linked to the FB understanding of children with ASD. Children with ASD who passed FB tasks all passed say- and think-complement tasks. However, some children in the control group were able to pass the FB tasks, even if they failed the say- and think-complement tasks. The results indicate that children with ASD relied more on complement understanding to pass FB than typically developing children. Results are discussed regarding the developmental pathways for FB understanding.

Error analyses reveal contrasting deficits in "theory of mind": neuropsychological evidence from a 3-option false belief task.

PubMed

Samson, Dana; Apperly, Ian A; Humphreys, Glyn W

2007-06-18

Perspective taking is a crucial ability that guides our social interactions. In this study, we show how the specific patterns of errors of brain-damaged patients in perspective taking tasks can help us further understand the factors contributing to perspective taking abilities. Previous work [e.g., Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Chiavarino, C., & Humphreys, G. W. (2004). Left temporoparietal junction is necessary for representing someone else's belief. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 499-500; Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Kathirgamanathan, U., & Humphreys, G. W. (2005). Seeing it my way: A case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective. Brain, 128, 1102-1111] distinguished two components of perspective taking: the ability to inhibit our own perspective and the ability to infer someone else's perspective. We assessed these components using a new nonverbal false belief task which provided different response options to detect three types of response strategies that participants might be using: a complete and spared belief reasoning strategy, a reality-based response selection strategy in which participants respond from their own perspective, and a simplified mentalising strategy in which participants avoid responding from their own perspective but rely on inaccurate cues to infer the other person's belief. One patient, with a self-perspective inhibition deficit, almost always used the reality-based response strategy; in contrast, the other patient, with a deficit in taking other perspectives, tended to use the simplified mentalising strategy without necessarily transposing her own perspective. We discuss the extent to which the pattern of performance of both patients could relate to their executive function deficit and how it can inform us on the cognitive and neural components involved in belief reasoning.

Overrated adults: 4-year-olds' false belief understanding is influenced by the believer's age.

PubMed

Seehagen, Sabine; Dreier, Larissa; Zmyj, Norbert

2018-03-01

Children perceive adults as more knowledgeable than peers. We tested whether this general preconception influences preschoolers' performance in a false-belief task. Children (4- and 5-year-olds; N = 146) watched videos showing a peer protagonist or an adult protagonist experiencing events that should lead the protagonist to hold a false belief. Then children were asked to infer the protagonist's perception of the situation. Age of the protagonist influenced 4-year-olds' judgments but not 5-year-olds' judgments. Specifically, 4-year-olds' performance was at chance when presented with a peer protagonist. Their performance dropped further when presented with an adult protagonist and was significantly below chance. Children aged around 5 years performed above chance level regardless of whether they were presented with an adult or peer protagonist. This suggests that in the younger age group, children's tendency to regard adults as experts in general knowledge undermined their ability to accurately judge the possibility that an adult could hold a false belief. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Thinking about false belief: it's not just what children say, but how long it takes them to say it.

PubMed

Atance, Cristina M; Bernstein, Daniel M; Meltzoff, Andrew N

2010-08-01

We examined 240 children's (3.5-, 4.5-, and 5.5-year-olds) latency to respond to questions on a battery of false-belief tasks. Response latencies exhibited a significant cross-over interaction as a function of age and response type (correct vs. incorrect). 3.5-year-olds'incorrect latencies were faster than their correct latencies, whereas the opposite pattern emerged for 4.5- and 5.5-year-olds. Although these results are most consistent with conceptual change theories of false-belief reasoning, no extant theory fully accounts for our data pattern. We argue that response latency data provide new information about underlying cognitive processes in theory of mind reasoning, and can shed light on concept acquisition more broadly. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Training preschoolers on first-order false belief understanding: transfer on advanced ToM skills and metamemory.

PubMed

Lecce, Serena; Bianco, Federica; Demicheli, Patrizia; Cavallini, Elena

2014-01-01

This study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and metamemory knowledge using a training methodology. Sixty-two 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: A first-order false belief (ToM) and a control condition. Intervention and control groups were equivalent at pretest for age, parents' education, verbal ability, inhibition, and ToM. Results showed that after the intervention children in the ToM group improved in their first-order false belief understanding significantly more than children in the control condition. Crucially, the positive effect of the ToM intervention was stable over 2 months and generalized to more complex ToM tasks and metamemory. © 2014 The Authors. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states?

PubMed

Apperly, Ian A; Butterfill, Stephen A

2009-10-01

The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans' capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years of age (H. Wellman, D. Cross, & J. Watson, 2001; H. Wimmer & J. Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false-belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (K. H. Onishi & R. Baillargeon, 2005; L. Surian, S. Caldi, & D. Sperber, 2007). Nonhuman animals also fail critical tests of belief reasoning but can show very complex social behavior (e.g., J. Call & M. Tomasello, 2005). Fluent social interaction in adult humans implies efficient processing of beliefs, yet direct tests suggest that belief reasoning is cognitively demanding, even for adults (e.g., I. A. Apperly, D. Samson, & G. W. Humphreys, 2009). The authors interpret these findings by drawing an analogy with the domain of number cognition, where similarly contrasting results have been observed. They propose that the success of infants and nonhuman animals on some belief reasoning tasks may be best explained by a cognitively efficient but inflexible capacity for tracking belief-like states. In humans, this capacity persists in parallel with a later-developing, more flexible but more cognitively demanding theory-of-mind abilities.

Localizing Pain Matrix and Theory of Mind networks with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli.

PubMed

Jacoby, Nir; Bruneau, Emile; Koster-Hale, Jorie; Saxe, Rebecca

2016-02-01

Functional localizer tasks allow researchers to identify brain regions in each individual's brain, using a combination of anatomical and functional constraints. In this study, we compare three social cognitive localizer tasks, designed to efficiently identify regions in the "Pain Matrix," recruited in response to a person's physical pain, and the "Theory of Mind network," recruited in response to a person's mental states (i.e. beliefs and emotions). Participants performed three tasks: first, the verbal false-belief stories task; second, a verbal task including stories describing physical pain versus emotional suffering; and third, passively viewing a non-verbal animated movie, which included segments depicting physical pain and beliefs and emotions. All three localizers were efficient in identifying replicable, stable networks in individual subjects. The consistency across tasks makes all three tasks viable localizers. Nevertheless, there were small reliable differences in the location of the regions and the pattern of activity within regions, hinting at more specific representations. The new localizers go beyond those currently available: first, they simultaneously identify two functional networks with no additional scan time, and second, the non-verbal task extends the populations in whom functional localizers can be applied. These localizers will be made publicly available. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Social cognition dysfunction in adolescents with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (velo-cardio-facial syndrome): relationship with executive functioning and social competence/functioning.

PubMed

Campbell, L E; McCabe, K L; Melville, J L; Strutt, P A; Schall, U

2015-09-01

Social difficulties are often noted among people with intellectual disabilities. Children and adults with 22q.11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) often have poorer social competence as well as poorer performance on measures of executive and social-cognitive skills compared with typically developing young people. However, the relationship between social functioning and more basic processes of social cognition and executive functioning are not well understood in 22q11DS. The present study examined the relationship between social-cognitive measures of emotion attribution and theory of mind with executive functioning and their contribution to social competence in 22q11DS. The present cross-sectional study measured social cognition and executive performance of 24 adolescents with 22q11DS compared with 27 age-matched typically developing controls. Social cognition was tested using the emotion attribution task (EAT) and a picture sequencing task (PST), which tested mentalising (false-belief), sequencing, cause and effect, and inhibition. Executive functioning was assessed using computerised versions of the Tower of London task and working memory measures of spatial and non-spatial ability. Social competence was also assessed using the parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Adolescents with 22q11DS showed impaired false-belief, emotion attribution and executive functioning compared with typically developing control participants. Poorer performance was reported on all story types in the PST, although, patterns of errors and response times across story types were similar in both groups. General sequencing ability was the strongest predictor of false-belief, and performance on the false-belief task predicted emotion attribution accuracy. Intellectual functioning, rather than theory of mind or executive functioning, predicted social competence in 22q11DS. Performance on social-cognitive tasks of theory of mind indicate evidence of a general underlying dysfunction in 22q11DS that includes executive ability to understand cause and effect, to logically reason about social scenarios and also to inhibit responses to salient, but misleading cues. However, general intellectual ability is closely related to actual social competence suggesting that a generalised intellectual deficit coupled with more specific executive impairments may best explain poor social cognition in 22q11DS. © 2015 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Galileo Bias: A Naive Conceptual Belief That Influences People's Perceptions and Performance in a Ball-Dropping Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oberle, Crystal D.; McBeath, Michael K.; Madigan, Sean C.; Sugar, Thomas G.

2005-01-01

This research introduces a new naive physics belief, the Galileo bias, whereby people ignore air resistance and falsely believe that all objects fall at the same rate. Survey results revealed that this bias is held by many and is surprisingly strongest for those with formal physics instruction. In 2 experiments, 98 participants dropped ball pairs…

Language and false belief: evidence for general, not specific, effects in cantonese-speaking preschoolers.

PubMed

Tardif, Twila; So, Catherine Wing-Chee; Kaciroti, Niko

2007-03-01

Two studies were conducted with Cantonese-speaking preschoolers examining J. de Villiers's (1995) hypothesis that syntactic complements play a unique role in the acquisition of false belief (FB). In Study 1, the authors found a positive correlation between FB and syntactic complements in 72 four- to six-year-old Cantonese-speaking preschoolers. Study 2 followed 72 three- to five-year-old Cantonese-speaking children who initially failed an FB screening task and were then tested on general language abilities, short-term memory, inhibition, nonverbal IQ, and on FB and complement tasks. Once age and initial FB understanding were controlled for in both multiple regression and hierarchical linear modeling analyses, complements no longer uniquely predicted FB. Instead, individual differences in general language abilities and short-term memory contributed to the variation in both complements and FB.

Social-cognitive processes in preschoolers' selective trust: three cultures compared.

PubMed

Lucas, Amanda J; Lewis, Charlie; Pala, F Cansu; Wong, Katie; Berridge, Damon

2013-03-01

Research on preschoolers' selective learning has mostly been conducted in English-speaking countries. We compared the performance of Turkish preschoolers (who are exposed to a language with evidential markers), Chinese preschoolers (known to be advanced in executive skills), and English preschoolers on an extended selective trust task (N = 144). We also measured children's executive function skills and their ability to attribute false belief. Overall we found a Turkish (rather than a Chinese) advantage in selective trust and a relationship between selective trust and false belief (rather than executive function). This is the 1st evidence that exposure to a language that obliges speakers to state the sources of their knowledge may sensitize preschoolers to informant reliability. It is also the first demonstration of an association between false belief and selective trust. Together these findings suggest that effective selective learning may progress alongside children's developing capacity to assess the knowledge of others.

High Proficiency across Two Languages Is Related to Better Mental State Reasoning for Bilingual Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gordon, Katherine R.

2016-01-01

Past research suggests that bilingualism positively affects children's performance in false belief tasks. However, researchers have yet to fully explore factors that are related to better performance in these tasks within bilingual groups. The current study includes an assessment of proficiency in both languages (which was lacking in past work)…

Belief attribution in deaf and hearing infants.

PubMed

Meristo, Marek; Morgan, Gary; Geraci, Alessandra; Iozzi, Laura; Hjelmquist, Erland; Surian, Luca; Siegal, Michael

2012-09-01

Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we compared the performance of 17- to 26-month-olds on anticipatory looking in ToM tasks. The infants were either hearing or were deaf from hearing families and thus delayed in communicative experience gained from access to language and conversational input. Hearing infants significantly outperformed their deaf counterparts in anticipating the search actions of a cartoon character that held a false belief about a target-object location. By contrast, the performance of the two groups in a true belief condition did not differ significantly. These findings suggest for the first time that access to language and conversational input contributes to early ToM reasoning. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Executive function depletion in children and its impact on theory of mind.

PubMed

Powell, Lindsey J; Carey, Susan

2017-07-01

The current studies provide an experimental, rather than correlational, method for testing hypotheses about the role of executive function (EF) in conceptual development. Previous research has established that adults' tendency to deploy EF can be temporarily diminished by use. Exercising self-control in one context decreases adults' performance on other EF demanding tasks immediately thereafter. Using two different depletion methods, Experiments 1 and 3 extend this finding to preschool-aged children. Experiments 2 and 4 make use of these EF depletion methods to elucidate the role of EF in children's theory of mind reasoning. Experiment 2 shows that EF depletion affects 5-year-olds' ability to predict another's behavior on the basis of that person's false belief, and Experiment 4 shows that this negative effect of depletion extends to 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to explain others' behavior on the basis of their false beliefs. These findings provide direct evidence that EF is required for the expression of an understanding of others' false beliefs across a variety of task demands, even in children who clearly have the capacity to construct such representations. We suggest ways in which depletion may be used as a tool for further investigating the role of executive function in cognitive development. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Are Infants' Theory-of-Mind Abilities Well Integrated? Implicit Understanding of Intentions, Desires, and Beliefs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yott, Jessica; Poulin-Dubois, Diane

2016-01-01

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

The development of interindividual sharing of knowledge and beliefs in 5- to 9-year-old children.

PubMed

Bradmetz, Joël; Gauthier, Cécile

2005-03-01

The authors studied the evolution of interindividual intentionality in children and showed that the sharing of knowledge and beliefs requires more complex operations than those involved in usual false-belief tasks. The authors conducted 3 experiments on 380 children (aged 5 years, 0 months to 9 years, 6 months). They assessed the children's ability to attribute to a character an intended action that was compatible with the belief held by another character interacting with that character. The observed lag in performances is explained both in terms of information processing and at the Piagetian concrete operational level.

Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks.

PubMed

Wellman, Henry M; Liu, David

2004-01-01

Two studies address the sequence of understandings evident in preschoolers' developing theory of mind. The first, preliminary study provides a meta-analysis of research comparing different types of mental state understandings (e.g., desires vs. beliefs, ignorance vs. false belief). The second, primary study tests a theory-of-mind scale for preschoolers. In this study 75 children (aged 2 years, 11 months to 6 years, 6 months) were tested on 7 tasks tapping different aspects of understanding persons' mental states. Responses formed a consistent developmental progression, where for most children if they passed a later item they passed all earlier items as well, as confirmed by Guttman and Rasch measurement model analyses.

Temporo-parietal junction activity in theory-of-mind tasks: falseness, beliefs, or attention.

PubMed

Aichhorn, Markus; Perner, Josef; Weiss, Benjamin; Kronbichler, Martin; Staffen, Wolfgang; Ladurner, Gunther

2009-06-01

By combining the false belief (FB) and photo (PH) vignettes to identify theory-of-mind areas with the false sign (FS) vignettes, we re-establish the functional asymmetry between the left and right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). The right TPJ (TPJ-R) is specially sensitive to processing belief information, whereas the left TPJ (TPJ-L) is equally responsible for FBs as well as FSs. Measuring BOLD at two time points in each vignette, at the time the FB-inducing information (or lack of information) is presented and at the time the test question is processed, made clear that the FB is processed spontaneously as soon as the relevant information is presented and not on demand for answering the question in contrast to extant behavioral data. Finally, a fourth, true belief vignette (TB) required teleological reasoning, that is, prediction of a rational action without any doubts being raised about the adequacy of the actor's information about reality. Activation by this vignette supported claims that the TPJ-R is activated by TBs as well as FBs.

"The Driver Doesn't Sit, He Stands up like the Flintstones!": Sibling Teaching during Teacher-Directed and Self-Guided Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Howe, Nina; Recchia, Holly; Porta, Sandra Della; Funamoto, Allyson

2012-01-01

Associations among sibling teaching strategies, learner behavior, age, age gap, gender, and social-cognitive skills (second-order false-belief and interpretive understanding of knowledge) were investigated in 63 sibling dyads in early and middle childhood. Two teaching tasks were introduced to the older sibling teacher: a teacher-directed task…

Similar Brain Activation during False Belief Tasks in a Large Sample of Adults with and without Autism

PubMed Central

Dufour, Nicholas; Redcay, Elizabeth; Young, Liane; Mavros, Penelope L.; Moran, Joseph M.; Triantafyllou, Christina; Gabrieli, John D. E.; Saxe, Rebecca

2013-01-01

Reading about another person’s beliefs engages ‘Theory of Mind’ processes and elicits highly reliable brain activation across individuals and experimental paradigms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined activation during a story task designed to elicit Theory of Mind processing in a very large sample of neurotypical (N = 462) individuals, and a group of high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (N = 31), using both region-of-interest and whole-brain analyses. This large sample allowed us to investigate group differences in brain activation to Theory of Mind tasks with unusually high sensitivity. There were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These results imply that the social cognitive impairments typical of autism spectrum disorder can occur without measurable changes in the size, location or response magnitude of activity during explicit Theory of Mind tasks administered to adults. PMID:24073267

The impact of verbal capacity on theory of mind in deaf and hard of hearing children.

PubMed

Levrez, Clovis; Bourdin, Beatrice; Le Driant, Barbara; D'Arc, Baudouin Forgeot; Vandromme, Luc

2012-01-01

Even when they have good language skills, many children with hearing loss lag several years behind hearing children in the ability to grasp beliefs of others. The researchers sought to determine whether this lag results from difficulty with the verbal demands of tasks or from conceptual delays. The researchers related children's performance on a nonverbal theory of mind task to their scores on verbal aptitude tests. Twelve French children (average age about 10 years) with severe to profound hearing loss and 12 French hearing children (average about 7 years) were evaluated. The children with hearing loss showed persistent difficulty with theory of mind tasks, even a nonverbal task, presenting results similar to those of hearing 6-year-olds. Also, the children with hearing loss showed a correlation between language level (lexical and morphosyntactic) and understanding of false beliefs. No such correlation was found in the hearing children.

Similar brain activation during false belief tasks in a large sample of adults with and without autism.

PubMed

Dufour, Nicholas; Redcay, Elizabeth; Young, Liane; Mavros, Penelope L; Moran, Joseph M; Triantafyllou, Christina; Gabrieli, John D E; Saxe, Rebecca

2013-01-01

Reading about another person's beliefs engages 'Theory of Mind' processes and elicits highly reliable brain activation across individuals and experimental paradigms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined activation during a story task designed to elicit Theory of Mind processing in a very large sample of neurotypical (N = 462) individuals, and a group of high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (N = 31), using both region-of-interest and whole-brain analyses. This large sample allowed us to investigate group differences in brain activation to Theory of Mind tasks with unusually high sensitivity. There were no differences between neurotypical participants and those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These results imply that the social cognitive impairments typical of autism spectrum disorder can occur without measurable changes in the size, location or response magnitude of activity during explicit Theory of Mind tasks administered to adults.

Is a bird in the hand worth two in the future? Intertemporal choice, attachment and theory of mind in school-aged children.

PubMed

Marchetti, Antonella; Castelli, Ilaria; Sanvito, Laura; Massaro, Davide

2014-01-01

Intertemporal choice is a decision-making dilemma related to outcomes of different entity located at different time points. Economic and psychological literature on this topic showed the phenomen of temporal discounting, i.e., the proclivity to devalue the outcome distant in time on the basis of the time delay necessary to obtain it. The goals of this research are to investigate two different components of intertemporal choice separately, namely time and outcome, in school-age children, and the possible link among such components and the security of attachment style and theory of mind. Ninety one children aged between 6 and 10 years performed two intertemporal choice tasks, first and second order false belief tasks and the Separation Anxiety Task in the Family and School versions. Results showed that the two components of intertemporal choice (waiting tolerance and sensitivity to delayed outcome) are stately interrelated; the quality of the attachment to the family caregiver affects the tolerance to waiting time and first order false belief understanding affects both the components of intertemporal choice.

Referential communication abilities and Theory of Mind development in preschool children.

PubMed

Resches, Mariela; Pérez Pereira, Miguel

2007-02-01

This work aims to analyse the specific contribution of social abilities (here considered as the capacity for attributing knowledge to others) in a particular communicative context. 74 normally developing children (aged 3;4 to 5;9, M = 4.6) were given two Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, which are considered to assess increasing complexity levels of epistemic state attribution: Attribution of knowledge-ignorance (Pillow, 1989; adapted by Welch-Ross, 1997) and Understanding of False-belief (Baron Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985). Subjects were paired according to their age and level of performance in ToM tasks. These dyads participated in a referential communication task specially designed for this research. The resulting communicative interchanges were analysed using a three-level category system (pragmatic functions, descriptive accuracy, and ambiguity of messages). The results showed significant differences among subjects with different levels of social comprehension regarding the type of communicative resources used by them in every category level. In particular, understanding of false belief seems to be the most powerful predictor of changes in the children's development of communicative competence.

Is a bird in the hand worth two in the future? Intertemporal choice, attachment and theory of mind in school-aged children

PubMed Central

Marchetti, Antonella; Castelli, Ilaria; Sanvito, Laura; Massaro, Davide

2014-01-01

Intertemporal choice is a decision-making dilemma related to outcomes of different entity located at different time points. Economic and psychological literature on this topic showed the phenomen of temporal discounting, i.e., the proclivity to devalue the outcome distant in time on the basis of the time delay necessary to obtain it. The goals of this research are to investigate two different components of intertemporal choice separately, namely time and outcome, in school-age children, and the possible link among such components and the security of attachment style and theory of mind. Ninety one children aged between 6 and 10 years performed two intertemporal choice tasks, first and second order false belief tasks and the Separation Anxiety Task in the Family and School versions. Results showed that the two components of intertemporal choice (waiting tolerance and sensitivity to delayed outcome) are stately interrelated; the quality of the attachment to the family caregiver affects the tolerance to waiting time and first order false belief understanding affects both the components of intertemporal choice. PMID:24904496

Collaborative Mother-Toddler Communication and Theory of Mind Development at Age 4

PubMed Central

Sung, Jihyun; Hsu, Hui-Chin

2014-01-01

Focusing on social pragmatics, this longitudinal study investigated the contribution of mother-toddler collaborative communication to theory of mind (ToM) development at age 4. At age 2½, 78 toddlers’ (42 boys) and their mothers were observed during pretend play. At age 4, children were tested using 4 false belief understanding tasks. Both mothers and toddlers engaged in more collaborative (inform, guide/request, and support/confirm) than non-collaborative communication acts. Other-focused collaborative acts of support/confirm by mothers and toddlers predicted children’s false belief understanding, even after controlling for 5 covariates. In addition, as active agents in their own ToM development, the contribution of toddlers’ collaborative acts to false belief understanding was independent of their mothers. Finally, the way toddlers and their mothers co-constructing their communication mattered. Only when toddlers engaged in high levels of collaborative acts, the mothers’ high levels of collaborative acts demonstrated a positive effect on children’s ToM development. The applied implications of these findings were discussed. PMID:25132699

Empathetic perspective-taking is impaired in schizophrenia: evidence from a study of emotion attribution and theory of mind.

PubMed

Langdon, Robyn; Coltheart, Max; Ward, Philip B

2006-03-01

Schizophrenia and autism are clinically distinct yet both disorders are characterised by theory of mind (ToM) deficits. Autistic individuals fail to appreciate false beliefs, yet understand the causal connections between behavioural events and simple emotions. Findings of this type have promoted the view that ToM deficits in autism reflect a domain-specific difficulty with appreciating the representational nature of epistemic mental states (i.e., beliefs and intentions and not emotions). This study examines whether the same holds true for schizophrenia. A picture-sequencing task assessed capacity to infer false beliefs in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. To assess emotion attribution, participants were shown cartoon strips of events likely to elicit strong emotional reactions in story characters. Characters' faces were blanked out. Participants were instructed to think about how the characters would be feeling in order to match up the cards depicting facial affect appropriately. Participants later named emotions depicted in facial affect cards. Patients were as capable as controls of identifying cartoon facial expressions, yet had greater difficulties with: (a) attributing emotions based on circumstances; and (b) inferring false beliefs. Schizophrenia patients, unlike autistic individuals, suffer a domain-general difficulty with empathetic perspective-taking that affects equally their appreciation of other people's beliefs, percepts, and emotions.

Different Patterns of Theory of Mind Impairment in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

PubMed

Moreau, Noémie; Rauzy, Stéphane; Bonnefoi, Bernadette; Renié, Laurent; Martinez-Almoyna, Laurent; Viallet, François; Champagne-Lavau, Maud

2015-01-01

Theory of Mind refers to the ability to infer other’s mental states, their beliefs, intentions, or knowledge. To date, only two studies have reported the presence of Theory of Mind impairment in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In the present study,we evaluated 20 MCI patients and compared them with 25 healthy control participants using two Theory of Mind tasks. The first task was a false belief paradigm as frequently used in the literature, and the second one was a referential communication task,assessing Theory of Mind in a real situation of interaction and which had never been used before in this population. The results showed that MCI patients presented difficulties inferring another person’s beliefs about reality and attributing knowledge to them in a situation of real-life interaction. Two different patterns of Theory of Mind emerged among the patients. In comparison with the control group, some MCI patients demonstrated impairment only in the interaction task and presented isolated episodicmemory impairment, while others were impaired in both Theory of Mind tasks and presented cognitive impairment impacting both episodic memory and executive functioning. Theory of Mind is thus altered in the very early stages of cognitive impairment even in real social interaction, which could impact precociously relationships in daily life.

The validity and scalability of the Theory of Mind Scale with toddlers and preschoolers.

PubMed

Hiller, Rachel M; Weber, Nathan; Young, Robyn L

2014-12-01

Despite the importance of theory of mind (ToM) for typical development, there remain 2 key issues affecting our ability to draw robust conclusions. One is the continued focus on false belief as the sole measure of ToM. The second is the lack of empirically validated measures of ToM as a broad construct. Our key aim was to examine the validity and reliability of the 5-item ToM scale (Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005). In particular, we extended on previous research of this scale by assessing its scalability and validity for use with children from 2 years of age. Sixty-eight typically developing children (aged 24 to 61 months) were assessed on the scale's 5 tasks, along with a sixth Sally-Anne false-belief task. Our data replicated the scalability of the 5 tasks for a Rasch-but not Guttman-scale. Guttman analysis showed that a 4-item scale may be more suitable for this age range. Further, the tasks showed good internal consistency and validity for use with children as young as 2 years of age. Overall, the measure provides a valid and reliable tool for the assessment of ToM, and in particular, the longitudinal assessment of this ability as a construct. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Parent-child picture-book reading, mothers' mental state language and children's theory of mind.

PubMed

Adrian, Juan E; Clemente, Rosa A; Villanueva, Lidon; Rieffe, Carolien

2005-08-01

This study focuses on parent-child book reading and its connection to the development of a theory of mind. First, parents were asked to report about frequency of parent-child storybook reading at home. Second, mothers were asked to read four picture-books to thirty-four children between 4;0 and 5;0. Both frequency of parent-child storybook reading at home, and mother's use of mental state terms in picture-books reading tasks were significantly associated with success on false belief tasks, after partialling out a number of potential mediators such as age of children, verbal IQ, paternal education, and words used by mothers in joint picture-book reading. Among the different mental state references (cognitive terms, desires, emotions and perceptions), it was found that the frequency and variety of cognitive terms, but also the frequency of emotional terms correlated positively with children's false belief performance. Relationships between mental state language and theory of mind are discussed.

Is Implicit Theory of Mind a Real and Robust Phenomenon? Results From a Systematic Replication Study.

PubMed

Kulke, Louisa; von Duhn, Britta; Schneider, Dana; Rakoczy, Hannes

2018-06-01

Recently, theory-of-mind research has been revolutionized by findings from novel implicit tasks suggesting that at least some aspects of false-belief reasoning develop earlier in ontogeny than previously assumed and operate automatically throughout adulthood. Although these findings are the empirical basis for far-reaching theories, systematic replications are still missing. This article reports a preregistered large-scale attempt to replicate four influential anticipatory-looking implicit theory-of-mind tasks using original stimuli and procedures. Results showed that only one of the four paradigms was reliably replicated. A second set of studies revealed, further, that this one paradigm was no longer replicated once confounds were removed, which calls its validity into question. There were also no correlations between paradigms, and thus, no evidence for their convergent validity. In conclusion, findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief paradigms seem less reliable and valid than previously assumed, thus limiting the conclusions that can be drawn from them.

When Injury Clouds Understanding of Others: Theory of Mind after Mild TBI in Preschool Children.

PubMed

Bellerose, Jenny; Bernier, Annie; Beaudoin, Cindy; Gravel, Jocelyn; Beauchamp, Miriam H

2015-08-01

There is evidence to suggest that social skills, such as the ability to understand the perspective of others (theory of mind), may be affected by childhood traumatic brain injuries; however, studies to date have only considered moderate and severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study aimed to assess theory of mind after early, mild TBI (mTBI). Fifty-one children who sustained mTBI between 18 and 60 months were evaluated 6 months post-injury on emotion and desires reasoning and false-belief understanding tasks. Their results were compared to that of 50 typically developing children. The two groups did not differ on baseline characteristics, except for pre- and post-injury externalizing behavior. The mTBI group obtained poorer scores relative to controls on both the emotion and desires task and the false-belief understanding task, even after controlling for pre-injury externalizing behavior. No correlations were found between TBI injury characteristics and theory of mind. This is the first evidence that mTBI in preschool children is associated with theory of mind difficulties. Reduced perspective taking abilities could be linked with the social impairments that have been shown to arise following TBI.

General intellectual functioning as a buffer against theory-of-mind deficits in individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis.

PubMed

Hur, Ji-Won; Byun, Min Soo; Shin, Na Young; Shin, Ye Seul; Kim, Sung Nyun; Jang, Joon Hwan; Kwon, Jun Soo

2013-09-01

The influence of neurocognition, including general intelligence, on theory of mind (ToM) among patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder is controversial. The purpose of the present study was to identify the influences of the non-ToM cognition and general intelligence on ToM performance in individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis. Fifty-five UHR subjects and 58 healthy controls (HCs) completed neurocognitive, verbal, and nonverbal ToM tasks. UHR individuals showed poorer performance in the two verbal ToM tasks, the false-belief task and the strange-story tasks. Moreover, the UHR subjects displayed poorer recall on the interference list of the verbal learning test. Linear regression analysis revealed that neurocognitive functioning, including executive functioning, working memory, and general intelligence, accounted for significant amounts of the variance in the results for UHR individuals: 20.4% in the false-belief task, 44.0% in the strange-story task, and 49.0% in the nonverbal cartoon task. Neurocognition, including general intelligence, was not a significant contributor to performance on ToM tasks in HCs. ToM deficits were not noted in UHR individuals with above-average IQ scores (≥ 110) compared with UHR subjects with IQ scores less than 110, who displayed significant differences on all ToM tasks compared with HCs. The present results suggest that ToM deficits in UHR individuals are complex and may be influenced by non-ToM cognition. Our findings are discussed in relation to the role of neurocognitive abilities in ToM-related impairments in UHR individuals. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Scaling of Advanced Theory-of-Mind Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Osterhaus, Christopher; Koerber, Susanne; Sodian, Beate

2016-01-01

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Children's Understanding of Ordinary and Extraordinary Minds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lane, Jonathan D.; Wellman, Henry M.; Evans, E. Margaret

2010-01-01

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental…

New evidence in theory of mind deficits in subjects with chronic schizophrenia and first episode: correlation with symptoms, neurocognition and social function.

PubMed

Mazza, Monica; Pollice, Rocco; Pacitti, Francesca; Pino, Maria Chiara; Mariano, Melania; Tripaldi, Simona; Casacchia, Massimo; Roncone, Rita

2012-01-01

Currently substantial evidence exists about Theory of Mind (ToM) impairment in subjects affected by chronic and first episode schizophrenia. In particular, in order to enhance the validity of our construct, we used in this study classical false beliefs tasks and advanced theory of mind tasks, together with the application of structural equation model, in order to ex-amine whether we are using ToM tasks with good psychometric properties. The main goal of the present study was to examine ToM deficits in a large sample including subjects suffering from chronic schizophrenia, first episode of schizophrenia and nor-mal controls, by observing in the same task the relationship with symptomatological gravity, neurocognition and social function.Materials and methods. A sample of 178 patients with chronic schizophrenia, a sample of 49 subjects with a first episode of psychosis and 484 healthy controls participated to this study. Measures of social cognition included task of false belief and advanced theory of mind task. No significant differences were found on ToM tasks between subjects affected by chronic and first episode schizophrenia. Social cognition showed in both groups a strong correlation with negative symptoms and social function, but did not evidence any relationship with neurocognition. CONCLUSION; ToM deficits exist in subjects suffering from chronic and first episode schizophrenia. These impairments do not seem to be a consequence of illness condition, they are likely to be state-independent and appear to be the most important cognitive mediator of social functioning in both groups.

Thinking in Pictures as a cognitive account of autism.

PubMed

Kunda, Maithilee; Goel, Ashok K

2011-09-01

We analyze the hypothesis that some individuals on the autism spectrum may use visual mental representations and processes to perform certain tasks that typically developing individuals perform verbally. We present a framework for interpreting empirical evidence related to this "Thinking in Pictures" hypothesis and then provide comprehensive reviews of data from several different cognitive tasks, including the n-back task, serial recall, dual task studies, Raven's Progressive Matrices, semantic processing, false belief tasks, visual search, spatial recall, and visual recall. We also discuss the relationships between the Thinking in Pictures hypothesis and other cognitive theories of autism including Mindblindness, Executive Dysfunction, Weak Central Coherence, and Enhanced Perceptual Functioning.

Mothers' Use of Cognitive State Verbs in Picture-Book Reading and the Development of Children's Understanding of Mind: A Longitudinal Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adrian, Juan E.; Clemente, Rosa Ana; Villanueva, Lidon

2007-01-01

Mothers read stories to their children (N = 41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book…

Theory of mind difficulties in patients with alcohol dependence: beyond the prefrontal cortex dysfunction hypothesis.

PubMed

Maurage, François; de Timary, Philippe; Tecco, Juan Martin; Lechantre, Stéphane; Samson, Dana

2015-06-01

Previous studies have shown that alcohol-dependent (AD) individuals have difficulties inferring other people's emotion, understanding humor, and detecting a faux pas. This study aimed at further understanding the nature of such "Theory of Mind" (ToM) difficulties. A total of 34 recently detoxified AD and 34 paired controls were compared based on 2 nonverbal and video-based false belief tasks. These tasks were designed to identify 3 different types of deficits: (i) a deficit in dealing with the general task demands, (ii) a selective deficit in self-perspective inhibition, and (iii) a deficit in tracking the other person's mental state. (i) and (ii) are compatible with the hypothesis of a prefrontal cortex dysfunction being at the origin of AD individuals' social difficulties, while (iii) would suggest the possible contribution of a dysfunction of the temporo-parietal junction in explaining the social difficulties. Group analyses highlighted that AD individuals performed worse on the 2 false belief tasks than controls. Individual analyses showed, however, that just under half of the AD individuals were impaired compared to controls. Moreover, most of the AD individuals who were impaired showed a deficit in tracking the other person's belief. This deficit was linked to disease-related factors such as illness duration, average alcohol consumption, and craving but not to general reasoning abilities, depression, anxiety, or demographic variables. Just under half of the AD individuals tested showed a ToM deficit, and in most cases, the deficit concerned the tracking of other people's mental states. Such a type of deficit has previously been associated with lesions to the temporo-parietal brain areas, indicating that a prefrontal cortex dysfunction may not be the sole origin of the social cognition deficits observed in alcohol dependence. Copyright © 2015 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.

Belief Reasoning and Emotion Understanding in Balanced Bilingual and Language-Dominant Mexican American Young Children.

PubMed

Weimer, Amy A; Gasquoine, Philip G

2016-01-01

Belief reasoning and emotion understanding were measured among 102 Mexican American bilingual children ranging from 4 to 7 years old. All children were tested in English and Spanish after ensuring minimum comprehension in each language. Belief reasoning was assessed using 2 false and 1 true belief tasks. Emotion understanding was measured using subtests from the Test for Emotion Comprehension. The influence of family background variables of yearly income, parental education level, and number of siblings on combined Spanish and English vocabulary, belief reasoning, and emotion understanding was assessed by regression analyses. Age and emotion understanding predicted belief reasoning. Vocabulary and belief reasoning predicted emotion understanding. When the sample was divided into language-dominant and balanced bilingual groups on the basis of language proficiency difference scores, there were no significant differences on belief reasoning or emotion understanding. Language groups were demographically similar with regard to child age, parental educational level, and family income. Results suggest Mexican American language-dominant and balanced bilinguals develop belief reasoning and emotion understanding similarly.

Mentalizing about emotion and its relationship to empathy.

PubMed

Hooker, Christine I; Verosky, Sara C; Germine, Laura T; Knight, Robert T; D'Esposito, Mark

2008-09-01

Mentalizing involves the ability to predict someone else's behavior based on their belief state. More advanced mentalizing skills involve integrating knowledge about beliefs with knowledge about the emotional impact of those beliefs. Recent research indicates that advanced mentalizing skills may be related to the capacity to empathize with others. However, it is not clear what aspect of mentalizing is most related to empathy. In this study, we used a novel, advanced mentalizing task to identify neural mechanisms involved in predicting a future emotional response based on a belief state. Subjects viewed social scenes in which one character had a False Belief and one character had a True Belief. In the primary condition, subjects were asked to predict what emotion the False Belief Character would feel if they had a full understanding about the situation. We found that neural regions related to both mentalizing and emotion were involved when predicting a future emotional response, including the superior temporal sulcus, medial prefrontal cortex, temporal poles, somatosensory related cortices (SRC), inferior frontal gyrus and thalamus. In addition, greater neural activity in primarily emotion-related regions, including right SRC and bilateral thalamus, when predicting emotional response was significantly correlated with more self-reported empathy. The findings suggest that predicting emotional response involves generating and using internal affective representations and that greater use of these affective representations when trying to understand the emotional experience of others is related to more empathy.

False feedback and beliefs influence name recall in younger and older adults.

PubMed

Strickland-Hughes, Carla M; West, Robin Lea; Smith, Kimberly A; Ebner, Natalie C

2017-09-01

Feedback is an important self-regulatory process that affects task effort and subsequent performance. Benefits of positive feedback for list recall have been explored in research on goals and feedback, but the effect of negative feedback on memory has rarely been studied. The current research extends knowledge of memory and feedback effects by investigating face-name association memory and by examining the potential mediation of feedback effects, in younger and older adults, through self-evaluative beliefs. Beliefs were assessed before and after name recognition and name recall testing. Repeated presentation of false positive feedback was compared to false negative feedback and a no feedback condition. Results showed that memory self-efficacy declined over time for participants in the negative and no feedback conditions but was sustained for those receiving positive feedback. Furthermore, participants who received negative feedback felt older after testing than before testing. For name recall, the positive feedback group outperformed the negative feedback and no feedback groups combined, with no age interactions. The observed feedback-related effects on memory were fully mediated by changes in memory self-efficacy. These findings advance our understanding of how beliefs are related to feedback in memory and inform future studies examining the importance of self-regulation in memory.

Social cognition in pediatric-onset multiple sclerosis (MS)

PubMed Central

Charvet, LE; Cleary, RE; Vazquez, K; Belman, A; Krupp, LB

2014-01-01

Background Pediatric-onset multiple sclerosis (MS) patients represent a subpopulation who are diagnosed during the course of development. Social cognitive deficits have recently been recognized in adults with MS. It is critical to identify if these youngest patients with the disorder are also at risk. Objective To determine whether pediatric-onset MS is associated with social cognitive deficits. Methods Consecutively-recruited participants with pediatric-onset MS were compared to a group of age- and gender-matched healthy controls on Theory of Mind (ToM) task performance. Tasks measured facial affect recognition (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test), understanding social faux pas (Faux Pas Test), and understanding the perspective of another (False Beliefs Task). Results Twenty-eight (28) pediatric-onset MS participants (median age 17 years) and 32 healthy controls (median age 16 years) completed the study. The MS participants performed worse than controls on all three ToM tasks: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (p=0.008), the Faux-Pas Test (p=0.009), and the False Beliefs Task (p=0.06). While more MS than control participants were impaired on a measure of information processing speed (the Symbol Digit Modalities Test; 38% versus 6%), it did not account for the differences in ToM performance. Conclusions Social cognition may represent an area of cognitive functioning affected by MS in the pediatric-onset population. These processes are especially important to study in younger patients as these deficits could have long range implications on social adjustment, employment, and well-being. PMID:24647558

Social cognition in pediatric-onset multiple sclerosis (MS).

PubMed

Charvet, L E; Cleary, R E; Vazquez, K; Belman, A L; Krupp, L B

2014-10-01

Pediatric-onset multiple sclerosis (MS) patients represent a subpopulation who are diagnosed during the course of development. Social cognitive deficits have recently been recognized in adults with MS. It is critical to identify whether these youngest patients with the disorder are also at risk. To determine whether pediatric-onset MS is associated with social cognitive deficits. Consecutively-recruited participants with pediatric-onset MS were compared to a group of age- and gender-matched healthy controls on Theory of Mind (ToM) task performance. Tasks measured facial affect recognition (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test), detecting social faux pas (Faux Pas Test), and understanding the perspective of another (False Beliefs Task). Twenty-eight (28) pediatric-onset MS participants (median age 17 years) and 32 healthy controls (median age 16 years) completed the study. The MS participants performed worse than controls on all three ToM tasks: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (p = 0.008), the Faux Pas Test (p = 0.009), and the False Beliefs Task (p = 0.06). While more MS than control participants were impaired on a measure of information processing speed (the Symbol Digit Modalities Test; 38% versus 6%), it did not account for the differences in ToM performance. Social cognition may represent an area of cognitive functioning affected by MS in the pediatric-onset population. These processes are especially important to study in younger patients as they may have long range implications for social adjustment, employment, and well-being. © The Author(s) 2014.

Exploring the Role of Theory of Mind in Moral Judgment: The Case of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Fadda, Roberta; Parisi, Marinella; Ferretti, Luca; Saba, Gessica; Foscoliano, Maria; Salvago, Azzurra; Doneddu, Giuseppe

2016-01-01

This paper adds to the growing research on moral judgment (MJ) by considering whether theory of mind (ToM) might foster children's autonomous MJ achievement. A group of 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was compared in MJ and ToM with 30 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were tested for MJ with a classical Piaget's task and for ToM with a second order False Belief task. In the moral task, children were told two versions of a story: in one version the protagonist acted according to a moral intention but the action resulted in a harmful consequence; in the other version the protagonist acted according to an immoral intention, but the action resulted in a harmless consequence. Children were asked which of the two protagonists was the "naughtier." In line with previous studies, the results indicated that, while the majority of TD participants succeeded in the second order False Belief task, only few individuals with ASD showed intact perspective taking abilities. The analysis of the MJ in relation to ToM showed that children with ASD lacking ToM abilities judged guilty the protagonists of the two versions of the story in the moral task because both of them violated a moral rule or because they considered the consequences of the actions, ignoring any psychological information. These results indicate a heteronomous morality in individuals with ASD, based on the respect of learned moral rules and outcomes rather than others' subjective states.

The relationship between vocabulary, grammar, and false belief task performance in children with autistic spectrum disorders and children with moderate learning difficulties.

PubMed

Fisher, Naomi; Happé, Francesca; Dunn, Judy

2005-04-01

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between language and theory of mind in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with moderate learning difficulties (MLD). Previous studies have found a strong association between language and theory of mind in a range of groups, but mostly have not included measures of both grammar and vocabulary; including these enables us to speculate about the causal direction of the relationship. Fifty-eight children with ASD and 118 children with MLD were given standardised assessments of vocabulary and grammar, along with standard theory of mind tasks. The relationship between language and theory of mind was more evident in children with ASD than in those with MLD, and grammar was a particularly strong predictor of theory of mind performance in children with ASD. Children with MLD performed better on false belief (FB) tasks than did children with ASD, and their performance was more predictable across the different theory of mind tasks. Language, in particular grammar, and theory of mind appear to be more strongly related in children with ASD than in those with MLD. We speculate that this relationship may be causal, with some grammatical understanding being a precursor of theory of mind. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to possible routes for compensatory strategies for mentalising in children with ASD.

What Difference Does It Make? Implicit, Explicit and Complex Social Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaller, Ulrich M.; Rauh, Reinhold

2017-01-01

We tested social cognition abilities of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypically developed peers (NTD). A multi-faceted test-battery including facial emotion categorization (FEC), classical false belief tasks (FBT), and complex social cognition (SC), yielded significantly lower accuracy rates for FEC and complex SC tasks…

Neural Correlates of Children's Theory of Mind Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, David; Sabbagh, Mark A.; Gehring, William J.; Wellman, Henry M.

2009-01-01

Young children show significant changes in their mental-state understanding as marked by their performance on false-belief tasks. This study provides evidence for activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with the development of this ability. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as adults (N = 24) and 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old…

Early Bilingualism Enhances Mechanisms of False-Belief Reasoning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kovacs, Agnes Melinda

2009-01-01

In their first years, children's understanding of mental states seems to improve dramatically, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are still unclear. Such "theory of mind" (ToM) abilities may arise during development, or have an innate basis, developmental changes reflecting limitations of other abilities involved in ToM tasks (e.g.…

Idiom, Syntax, and Advanced Theory of Mind Abilities in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Whyte, Elisabeth M.; Nelson, Keith E.; Scherf, K. Suzanne

2014-01-01

Purpose: When researchers investigate figurative language abilities (including idioms) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), syntax abilities may be more important than once considered. In addition, there are limitations to the overreliance on false-belief tasks to measure theory of mind (TOM) abilities. In the current study, the…

Task Values and Ability Beliefs as Predictors of High School Literacy Choices: A Developmental Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durik, Amanda M.; Vida, Mina; Eccles, Jacquelynne S.

2005-01-01

This study examines how competence beliefs and task values predict high school achievement choices related to literacy. Students' task beliefs (self-concept of ability, intrinsic value, and importance) about reading in the 4th grade and English in the 10th grade were tracked over time. Task beliefs, school performance, and gender were used to…

Do adults show a curse of knowledge in false-belief reasoning? A robust estimate of the true effect size.

PubMed

Ryskin, Rachel A; Brown-Schmidt, Sarah

2014-01-01

Seven experiments use large sample sizes to robustly estimate the effect size of a previous finding that adults are more likely to commit egocentric errors in a false-belief task when the egocentric response is plausible in light of their prior knowledge. We estimate the true effect size to be less than half of that reported in the original findings. Even though we found effects in the same direction as the original, they were substantively smaller; the original study would have had less than 33% power to detect an effect of this magnitude. The influence of plausibility on the curse of knowledge in adults appears to be small enough that its impact on real-life perspective-taking may need to be reevaluated.

Thinking about the thoughts of others; temporal and spatial neural activation during false belief reasoning.

PubMed

Mossad, Sarah I; AuCoin-Power, Michelle; Urbain, Charline; Smith, Mary Lou; Pang, Elizabeth W; Taylor, Margot J

2016-07-01

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to understand the perspectives, mental states and beliefs of others in order to anticipate their behaviour and is therefore crucial to social interactions. Although fMRI has been widely used to establish the neural networks implicated in ToM, little is known about the timing of ToM-related brain activity. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the neural processes underlying ToM, as MEG provides very accurate timing and excellent spatial localization of brain processes. We recorded MEG activity during a false belief task, a reliable measure of ToM, in twenty young adults (10 females). MEG data were recorded in a 151 sensor CTF system (MISL, Coquitlam, BC) and data were co-registered to each participant's MRI (Siemens 3T) for source reconstruction. We found stronger right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) activations in the false belief condition from 150ms to 225ms, in the right precuneus from 275ms to 375ms, in the right inferior frontal gyrus from 200ms to 300ms and the superior frontal gyrus from 300ms to 400ms. Our findings extend the literature by demonstrating the timing and duration of neural activity in the main regions involved in the "mentalizing" network, showing that activations related to false belief in adults are predominantly right lateralized and onset around 100ms. The sensitivity of MEG will allow us to determine spatial and temporal differences in the brain processes in ToM in younger populations or those who demonstrate deficits in this ability. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Exploring the Role of Theory of Mind in Moral Judgment: The Case of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PubMed Central

Fadda, Roberta; Parisi, Marinella; Ferretti, Luca; Saba, Gessica; Foscoliano, Maria; Salvago, Azzurra; Doneddu, Giuseppe

2016-01-01

This paper adds to the growing research on moral judgment (MJ) by considering whether theory of mind (ToM) might foster children’s autonomous MJ achievement. A group of 30 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was compared in MJ and ToM with 30 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were tested for MJ with a classical Piaget’s task and for ToM with a second order False Belief task. In the moral task, children were told two versions of a story: in one version the protagonist acted according to a moral intention but the action resulted in a harmful consequence; in the other version the protagonist acted according to an immoral intention, but the action resulted in a harmless consequence. Children were asked which of the two protagonists was the “naughtier.” In line with previous studies, the results indicated that, while the majority of TD participants succeeded in the second order False Belief task, only few individuals with ASD showed intact perspective taking abilities. The analysis of the MJ in relation to ToM showed that children with ASD lacking ToM abilities judged guilty the protagonists of the two versions of the story in the moral task because both of them violated a moral rule or because they considered the consequences of the actions, ignoring any psychological information. These results indicate a heteronomous morality in individuals with ASD, based on the respect of learned moral rules and outcomes rather than others’ subjective states. PMID:27148131

Competence and performance in belief-desire reasoning across two cultures: the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about false belief?

PubMed

Yazdi, Amir Amin; German, Tim P; Defeyter, Margaret Anne; Siegal, Michael

2006-06-01

There is a change in false belief task performance across the 3-5 year age range, as confirmed in a recent meta-analysis [Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory mind development: The truth about false-belief. Child Development, 72, 655-684]. This meta-analysis identified several performance factors influencing success, including manipulations that highlight the salience of the initial belief content (such as asking where Sally will look first for the marble). However, because a proportion of variance in performance remained unexplained even when identified performance factors were controlled for, the authors concluded from the standpoint of a 'theory-theory' account that children's improvement is the result of conceptual change. Further, the meta-analysis showed that manipulations such as 'look first' improve performance only in children who are in the older part of the 3-5 year range, and thus plausibly operating with a 'transitional' theory of mind--just on the point of realizing conceptual change. Here, we present three studies systematically investigating the 'look first' manipulation which showed that: (i) the advantage for the look first question can be demonstrated in children across different cultures, (ii) look first has an effect that is additive to the improvement with age; there is no interaction such that older children gain more benefit from younger children, (iii) performance in younger children can be, but is not always, elevated to levels that are statistically above chance. These results challenge the theory-theory account and are discussed in terms of models of belief-desire reasoning in which both conceptual competence and performance factors play central roles.

Young Children's Emotion Comprehension and Theory of Mind Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weimer, Amy A.; Sallquist, Julie; Bolnick, Rebecca R.

2012-01-01

Research Findings: The present study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and emotion understanding among 78 children 4 1/2; to 6 1/2; years old (35 boys, 43 girls). ToM understanding was assessed using ignorance and false belief questions within an emotion-understanding task that evaluated children's abilities to recognize…

False Belief Understanding: The Influence of Person, Grammatical Mood, Counterfactual Reasoning and Working Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muller, Ulrich; Miller, Michael R.; Michalczyk, Kurt; Karapinka, Aaron

2007-01-01

The present study had two major goals. The first goal was to assess the relative difficulty among different versions of the unexpected contents task by systematically varying the dimensions of grammatical mood (indicative vs. subjunctive) and person (self vs. other), and to examine the correlational pattern between these different versions of the…

Insight into others' minds: spatio-temporal representations by intrinsic frame of reference.

PubMed

Sun, Yanlong; Wang, Hongbin

2014-01-01

Recent research has seen a growing interest in connections between domains of spatial and social cognition. Much evidence indicates that processes of representing space in distinct frames of reference (FOR) contribute to basic spatial abilities as well as sophisticated social abilities such as tracking other's intention and belief. Argument remains, however, that belief reasoning in social domain requires an innately dedicated system and cannot be reduced to low-level encoding of spatial relationships. Here we offer an integrated account advocating the critical roles of spatial representations in intrinsic frame of reference. By re-examining the results from a spatial task (Tamborello etal., 2012) and a false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005), we argue that spatial and social abilities share a common origin at the level of spatio-temporal association and predictive learning, where multiple FOR-based representations provide the basic building blocks for efficient and flexible partitioning of the environmental statistics. We also discuss neuroscience evidence supporting these mechanisms. We conclude that FOR-based representations may bridge the conceptual as well as the implementation gaps between the burgeoning fields of social and spatial cognition.

Neural correlates of dual-task effect on belief-bias syllogistic reasoning: a near-infrared spectroscopy study.

PubMed

Tsujii, Takeo; Watanabe, Shigeru

2009-09-01

Recent dual-process reasoning theories have explained the belief-bias effect, the tendency for human reasoning to be erroneously biased when logical conclusions are incongruent with beliefs about the world, by proposing a belief-based automatic heuristic system and logic-based demanding analytic system. Although these claims are supported by the behavioral finding that high-load secondary tasks enhance the belief-bias effect, the neural correlates of dual-task reasoning remain unknown. The present study therefore examined the relationship between dual-task effect and activity in the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) during belief-bias reasoning by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Forty-eight subjects participated in this study (MA=23.46 years). They were required to perform congruent and incongruent reasoning trials while responding to high- and low-load secondary tasks. Behavioral analysis showed that the high-load secondary task impaired only incongruent reasoning performance. NIRS analysis found that the high-load secondary task decreased right IFC activity during incongruent trials. Correlation analysis showed that subjects with enhanced right IFC activity could perform better in the incongruent reasoning trials, though subjects for whom right IFC activity was impaired by the secondary task could not maintain better reasoning performance. These findings suggest that the right IFC may be responsible for the dual-task effect in conflicting reasoning processes. When secondary tasks impair right IFC activity, subjects may rely on the automatic heuristic system, which results in belief-bias responses. We therefore offer the first demonstration of neural correlates of dual-task effect on IFC activity in belief-bias reasoning.

Ability Beliefs, Task Value, and Performance as a Function of Race in a Dart-Throwing Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gao, Zan; Kosma, Maria; Harrison, Louis, Jr.

2009-01-01

This study examines differences in self-efficacy, expectancy-related beliefs, task value, and performance in a dart-throwing task as a function of race among diverse college students using the expectancy-value model and self-efficacy theory. It also examines the predictive contributions of these beliefs on task performance within each racial…

My belief or yours? Differential theory of mind deficits in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Le Bouc, Raphaël; Lenfant, Pierre; Delbeuck, Xavier; Ravasi, Laura; Lebert, Florence; Semah, Franck; Pasquier, Florence

2012-10-01

Theory of mind reasoning-the ability to understand someone else's mental states, such as beliefs, intentions and desires-is crucial in social interaction. It has been suggested that a theory of mind deficit may account for some of the abnormalities in interpersonal behaviour that characterize patients affected by behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. However, there are conflicting reports as to whether understanding someone else's mind is a key difference between behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. Literature data on the relationship between theory of mind abilities and executive functions are also contradictory. These disparities may be due to underestimation of the fractionation within theory of mind components. A recent theoretical framework suggests that taking someone else's mental perspective requires two distinct processes: inferring someone else's belief and inhibiting one's own belief, with involvement of the temporoparietal and right frontal cortices, respectively. Therefore, we performed a neuropsychological and neuroimaging study to investigate the hypothesis whereby distinct cognitive deficits could impair theory of mind reasoning in patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. We used a three-option false belief task to assess theory of mind components in 11 patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, 12 patients with Alzheimer's disease and 20 healthy elderly control subjects. The patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and those with Alzheimer's disease were matched for age, gender, education and global cognitive impairment. [(18)F]-fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography imaging was used to investigate neural correlates of theory of mind reasoning deficits. Performance in the three-option false belief task revealed differential impairments in the components of theory of mind reasoning; patients with Alzheimer's disease had a predominant deficit in inferring someone else's belief, whereas patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia were selectively impaired in inhibiting their own mental perspective. Moreover, inhibiting one's own perspective was strongly correlated with inhibition in a Stroop task but not with other subprocesses of executive functions. This finding suggests that self-perspective inhibition may depend on cognitive processes that are not specific to the social domain. Last, the severity of the deficit in inferring someone else's beliefs correlated significantly over all subjects with hypometabolism in the left temporoparietal junction, whereas the severity of the deficit in self-perspective inhibition correlated significantly with hypometabolism in the right lateral prefrontal cortex. In conclusion, our findings provided clinical and imaging evidence to support differential deficits in two components of theory of mind reasoning (subserved by distinct brain regions) in patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia.

Gender and theory of mind in preschoolers' group effort: evidence for timing differences behind children's earliest social loafing.

PubMed

Thompson, R Bruce; Thornton, Bill

2014-01-01

This study explored mental state reasoning within the context of group effort and possible differences in development between boys and girls. Preschool children (59 girls, 47 boys) were assessed for theory of mind (ToM) ability using classic false belief tests. Children participated in group effort conditions that alternated from one condition, where individual effort was transparent and obvious, to one where individual effort remained anonymous. The aim was to investigate if emergent mental state reasoning, after controlling for age, was associated with the well-known phenomenon of reduced effort in group tasks ("social loafing"). Girls had slightly higher ToM scores and social loafing than boys. Hierarchical regression, controlling for age, indicated that understanding of others' false beliefs uniquely predicted social loafing and interacted weakly with gender status.

Mothers' Cognitive References to 2-Year-Olds Predict Theory of Mind at Ages 6 and 10

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ensor, Rosie; Devine, Rory T.; Marks, Alex; Hughes, Claire

2014-01-01

Mothers' mental-state references predict individual differences in preschoolers' false-belief (FB) understanding; less is known about the origins of corresponding variation in school-age children. To address this gap, 105 children completed observations with their mothers at child ages 2 and 6, three FB tasks and a verbal comprehension…

Affective Qualities of Sibling Disputes, Mothers' Conflict Attitudes, and Children's Theory of Mind Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Randell, Angela C.; Peterson, Candida C.

2009-01-01

Preschoolers' theory of mind (ToM) was examined in relation to emotional features of their conflicts with siblings, using mothers as privileged informants. Fifty-four children aged 3 to 5 years and their 54 mothers took part. Children were given 10 standard false belief tasks and a standardized language test. Mothers completed questionnaires,…

The Role of Institution and Home Contexts in Theory of Mind Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yagmurlu, B.; Berument, S.K.; Celimli, S.

2005-01-01

To investigate the role of early context in theory of mind development, institutionalized children living in a boarding home (n = 34) in Turkey were compared to home-reared children coming from low (n = 32) and middle socioeconomic backgrounds (n = 44). Theory of mind was assessed with one deception and three false belief tasks; Peabody PVT and…

Individual Differences in Executive Functioning and Theory of Mind: An Investigation of Inhibitory Control and Planning Ability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carlson, Stephanie M.; Moses, Louis J.; Claxton, Laura J.

2004-01-01

This research examined the relative contributions of two aspects of executive function--inhibitory control and planning ability--to theory of mind in 49 3- and 4-year-olds. Children were given two standard theory of mind measures (Appearance-Reality and False Belief), three inhibitory control tasks (Bear/Dragon, Whisper, and Gift Delay), three…

Specifying the brain anatomy underlying temporo-parietal junction activations for theory of mind: A review using probabilistic atlases from different imaging modalities.

PubMed

Schurz, Matthias; Tholen, Matthias G; Perner, Josef; Mars, Rogier B; Sallet, Jerome

2017-09-01

In this quantitative review, we specified the anatomical basis of brain activity reported in the Temporo-Parietal Junction (TPJ) in Theory of Mind (ToM) research. Using probabilistic brain atlases, we labeled TPJ peak coordinates reported in the literature. This was carried out for four different atlas modalities: (i) gyral-parcellation, (ii) sulco-gyral parcellation, (iii) cytoarchitectonic parcellation and (iv) connectivity-based parcellation. In addition, our review distinguished between two ToM task types (false belief and social animations) and a nonsocial task (attention reorienting). We estimated the mean probabilities of activation for each atlas label, and found that for all three task types part of TPJ activations fell into the same areas: (i) Angular Gyrus (AG) and Lateral Occpital Cortex (LOC) in terms of a gyral atlas, (ii) AG and Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) in terms of a sulco-gyral atlas, (iii) areas PGa and PGp in terms of cytoarchitecture and (iv) area TPJp in terms of a connectivity-based parcellation atlas. Beside these commonalities, we also found that individual task types showed preferential activation for particular labels. Main findings for the right hemisphere were preferential activation for false belief tasks in AG/PGa, and in Supramarginal Gyrus (SMG)/PFm for attention reorienting. Social animations showed strongest selective activation in the left hemisphere, specifically in left Middle Temporal Gyrus (MTG). We discuss how our results (i.e., identified atlas structures) can provide a new reference for describing future findings, with the aim to integrate different labels and terminologies used for studying brain activity around the TPJ. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4788-4805, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Children exhibit different performance patterns in explicit and implicit theory of mind tasks.

PubMed

Oktay-Gür, Nese; Schulz, Alexandra; Rakoczy, Hannes

2018-04-01

Three studies tested scope and limits of children's implicit and explicit theory of mind. In Studies 1 and 2, three- to six-year-olds (N = 84) were presented with closely matched explicit false belief tasks that differed in whether or not they required an understanding of aspectuality. Results revealed that children performed equally well in the different tasks, and performance was strongly correlated. Study 3 tested two-year-olds (N = 81) in implicit interactive versions of these tasks and found evidence for dis-unity: children performed competently only in those tasks that did not require an understanding of aspectuality. Taken together, the present findings suggest that early implicit and later explicit theory of mind tasks may tap different forms of cognitive capacities. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Can the problem of the observability of other minds be solved in the lab?. Comment on "Seeing mental states: An experimental strategy for measuring the observability of other minds" by Cristina Becchio et al.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Puusepp, Vivian

2018-03-01

In the area of social cognition, several questions that were first discussed by philosophers, have inspired empirical scientists to invent new experimental paradigms in order to tackle related issues. The results of experiments conducted within these paradigms have in turn contributed to theoretical discussions. For example, the first false belief task [1] was developed after three philosophers, Dennett, Bennett, and Harman [2-4] independently argued that possession of the concept of belief is crucial to understanding others' mental states.

Theory of mind and recognition of facial emotion in dementia: challenge to current concepts.

PubMed

Freedman, Morris; Binns, Malcolm A; Black, Sandra E; Murphy, Cara; Stuss, Donald T

2013-01-01

Current literature suggests that theory of mind (ToM) and recognition of facial emotion are impaired in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). In contrast, studies suggest that ToM is spared in Alzheimer disease (AD). However, there is controversy whether recognition of emotion in faces is impaired in AD. This study challenges the concepts that ToM is preserved in AD and that recognition of facial emotion is impaired in bvFTD. ToM, recognition of facial emotion, and identification of emotions associated with video vignettes were studied in bvFTD, AD, and normal controls. ToM was assessed using false-belief and visual perspective-taking tasks. Identification of facial emotion was tested using Ekman and Friesen's pictures of facial affect. After adjusting for relevant covariates, there were significant ToM deficits in bvFTD and AD compared with controls, whereas neither group was impaired in the identification of emotions associated with video vignettes. There was borderline impairment in recognizing angry faces in bvFTD. Patients with AD showed significant deficits on false belief and visual perspective taking, and bvFTD patients were impaired on second-order false belief. We report novel findings challenging the concepts that ToM is spared in AD and that recognition of facial emotion is impaired in bvFTD.

Language and ToM Development in Autism versus Asperger Syndrome: Contrasting Influences of Syntactic versus Lexical/Semantic Maturity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paynter, Jessica; Peterson, Candida

2010-01-01

Theory of mind (ToM) development by a sample of 63 children aged 5-12 years (24 with Asperger syndrome, 19 with high-functioning autism, and 20 age-matched typical developers) was assessed with a five-task false-belief battery in relation to both lexical (vocabulary) and syntactic (grammar) language skills. Contrary to some previous research, no…

Students' Mathematical Reasoning and Beliefs in Non-Routine Task Solving

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jäder, Jonas; Sidenvall, Johan; Sumpter, Lovisa

2017-01-01

Beliefs and problem solving are connected and have been studied in different contexts. One of the common results of previous research is that students tend to prefer algorithmic approaches to mathematical tasks. This study explores Swedish upper secondary school students' beliefs and reasoning when solving non-routine tasks. The results regarding…

Does Inquiry Based Learning Affect Students' Beliefs and Attitudes towards Mathematics?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McGregor, Darren

2014-01-01

Ill-structured tasks presented in an inquiry learning environment have the potential to affect students' beliefs and attitudes towards mathematics. This empirical research followed a Design Experiment approach to explore how aspects of using ill-structured tasks may have affected students' beliefs and attitudes. Results showed this task type and…

Task complexity, student perceptions of vocabulary learning in EFL, and task performance.

PubMed

Wu, Xiaoli; Lowyck, Joost; Sercu, Lies; Elen, Jan

2013-03-01

The study deepened our understanding of how students' self-efficacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a fine-tuned task-specific level. The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self-efficacy beliefs, domain-related prior knowledge, learning strategy use, and task performance as they were applied to English vocabulary learning from reading tasks. Participants were 120 second-year university students (mean age 21) from a Chinese university. This experiment had two conditions (simple/complex). A vocabulary level test was first conducted to measure participants' prior knowledge of English vocabulary. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of the learning tasks. Participants were administered task booklets together with the self-efficacy scales, measures of learning strategy use, and post-tests. Data obtained were submitted to multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and path analysis. Results from the MANOVA model showed a significant effect of vocabulary level on self-efficacy beliefs, learning strategy use, and task performance. Task complexity showed no significant effect; however, an interaction effect between vocabulary level and task complexity emerged. Results from the path analysis showed self-efficacy beliefs had an indirect effect on performance. Our results highlighted the mediating role of self-efficacy beliefs and learning strategy use. Our findings indicate that students' prior knowledge plays a crucial role on both self-efficacy beliefs and task performance, and the predictive power of self-efficacy on task performance may lie in its association with learning strategy use. © 2011 The British Psychological Society.

Relations among Epistemological Beliefs, Academic Achievement, and Task Performance in Secondary School Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lodewyk, Ken R.

2007-01-01

Students with differing profiles of epistemological beliefs--their beliefs about personal epistemology, intelligence, and learning--vary in thinking, reasoning, motivation, and use of strategies while working on academic tasks, each of which affect learning. This study examined students' epistemological beliefs according to gender, school…

A Systematic Review of the Evidence for Impaired Cognitive Theory of Mind in Maltreated Children

PubMed Central

Benarous, Xavier; Guilé, Jean-Marc; Consoli, Angèle; Cohen, David

2015-01-01

Compared to the large number of studies exploring difficulties in emotion recognition in maltreated children, few (N = 12) have explored the cognitive aspect of theory of mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to understand others’ thoughts and intentions. A systematic review of these studies shows inconsistent results regarding cognitive ToM tasks. Youths with a history of maltreatment are more likely to fail at false-belief tasks (N = 2). However, results are less conclusive regarding other tasks (perspective-taking tasks, N = 4; and hostile attribution tasks, N = 7). Additionally, only one study controlled for potential psychopathology. Measures of psychopathology and other cognitive abilities, in addition to ToM, are required to establish a specific association between maltreatment and the cognitive dimension of ToM. PMID:26283975

A Systematic Review of the Evidence for Impaired Cognitive Theory of Mind in Maltreated Children.

PubMed

Benarous, Xavier; Guilé, Jean-Marc; Consoli, Angèle; Cohen, David

2015-01-01

Compared to the large number of studies exploring difficulties in emotion recognition in maltreated children, few (N = 12) have explored the cognitive aspect of theory of mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to understand others' thoughts and intentions. A systematic review of these studies shows inconsistent results regarding cognitive ToM tasks. Youths with a history of maltreatment are more likely to fail at false-belief tasks (N = 2). However, results are less conclusive regarding other tasks (perspective-taking tasks, N = 4; and hostile attribution tasks, N = 7). Additionally, only one study controlled for potential psychopathology. Measures of psychopathology and other cognitive abilities, in addition to ToM, are required to establish a specific association between maltreatment and the cognitive dimension of ToM.

Effects of Task Relevance Instructions and Topic Beliefs on Reading Processes and Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bohn-Gettler, Catherine M.; McCrudden, Matthew T.

2018-01-01

This study investigated the effects of task relevance instructions and topic beliefs on reading processes and memory for belief-related text. Undergraduates received task instructions (focus on arguments for vs. against) before reading a dual-position text. In Experiment 1 (n = 88), a reading time methodology showed no differences in reading time…

False belief and language comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children.

PubMed

Cheung, Him

2006-10-01

The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code metarepresentation contribute uniquely to the language-false belief relation. In three studies, attempts were made to correlate Cantonese-speaking children's false belief with their general language comprehension and understanding of certain structures that explicitly express metarepresentational knowledge. Results showed that these structures failed to predict false belief after age, nonverbal intelligence, and general language comprehension were considered. In contrast, general language remained predictive of false belief after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, and language structures. The current findings are more consistent with a general language account than a language structure account.

Child language and parent discipline mediate the relation between family income and false belief understanding.

PubMed

Tompkins, Virginia; Logan, Jessica A R; Blosser, Daniel F; Duffy, Kaylin

2017-06-01

Achieving false belief understanding is an important cognitive milestone that allows children to understand that thoughts and reality can differ. Researchers have found that low-income children score significantly lower than middle-income children on false belief understanding but have not examined why this difference exists. We hypothesized that children's language and parent discipline mediate the income-false belief relation. Participants were 174 3- to 6-year-olds. False belief understanding was significantly correlated with family income, children's vocabulary, parents' self-reported discussion of children's behavior, discussion of emotions, and power assertion. Family income had a significant indirect effect on false belief understanding through children's vocabulary and parent discipline when examined independently, but only through children's vocabulary when using parallel multiple mediation. This study contributes to our knowledge of individual differences in false belief understanding. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Preschoolers' Processing of False Beliefs within the Context of Picture Book Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riggio, Mary Mabel; Cassidy, Kimberly W.

2009-01-01

Research Findings: The current study examined preschoolers' processing of false belief situations presented in published picture books. Children were read one story with a plot that revolved around a single false belief occurrence and one story with multiple false belief occurrences. Children's narrative retellings of the stories were utilized as…

Absence of spontaneous action anticipation by false belief attribution in children with autism spectrum disorder.

PubMed

Senju, Atsushi; Southgate, Victoria; Miura, Yui; Matsui, Tomoko; Hasegawa, Toshikazu; Tojo, Yoshikuni; Osanai, Hiroo; Csibra, Gergely

2010-05-01

Recently, a series of studies demonstrated false belief understanding in young children through completely nonverbal measures. These studies have revealed that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false belief test, can anticipate others' actions based on their attributed false beliefs. The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who are known to have difficulties in the verbal false belief test, may also show such action anticipation in a nonverbal false belief test. We presented video stimuli of an actor watching an object being hidden in a box. The object was then displaced while the actor was looking away. We recorded children's eye movements and coded whether they spontaneously anticipated the actor's subsequent behavior, which could only have been predicted if they had attributed a false belief to her. Although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASD failed to show such action anticipation. The results suggest that children with ASD have an impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.

From the External to the Internal: Behavior Clarifications Facilitate Theory of Mind (ToM) Development in Chinese Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Yanchun; Wang, Yijie; Luo, Rufan; Su, Yanjie

2016-01-01

The present study investigated how Chinese children develop theory of mind (ToM) in a language environment with limited mental state talk that is rich in behavior discourse. In Study 1, 60 mothers shared a wordless storybook with their 3-4-year-olds. The children completed two false-belief tasks and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised at…

The Relationship between Vocabulary, Grammar, and False Belief Task Performance in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders and Children with Moderate Learning Difficulties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fisher, Naomi; Happe, Francesca; Dunn, Judy

2005-01-01

Background: The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between language and theory of mind in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with moderate learning difficulties (MLD). Previous studies have found a strong association between language and theory of mind in a range of groups, but mostly have not included…

Impaired "affective theory of mind" is associated with right ventromedial prefrontal damage.

PubMed

Shamay-Tsoory, S G; Tomer, R; Berger, B D; Goldsher, D; Aharon-Peretz, J

2005-03-01

To examine the hypothesis that patients with ventromedial (VM) frontal lesions are impaired in the affective rather than cognitive facets of theory of mind (ToM). Prefrontal brain damage may result in impaired social behavior, especially when the damage involves the orbitofrontal/VM prefrontal cortex (PFC). It has been previously suggested that deficits in ToM may account for such aberrant behavior. However, inconsistent results have been reported, and different regions within the frontal cortex have been associated with ToM impairment. The performance of 26 patients with localized lesions in the PFC was compared with responses of 13 patients with posterior lesions and 13 normal control subjects. Three ToM tasks differing in the level of emotional processing involved were used: second-order false belief task, understanding ironic utterances, and identifying social faux pas. The results indicated that patients with VM (but not dorsolateral) prefrontal lesions were significantly impaired in irony and faux pas but not in second-order false belief as compared with patients with posterior lesions and normal control subjects. Lesions in the right VM area were associated with the most severe ToM deficit. These results are discussed in terms of the cognitive and affective facets of "mind-reading" processes mediated by the VM cortex.

Children's memory distortions following social contact with a co-witness: disentangling social and cognitive mechanisms.

PubMed

Bright-Paul, Alexandra; Jarrold, Christopher; Wright, Daniel B; Guillaume, Stephanie

2012-01-01

This study examined whether recalling an event with a co-witness influences children's recall. Individual 3-5-year-olds (n = 48) watched a film with a co-witness. Unbeknown to participants, the co-witness was watching an alternative version of the film. Afterwards both the co-witness and the participant answered questions about the film together (public recall), and the degree to which children conformed to the co-witness's alternative version of events was measured. Subsequently participants were questioned again individually (private recall). Children also completed false belief and inhibitory control tasks. By separating errors made in public and private, the results indicated that both social conformity (32% of errors) and memory distortion (68% of errors) played a role in co-witness influence. Inhibitory control predicted the likelihood of retracting errors in private, but only for children who failed (r = .66) rather than passed false belief tasks (r = -.10). The results suggest that children with a theory of mind conform in the company of the co-witness to avoid social embarrassment, while those a poor theory of mind conform on the basis of an inability to inhibit the co-witness's response. The findings contribute to our understanding of the motivations responsible for co-witness conformity across early childhood.

Specialized mechanisms for theory of mind: are mental representations special because they are mental or because they are representations?

PubMed

Cohen, Adam S; Sasaki, Joni Y; German, Tamsin C

2015-03-01

Does theory of mind depend on a capacity to reason about representations generally or on mechanisms selective for the processing of mental state representations? In four experiments, participants reasoned about beliefs (mental representations) and notes (non-mental, linguistic representations), which according to two prominent theories are closely matched representations because both are represented propositionally. Reaction times were faster and accuracies higher when participants endorsed or rejected statements about false beliefs than about false notes (Experiment 1), even when statements emphasized representational format (Experiment 2), which should have favored the activation of representation concepts. Experiments 3 and 4 ruled out a counterhypothesis that differences in task demands were responsible for the advantage in belief processing. These results demonstrate for the first time that understanding of mental and linguistic representations can be dissociated even though both may carry propositional content, supporting the theory that mechanisms governing theory of mind reasoning are narrowly specialized to process mental states, not representations more broadly. Extending this theory, we discuss whether less efficient processing of non-mental representations may be a by-product of mechanisms specialized for processing mental states. Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Associations among false belief understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function.

PubMed

Guajardo, Nicole R; Parker, Jessica; Turley-Ames, Kandi

2009-09-01

The primary purposes of the present study were to clarify previous work on the association between counterfactual thinking and false belief performance to determine (1) whether these two variables are related and (2) if so, whether executive function skills mediate the relationship. A total of 92 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds completed false belief, counterfactual, working memory, representational flexibility, and language measures. Counterfactual reasoning accounted for limited unique variance in false belief. Both working memory and representational flexibility partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual and false belief. Children, like adults, also generated various types of counterfactual statements to differing degrees. Results demonstrated the importance of language and executive function for both counterfactual and false belief. Implications are discussed.

Changes in children's self-competence and values: gender and domain differences across grades one through twelve.

PubMed

Jacobs, Janis E; Lanza, Stephanie; Osgood, D Wayne; Eccles, Jacquelynne S; Wigfield, Allan

2002-01-01

This study extended previous research on changes in children's self-beliefs by documenting domain-specific growth trajectories for 761 children across grades 1 through 12 in a longitudinal study of perceptions of self-competence and task values. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to (1) describe changes in beliefs across childhood and adolescence within the domains of mathematics, language arts, and sports; (2) examine the impact of changes in competence beliefs on changes in values over time in the same domains; and (3) describe gender differences in mean levels and trajectories of change in competence beliefs and values. The most striking finding across all domains was that self-perceptions of competence and subjective task values declined as children got older, although the extent and rate of decline varied across domains. For example, in language arts, competence beliefs declined rapidly during the elementary school years, but then leveled off or increased to some extent; whereas the decline in self-competence beliefs in sports accelerated during the high school years. Significant gender differences in beliefs were found in most domains; however, the gender differences in developmental trajectories appeared to be domain specific rather than global. Importantly, the gender differences between boys and girls did not systematically increase with age, as predicted by some socialization perspectives. Adding competence beliefs as an explanatory variable to the model for task values revealed that changes in competence beliefs accounted for much of the age-related decline in task values. In addition, competence beliefs accounted for most of the gender differences in task values for language arts and sports.

You don't have to believe everything you read: background knowledge permits fast and efficient validation of information.

PubMed

Richter, Tobias; Schroeder, Sascha; Wöhrmann, Britta

2009-03-01

In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task (epistemic Stroop effect). Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information.

Resting state morphology predicts the effect of theta burst stimulation in false belief reasoning.

PubMed

Hartwright, Charlotte E; Hardwick, Robert M; Apperly, Ian A; Hansen, Peter C

2016-10-01

When required to represent a perspective that conflicts with one's own, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rvlPFC) supports the inhibition of that conflicting self-perspective. The present task dissociated inhibition of self-perspective from other executive control processes by contrasting belief reasoning-a cognitive state where the presence of conflicting perspectives was manipulated-with a conative desire state wherein no systematic conflict existed. Linear modeling was used to examine the effect of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) to rvlPFC on participants' reaction times in belief and desire reasoning. It was anticipated that cTBS applied to rvlPFC would affect belief but not desire reasoning, by modulating activity in the Ventral Attention System (VAS). We further anticipated that this effect would be mediated by functional connectivity within this network, which was identified using resting state fMRI and an unbiased model-free approach. Simple reaction-time analysis failed to detect an effect of cTBS. However, by additionally modeling individual measures from within the stimulated network, the hypothesized effect of cTBS to belief (but, importantly, not desire) reasoning was demonstrated. Structural morphology within the stimulated region, rvlPFC, and right temporoparietal junction were demonstrated to underlie this effect. These data provide evidence that inconsistencies found with cTBS can be mediated by the composition of the functional network that is being stimulated. We suggest that the common claim that this network constitutes the VAS explains the effect of cTBS to this network on false belief reasoning. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3502-3514, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Attributing False Beliefs about Non-Obvious Properties at 18 Months

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scott, Rose M.; Baillargeon, Renee; Song, Hyun-joo; Leslie, Alan M.

2010-01-01

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a "search" paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object's location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel "non-search"…

Cross-cultural differences in adult Theory of Mind abilities: A comparison of native-English speakers and native-Chinese speakers on the Self/Other Differentiation task.

PubMed

Bradford, Elisabeth Ef; Jentzsch, Ines; Gomez, Juan-Carlos; Chen, Yulu; Zhang, Da; Su, Yanjie

2018-02-01

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to compute and attribute mental states to ourselves and other people. It is currently unclear whether ToM abilities are universal or whether they can be culturally influenced. To address this question, this research explored potential differences in engagement of ToM processes between two different cultures, Western (individualist) and Chinese (collectivist), using a sample of healthy adults. Participants completed a computerised false-belief task, in which they attributed beliefs to either themselves or another person, in a matched design, allowing direct comparison between "Self"- and "Other"-oriented conditions. Results revealed that both native-English speakers and native-Chinese individuals responded significantly faster to self-oriented than other-oriented questions. Results also showed that when a trial required a "perspective-shift," participants from both cultures were slower to shift from Self-to-Other than from Other-to-Self. Results indicate that despite differences in collectivism scores, culture does not influence task performance, with similar results found for both Western and non-Western participants, suggesting core and potentially universal similarities in the ToM mechanism across these two cultures.

Attributing false beliefs about non-obvious properties at 18 months

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Baillargeon, Renée; Song, Hyun-joo; Leslie, Alan M.

2010-01-01

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a search paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object’s location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel non-search paradigm. An experimenter shook an object, demonstrating that it rattled, and then asked an agent, “Can you do it?” In response to this prompt, the agent selected one of two test objects. Infants realized that the agent could be led through inference (Experiment 1) or memory (Experiment 2) to hold a false belief about which of the two test objects rattled. These results suggest that 18-month-olds can attribute false beliefs about non-obvious properties to others, and can do so in a non-search paradigm. These and additional results (Experiment 3) help address several alternative interpretations of false-belief findings with infants. PMID:21047625

Justifying all the fuss about false belief.

PubMed

Russell, James

2005-07-01

The classic study by Wimmer and Perner showed that children below the age of about 4 years of age fail to appreciate others' false beliefs. This opened the floodgates to the theory-of-mind research programme. Recently, a study by Riggs and Simpson has called the central challenge of false belief into question, reporting similar difficulties with true belief. I would argue, however, that not only should the acquisition of false belief remain a central concern but that we should think harder about it and its earlier manifestations.

False belief and verb non-factivity: a common neural basis?

PubMed

Cheung, Him; Chen, Lan; Szeto, Ching-Yee; Feng, Gangyi; Lu, Guangming; Zhang, Zhiqiang; Zhu, Zude; Wang, Suiping

2012-03-01

Using fMRI, the present study compares the brain activation underlying false belief thinking induced by pictorial, nonverbal material to that instigated by strong non-factive verbs in a sample of adult Chinese speakers. These verbs obligatorily negate their complements which describe the mind content of the sentence agent, and thus may activate part of the false belief network. Some previous studies have shown a behavioral correlation between verb non-factivity/false complementation and conventional false belief but corresponding neural evidence is lacking. Our results showed that the non-factive grammar and false belief commonly implicated the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), which had been shown by past studies to play a role in general mentalizing. Regions that were unique to nonverbal false belief were the left TPJ and right middle frontal gyrus (MFG), whereas the unique regions for the non-factive grammar were the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and right superior temporal gyrus (STG). Hence, conventional nonverbal false belief and verb non-factivity have both shared and unique neural representations. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Developmental parallels in understanding minds and bodies.

PubMed

Leslie, Alan M

2005-10-01

A recent article by Onishi and Baillargeon presents evidence that 15-month-old infants attribute false beliefs (FBs) to other people. If correct, it lends dramatic new support to the idea that mental state concepts ("theory of mind") emerge from a specialized neurocognitive mechanism that matures during the second year of life. But it also raises new puzzles concerning the FB task--puzzles that have intriguing parallels in results from infants' reasoning about solid bodies.

Putting Theory of Mind in Its Place: Psychological Explanations of the Socio-Emotional-Communicative Impairments in Autistic Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boucher, Jill

2012-01-01

In this review, the history of the theory of mind (ToM) theory of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is outlined (in which ToM is indexed by success on false belief tasks), and the explanatory power and psychological causes of impaired ToM in ASD are critically discussed. It is concluded that impaired ToM by itself has only limited explanatory…

Connections between Secondary Mathematics Teachers' Beliefs and Their Selection of Tasks for English Language Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Araujo, Zandra

2017-01-01

The tasks teachers select impact students' opportunities to learn mathematics and teachers' beliefs influence their choice of tasks. Through the qualitative analysis of surveys, interviews and classroom artefacts from three secondary mathematics teachers, this study examined teachers' selection of mathematics tasks for English language learners…

Understanding the Connection between Epistemic Beliefs and Internet Searching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ulyshen, Tianyi Zhang; Koehler, Matthew J.; Gao, Fei

2015-01-01

Within the context of exploring an ill-structured task using the Google search engine, this study examined (a) the connections between general epistemic beliefs and the complexity of learners' knowledge exploration processes (i.e., learning complexity) and (b) the role of activating learners' task-oriented epistemic beliefs (i.e., epistemic…

Two takes on the social brain: a comparison of theory of mind tasks.

PubMed

Gobbini, Maria Ida; Koralek, Aaron C; Bryan, Ronald E; Montgomery, Kimberly J; Haxby, James V

2007-11-01

We compared two tasks that are widely used in research on mentalizing--false belief stories and animations of rigid geometric shapes that depict social interactions--to investigate whether the neural systems that mediate the representation of others' mental states are consistent across these tasks. Whereas false belief stories activated primarily the anterior paracingulate cortex (APC), the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PC), and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)--components of the distributed neural system for theory of mind (ToM)--the social animations activated an extensive region along nearly the full extent of the superior temporal sulcus, including a locus in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), as well as the frontal operculum and inferior parietal lobule (IPL)--components of the distributed neural system for action understanding--and the fusiform gyrus. These results suggest that the representation of covert mental states that may predict behavior and the representation of intentions that are implied by perceived actions involve distinct neural systems. These results show that the TPJ and the pSTS play dissociable roles in mentalizing and are parts of different distributed neural systems. Because the social animations do not depict articulated body movements, these results also highlight that the perception of the kinematics of actions is not necessary to activate the mirror neuron system, suggesting that this system plays a general role in the representation of intentions and goals of actions. Furthermore, these results suggest that the fusiform gyrus plays a general role in the representation of visual stimuli that signify agency, independent of visual form.

Relationship between social competence and neurocognitive performance in children with epilepsy.

PubMed

Raud, Triin; Kaldoja, Mari-Liis; Kolk, Anneli

2015-11-01

Epilepsy may affect a child's social skills and social cognition. The purpose of the study was to examine associations between sociocognitive skills and neurocognitive performance in children with epilepsy. Thirty-five children with epilepsy between the ages of 7 and 12 years (25 with partial and 10 with generalized epilepsy) and 30 controls participated. Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, Social Cognition Questionnaire proposed by Saltzman-Benaiah and Lalonde (2007), and Social Skills Rating System were used to assess social competence and sociocognitive skills. Neurocognitive performance was assessed using the NEPSY battery. Children with epilepsy demonstrated more difficulties in understanding false belief (p<.001) and intentional lying (p<.05) and exhibited more behavioral problems (p<.05). Notably, their social skills were at the same level as typically developing peers. Children with epilepsy performed significantly worse in attention, executive, verbal, and fine motor tasks (p<.05). We found positive correlations between the understanding of false belief and in executive (r=.6, p<.05), verbal (r=.45-.49, p<.05), and visuospatial skills (r=.34-.48, p<0.01). Children with generalized epilepsy had more problems in memory tasks (p<.05) and understanding of sarcasm (p<.05) compared with children with partial epilepsy. An age of onset over 9.1 years was positively associated with ToM skills (r=.42, p<.05). In conclusion, better ToM in children with better executive functions, and language and visuospatial skills was revealed. The type of epilepsy and age of onset significantly affected ToM skills. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Undermining belief in false memories leads to less efficient problem-solving behaviour.

PubMed

Wang, Jianqin; Otgaar, Henry; Howe, Mark L; Smeets, Tom; Merckelbach, Harald; Nahouli, Zacharia

2017-08-01

Memories of events for which the belief in the occurrence of those events is undermined, but recollection is retained, are called nonbelieved memories (NBMs). The present experiments examined the effects of NBMs on subsequent problem-solving behaviour. In Experiment 1, we challenged participants' beliefs in their memories and examined whether NBMs affected subsequent solution rates on insight-based problems. True and false memories were elicited using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Then participants' belief in true and false memories was challenged by telling them the item had not been presented. We found that when the challenge led to undermining belief in false memories, fewer problems were solved than when belief was not challenged. In Experiment 2, a similar procedure was used except that some participants solved the problems one week rather than immediately after the feedback. Again, our results showed that undermining belief in false memories resulted in lower problem solution rates. These findings suggest that for false memories, belief is an important agent in whether memories serve as effective primes for immediate and delayed problem-solving.

Late, but not early, arriving younger siblings foster firstborns' understanding of second-order false belief.

PubMed

Paine, Amy L; Pearce, Holly; van Goozen, Stephanie H M; de Sonneville, Leo M J; Hay, Dale F

2018-02-01

This study examined the influence of younger siblings on children's understanding of second-order false belief. In a representative community sample of firstborn children (N=229) with a mean age of 7years (SD=4.58), false belief was assessed during a home visit using an adaptation of a well-established second-order false belief narrative enacted with Playmobil figures. Children's responses were coded to establish performance on second-order false belief questions. When controlling for verbal IQ and age, the existence of a younger sibling predicted a twofold advantage in children's second-order false belief performance, yet this was the case only for firstborns who experienced the arrival of a sibling after their second birthday. These findings provide a foundation for future research on family influences on social cognition. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

False Belief vs. False Photographs: A Test of Theory of Mind or Working Memory?

PubMed

Callejas, Alicia; Shulman, Gordon L; Corbetta, Maurizio

2011-01-01

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to reason about other people's thoughts and beliefs, has been traditionally studied in behavioral and neuroimaging experiments by comparing performance in "false belief" and "false photograph" (control) stories. However, some evidence suggests that these stories are not matched in difficulty, complicating the interpretation of results. Here, we more fully evaluated the relative difficulty of comprehending these stories and drawing inferences from them. Subjects read false belief and false photograph stories followed by comprehension questions that probed true ("reality" questions) or false beliefs ("representation" questions) appropriate to the stories. Stories and comprehension questions were read and answered, respectively, more slowly in the false photograph than false belief conditions, indicating their greater difficulty. Interestingly, accuracy on representation questions for false photograph stories was significantly lower than for all other conditions and correlated positively with participants' working memory span scores. These results suggest that drawing representational inferences from false photo stories is particularly difficult and places heavy demands on working memory. Extensive naturalistic practice with ToM reasoning may enable a more flexible and efficient mental representation of false belief stories, resulting in lower memory load requirements. An important implication of these results is that the differential modulation of right temporal-parietal junction (RTPJ) during ToM and "false photo" control conditions may reflect the documented negative correlation of RTPJ activity with working memory load rather than a specialized involvement in ToM processes.

Functional activity of the right temporo-parietal junction and of the medial prefrontal cortex associated with true and false belief reasoning.

PubMed

Döhnel, Katrin; Schuwerk, Tobias; Meinhardt, Jörg; Sodian, Beate; Hajak, Göran; Sommer, Monika

2012-04-15

Since false belief reasoning requires mental state representation independently of the state of reality, it is seen as a key ability in Theory of Mind (ToM). Although true beliefs do not have to be processed independently of the state of reality, growing behavioural evidence indicates that true belief reasoning is different from just reasoning about the state of reality. So far, neural studies on true and false belief reasoning revealed inconsistent findings in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and in the right temporo-parietal junction (R-TPJ), brain regions that are hypothesized to play an important role in ToM. To further explore true and false belief reasoning, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in eighteen adult subjects used methodological refinements such as ensuring that the true belief trials did not elicit false belief reasoning, as well as including paralleled control conditions requiring reasoning about the state of reality. When compared to its control condition, common R-TPJ activity was observed for true and false belief reasoning, supporting its role in belief reasoning in general, and indicating that, at least in adults, also true belief reasoning appears to be different from reasoning about the state of reality. Differential activity was observed in a broad network of brain regions such as the MPFC, the inferior frontal cortex, and the precuneus. False over true belief reasoning induced activation in the posterior MPFC (pMPFC), supporting its role in the decoupling mechanisms, which is defined as processing a mental state independently of the state of reality. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mental Rotation Performance in Fourth Graders: No Effects of Gender Beliefs (yet?)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Titze, Corinna; Jansen, Petra; Heil, Martin

2010-01-01

The influence of gender beliefs on cognitive task performance has been demonstrated repeatedly for adults. For children, there is evidence that gender beliefs can substantially impede or boost math performance--a task where gender differences in favour of boys declined over past decades. Therefore, we examined this phenomenon using the Mental…

Reduced nicotine content cigarette advertising: How false beliefs and subjective ratings affect smoking behavior

PubMed Central

Mercincavage, Melissa; Saddleson, Megan L.; Gup, Emily; Halstead, Angela; Mays, Darren; Strasser, Andrew A.

2017-01-01

Introduction Tobacco advertising can create false beliefs about health harms that are reinforced by product design features. Reduced nicotine content (RNC) cigarettes may reduce harm, but research has not addressed advertising influences. This study examined RNC cigarette advertising effects on false harm beliefs, and how these beliefs – along with initial subjective ratings of RNC cigarettes – affect subsequent smoking behaviors. We further explored whether subjective ratings moderate associations between false beliefs and behavior. Methods Seventy-seven daily, non-treatment-seeking smokers (66.2% male) participated in the first 15 days of a randomized, controlled, open-label RNC cigarette trial. Participants viewed an RNC cigarette advertisement at baseline before completing a 5-day period of preferred brand cigarette use, followed by a 10-day period of RNC cigarette use (0.6 mg nicotine yield). Participants provided pre- and post-advertisement beliefs, and subjective ratings and smoking behaviors for cigarettes smoked during laboratory visits. Results Viewing the advertisement increased beliefs that RNC cigarettes contain less nicotine and are healthier than regular cigarettes (p’s < 0.001 and 0.011), and decreased the belief that they are less likely to cause cancer (p = 0.046). Neither false beliefs nor subjective ratings directly affected smoking behaviors. Significant interactions of strength and taste ratings with beliefs (p’s < 0.001), however, indicated that among smokers with less negative initial subjective ratings, greater false beliefs were associated with greater RNC cigarette consumption. Conclusions Smokers may misconstrue RNC cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes. These beliefs, in conjunction with favorable subjective ratings, may increase product use. PMID:28214392

Reduced nicotine content cigarette advertising: How false beliefs and subjective ratings affect smoking behavior.

PubMed

Mercincavage, Melissa; Saddleson, Megan L; Gup, Emily; Halstead, Angela; Mays, Darren; Strasser, Andrew A

2017-04-01

Tobacco advertising can create false beliefs about health harms that are reinforced by product design features. Reduced nicotine content (RNC) cigarettes may reduce harm, but research has not addressed advertising influences. This study examined RNC cigarette advertising effects on false harm beliefs, and how these beliefs - along with initial subjective ratings of RNC cigarettes - affect subsequent smoking behaviors. We further explored whether subjective ratings moderate associations between false beliefs and behavior. Seventy-seven daily, non-treatment-seeking smokers (66.2% male) participated in the first 15days of a randomized, controlled, open-label RNC cigarette trial. Participants viewed an RNC cigarette advertisement at baseline before completing a 5-day period of preferred brand cigarette use, followed by a 10-day period of RNC cigarette use (0.6mg nicotine yield). Participants provided pre- and post-advertisement beliefs, and subjective ratings and smoking behaviors for cigarettes smoked during laboratory visits. Viewing the advertisement increased beliefs that RNC cigarettes contain less nicotine and are healthier than regular cigarettes (p's<0.001 and 0.011), and decreased the belief that they are less likely to cause cancer (p=0.046). Neither false beliefs nor subjective ratings directly affected smoking behaviors. Significant interactions of strength and taste ratings with beliefs (p's<0.001), however, indicated that among smokers with less negative initial subjective ratings, greater false beliefs were associated with greater RNC cigarette consumption. Smokers may misconstrue RNC cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes. These beliefs, in conjunction with favorable subjective ratings, may increase product use. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli.

PubMed

Krummenacher, Peter; Mohr, Christine; Haker, Helene; Brugger, Peter

2010-08-01

Dopamine (DA) is suggested to improve perceptual and cognitive decisions by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. Somewhat paradoxically, a hyperdopaminergia (arguably more accentuated in the right hemisphere) has also been implied in the genesis of unusual experiences such as hallucinations and paranormal thought. To test these opposing assumptions, we used two lateralized decision tasks, one with lexical (tapping left-hemisphere functions), the other with facial stimuli (tapping right-hemisphere functions). Participants were 40 healthy right-handed men, of whom 20 reported unusual, "paranormal" experiences and beliefs ("believers"), whereas the remaining participants were unexperienced and critical ("skeptics"). In a between-subject design, levodopa (200 mg) or placebo administration was balanced between belief groups (double-blind procedure). For each task and visual field, we calculated sensitivity (d') and response tendency (criterion) derived from signal detection theory. Results showed the typical right visual field advantage for the lexical decision task and a higher d' for verbal than facial stimuli. For the skeptics, d' was lower in the levodopa than in the placebo group. Criterion analyses revealed that believers favored false alarms over misses, whereas skeptics displayed the opposite preference. Unexpectedly, under levodopa, these decision preferences were lower in both groups. We thus infer that levodopa (1) decreases sensitivity in perceptual-cognitive decisions, but only in skeptics, and (2) makes skeptics less and believers slightly more conservative. These results stand at odd to the common view that DA generally improves signal-to-noise ratios. Paranormal ideation seems an important personality dimension and should be assessed in investigations on the detection of signals in noise.

Teachers' Teaching Practices and Beliefs Regarding Context-Based Tasks and Their Relation with Students' Difficulties in Solving These Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wijaya, Ariyadi; van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, Marja; Doorman, Michiel

2015-01-01

In this study, we investigated teachers' teaching practices and their underlying beliefs regarding context-based tasks to find a possible explanation for students' difficulties with these tasks. The research started by surveying 27 Junior High School teachers from seven schools in Indonesia through a written questionnaire. Then, to further examine…

Task Complexity, Student Perceptions of Vocabulary Learning in EFL, and Task Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wu, Xiaoli; Lowyck, Joost; Sercu, Lies; Elen, Jan

2013-01-01

Background: The study deepened our understanding of how students' self-ef?cacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a ?ne-tuned task-speci?c level. Aim: The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self-ef?cacy beliefs, domain-related…

Effects of Text-Belief Consistency and Reading Task on the Strategic Validation of Multiple Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maier, Johanna; Richter, Tobias

2016-01-01

In the comprehension of multiple controversial scientific texts, readers with strong prior beliefs tend to construct a one-sided mental representation that is biased towards belief-consistent information. In the present study, we examined whether an argument in contrast to a summary task instruction can increase the resource allocation to and…

Mothers' use of cognitive state verbs in picture-book reading and the development of children's understanding of mind: a longitudinal study.

PubMed

Adrián, Juan E; Clemente, Rosa Ana; Villanueva, Lidón

2007-01-01

Mothers read stories to their children (N=41) aged between 3.3 years and 5.11 years old, and children then completed two false-belief tasks. One year later, mothers read a story to 37 of those children who were also given four tasks to assess their advanced understanding of mental states. Mothers' early use of cognitive verbs in picture-book reading correlated with their children's later understanding of mental states. Some pragmatic aspects of maternal input correlated with children's later outcomes. Two different factors in mothers' cognitive discourse were identified, suggesting a zone of proximal development in children's understanding of mental states.

Talking about others facilitates theory of mind in Chinese preschoolers.

PubMed

Lu, Huijing; Su, Yanjie; Wang, Qi

2008-11-01

A longitudinal study and a training study were conducted to show that simply referring to others facilitated theory of mind (ToM) development in Chinese children. In Study 1, 3- to 4-year-old Chinese children (N = 52) were tested on ToM and autobiographical memory (AM). One year later, in the group of children who initially failed the false belief tasks, only those who increased their references to others in AM recall passed the tasks. In Study 2, Chinese preschoolers who were trained to talk about others through storytelling showed improvement in their ToM performance. These findings suggest alternative pathways for ToM development in non-Euro-American context.

Inference of beliefs and emotions in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Zaitchik, Deborah; Koff, Elissa; Brownell, Hiram; Winner, Ellen; Albert, Marilyn

2006-01-01

The present study compared 20 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease with 20 older controls (ages 69-94 years) on their ability to make inferences about emotions and beliefs in others. Six tasks tested their ability to make 1st-order and 2nd-order inferences as well as to offer explanations and moral evaluations of human action by appeal to emotions and beliefs. Results showed that the ability to infer emotions and beliefs in 1st-order tasks remains largely intact in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Patients were able to use mental states in the prediction, explanation, and moral evaluation of behavior. Impairment on 2nd-order tasks involving inference of mental states was equivalent to impairment on control tasks, suggesting that patients' difficulty is secondary to their cognitive impairments. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

Which penguin is This? Attributing False Beliefs About Object Identity at 18 Months

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Baillargeon, Renée

2010-01-01

Recent research has shown that infants as young as 13 months can attribute false beliefs to agents, suggesting that the psychological-reasoning subsystem necessary for attributing reality-incongruent informational states (SS2) is operational in infancy. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds’ false-belief reasoning extends to false beliefs about object identity. Infants watched events involving an agent and two toy penguins; one penguin could be disassembled (2-piece penguin) and the other could not (1-piece penguin). Infants realized that outdated contextual information could lead the agent to falsely believe she was facing the 1-piece rather than the 2-piece penguin, suggesting that 18-month-olds can attribute false beliefs about the identity of objects and providing new evidence for SS2 reasoning in the second year of life. PMID:19630901

Which penguin is this? Attributing false beliefs about object identity at 18 months.

PubMed

Scott, Rose M; Baillargeon, Renée

2009-01-01

Recent research has shown that infants as young as 13 months can attribute false beliefs to agents, suggesting that the psychological-reasoning subsystem necessary for attributing reality-incongruent informational states (Subsystem-2, SS2) is operational in infancy. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds' false-belief reasoning extends to false beliefs about object identity. Infants watched events involving an agent and 2 toy penguins; 1 penguin could be disassembled (2-piece penguin) and 1 could not (1-piece penguin). Infants realized that outdated contextual information could lead the agent to falsely believe she was facing the 1-piece rather than the 2-piece penguin, suggesting that 18-month-olds can attribute false beliefs about the identity of objects and providing new evidence for SS2 reasoning in the 2nd year of life.

The Role of the Counterfactually Satisfied Desire in the Lag between False-Belief and False-Emotion Attributions in Children Aged 4-7

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bradmetz, Joel; Schneider, Roland

2004-01-01

A robust lag was evidenced between the attribution to an individual of a false belief about the world and the attribution of the false emotion associated with this false belief (Bradmetz & Schneider, 1999). This lag was unexpected in the frame of current theories of mind which consider that emotion has a rational cognitive basis. The present paper…

False Belief, Complementation Language, and Contextual Bias in Preschoolers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ng, Lisa; Cheung, Him; Xiao, Wen

2010-01-01

In the present study, we address two questions concerning the relation between children's false belief and their understanding of complex object complements. The first question is whether the previously demonstrated association between tensed complements and false belief generalizes to infinitival complements (de Villiers & Pyers, 2002). The…

Reducing the language content in ToM tests: A developmental scale.

PubMed

Burnel, Morgane; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Reboul, Anne; Baciu, Monica; Durrleman, Stephanie

2018-02-01

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks proposed by Wellman and Liu (2004) for their scale were tested in 234 children (2.5 years to 11.9 years). Results showed that 5 of the tasks formed a scale according to both Guttman and Rasch models whereas all 6 tasks could form a scale according to the Rasch model only. The main difference from the original scale was that the Explicit False Belief task could be included whereas the Knowledge Access (KA) task could not. The authors argue that the more verbal version of the KA task administered in previous studies could have measured language understanding rather than ToM. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual perspective taking impairment in children with autistic spectrum disorder.

PubMed

Hamilton, Antonia F de C; Brindley, Rachel; Frith, Uta

2009-10-01

Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking - the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time - is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2 visual perspective taking as well. However, prior data on this issue are inconclusive. We re-examined this question, testing a group of 23 young autistic children, aged around 8years with a verbal mental age of around 4years and three groups of typical children (n=60) ranging in age from 4 to 8years on a level 2 visual perspective task and a closely matched mental rotation task. The results demonstrate that autistic children have difficulty with visual perspective taking compared to a task requiring mental rotation, relative to typical children. Furthermore, performance on the level 2 visual perspective taking task correlated with theory of mind performance. These findings resolve discrepancies in previous studies of visual perspective taking in autism, and demonstrate that level 2 visual perspective taking is a mentalising task.

Multiple roles for executive control in belief-desire reasoning: distinct neural networks are recruited for self perspective inhibition and complexity of reasoning.

PubMed

Hartwright, Charlotte E; Apperly, Ian A; Hansen, Peter C

2012-07-16

Belief-desire reasoning is a core component of 'Theory of Mind' (ToM), which can be used to explain and predict the behaviour of agents. Neuroimaging studies reliably identify a network of brain regions comprising a 'standard' network for ToM, including temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex. Whilst considerable experimental evidence suggests that executive control (EC) may support a functioning ToM, co-ordination of neural systems for ToM and EC is poorly understood. We report here use of a novel task in which psychologically relevant ToM parameters (true versus false belief; approach versus avoidance desire) were manipulated orthogonally. The valence of these parameters not only modulated brain activity in the 'standard' ToM network but also in EC regions. Varying the valence of both beliefs and desires recruits anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting a shared inhibitory component associated with negatively valenced mental state concepts. Varying the valence of beliefs additionally draws on ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, reflecting the need to inhibit self perspective. These data provide the first evidence that separate functional and neural systems for EC may be recruited in the service of different aspects of ToM. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

False memories, but not false beliefs, affect implicit attitudes for food preferences.

PubMed

Howe, David; Anderson, Rachel J; Dewhurst, Stephen A

2017-09-01

Previous studies have found that false memories and false beliefs of childhood experiences can have attitudinal consequences. Previous studies have, however, focused exclusively on explicit attitude measures without exploring whether implicit attitudes are similarly affected. Using a false feedback/imagination inflation paradigm, false memories and beliefs of enjoying a certain food as a child were elicited in participants, and their effects were assessed using both explicit attitude measures (self-report questionnaires) and implicit measures (a Single-Target Implicit Association Test). Positive changes in explicit attitudes were observed both in participants with false memories and participants with false beliefs. In contrast, only participants with false memories exhibited more positive implicit attitudes. The findings are discussed in terms of theories of explicit and implicit attitudes. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

False Belief and Language Comprehension in Cantonese-Speaking Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cheung, Him

2006-01-01

The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code meta representation contribute…

Pluto behaving badly: false beliefs and their consequences.

PubMed

Berkowitz, Shari R; Laney, Cara; Morris, Erin K; Garry, Maryanne; Loftus, Elizabeth F

2008-01-01

We exposed college students to suggestive materials in order to lead them to believe that, as children, they had a negative experience at Disneyland involving the Pluto character. A sizable minority of subjects developed a false belief or memory that Pluto had uncomfortably licked their ear. Suggestions about a positive experience with Pluto led to even greater acceptance of a lovable ear-licking episode. False beliefs and memories had repercussions; those seduced by the bad suggestions were not willing to pay as much for a Pluto souvenir. These findings are among the first to demonstrate that false beliefs can have repercussions for people, meaning that they can influence their later thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.

Interest contagion in violation-of-expectation-based false-belief tasks.

PubMed

Falck, Andreas; Brinck, Ingar; Lindgren, Magnus

2014-01-01

In the debate about how to interpret Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) based false-belief experiments, it has been suggested that infants are predicting the actions of the agent based on more or less sophisticated cognitive means. We present an alternative, more parsimonious interpretation, exploring the possibility that the infants' reactions are not governed by rational expectation but rather of memory strength due to differences in the allocation of cognitive resources earlier in the experiment. Specifically, it is argued that (1) infants' have a tendency to find more interest in events that observed agents are attending to as opposed to unattended events ("interest contagion"), (2) the object-location configurations that result from such interesting events are remembered more strongly by the infants, and (3) the VoE contrast arises as a consequence of the difference in memory strength between more and less interesting object-location configurations. We discuss two published experiments, one which we argue that our model can explain (Kovács etal., 2010), and one which we argue cannot be readily explained by our model (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005).

Theory of Mind Impairments in Women With Cocaine Addiction.

PubMed

Sanvicente-Vieira, Breno; Kluwe-Schiavon, Bruno; Corcoran, Rhiannon; Grassi-Oliveira, Rodrigo

2017-03-01

This study investigates the Theory of Mind performance of female cocaine-dependent users (CDUs) and possible associations between theory of mind performance and features of cocaine use. Sixty women controlled for age, education, individual income, and IQ participated in this study: 30 in the CDU group and 30 in the healthy control group. Participants were assessed for theory of mind with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), a test of understanding of first-order and second-order false beliefs, and the Hinting task. Drug use parameters, clinical symptoms, and neuropsychological functioning were also assessed. Analyses of covariance indicated Theory of Mind impairments in negative mental states within the RMET and second-order false-belief understanding of Theory of Mind stories. In addition, Theory of Mind impairment was associated with drug use characteristics, including craving and number of hospitalizations. High-demand Theory of Mind is suggested to be impaired in CDU women, and the deficits appear to be related to drug addiction severity. We found associations between Theory of Mind deficits and worse clinical and social outcomes.

Which Penguin Is This? Attributing False Beliefs about Object Identity at 18 Months

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scott, Rose M.; Baillargeon, Renee

2009-01-01

Recent research has shown that infants as young as 13 months can attribute false beliefs to agents, suggesting that the psychological-reasoning subsystem necessary for attributing reality-incongruent informational states (Subsystem-2, SS2) is operational in infancy. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds' false-belief reasoning extends…

Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs.

PubMed

Krupenye, Christopher; Kano, Fumihiro; Hirata, Satoshi; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

2016-10-07

Humans operate with a "theory of mind" with which they are able to understand that others' actions are driven not by reality but by beliefs about reality, even when those beliefs are false. Although great apes share with humans many social-cognitive skills, they have repeatedly failed experimental tests of such false-belief understanding. We use an anticipatory looking test (originally developed for human infants) to show that three species of great apes reliably look in anticipation of an agent acting on a location where he falsely believes an object to be, even though the apes themselves know that the object is no longer there. Our results suggest that great apes also operate, at least on an implicit level, with an understanding of false beliefs. Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sociolinguistic awareness and false belief in young Cantonese learners of English.

PubMed

Cheung, Him; Mak, Wing Yan; Luo, Xueying; Xiao, Wen

2010-10-01

In this study, we examined whether sociolinguistic awareness and false belief were uniquely related in 3- and 4-year-old Cantonese-speaking children learning English as a second language. The English-use background of these children varied so that they possessed sociolinguistic awareness to different degrees. Results indicated that sociolinguistic awareness predicted false belief uniquely after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, English vocabulary, and family income for both the second language learners and the more balanced bilinguals. The group difference in false belief was adequately explained by the corresponding difference in sociolinguistic awareness over and above the other variables. Such findings provide evidence for the claim that false belief understanding is critically related to sociolinguistic awareness, which in turn is influenced by how a second language is learned. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Deep belief networks for false alarm rejection in forward-looking ground-penetrating radar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Becker, John; Havens, Timothy C.; Pinar, Anthony; Schulz, Timothy J.

2015-05-01

Explosive hazards are one of the most deadly threats in modern conflicts. The U.S. Army is interested in a reliable way to detect these hazards at range. A promising way of accomplishing this task is using a forward-looking ground-penetrating radar (FLGPR) system. Recently, the Army has been testing a system that utilizes both L-band and X-band radar arrays on a vehicle mounted platform. Using data from this system, we sought to improve the performance of a constant false-alarm-rate (CFAR) prescreener through the use of a deep belief network (DBN). DBNs have also been shown to perform exceptionally well at generalized anomaly detection. They combine unsupervised pre-training with supervised fine-tuning to generate low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional input data. We seek to take advantage of these two properties by training a DBN on the features of the CFAR prescreener's false alarms (FAs) and then use that DBN to separate FAs from true positives. Our analysis shows that this method improves the detection statistics significantly. By training the DBN on a combination of image features, we were able to significantly increase the probability of detection while maintaining a nominal number of false alarms per square meter. Our research shows that DBNs are a good candidate for improving detection rates in FLGPR systems.

Perceived parental beliefs about the causes of success in sport: relationship to athletes' achievement goals and personal beliefs.

PubMed

White, Sally A; Kavussanu, Maria; Tank, Kari M; Wingate, Jason M

2004-02-01

This study examined the relationship between perceived parental beliefs and young athletes' achievement goal orientations and personal beliefs about the causes of success in sport. Participants were 183 male and female athletes, 11-18 years old, involved in team sports. Athletes completed the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire, the Beliefs about the Causes of Sport Success Questionnaire, and two modified versions of the latter inventory to assess their perceptions of their parents' beliefs. Canonical correlation analysis revealed that perceived parental beliefs were related to goal orientations and personal beliefs in a conceptually coherent fashion. Thus, the perceived parental belief that effort leads to success in sport was related to athletes' task orientation and personal belief that effort causes sport success. In contrast, the perceived parental beliefs that superior ability, external factors, and using deceptive tactics are precursors to success in sport corresponded to athletes' ego orientation and the same personal beliefs. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the socialization experiences of young athletes.

Mother and Infant Talk about Mental States: Systemic Emergence of Psychological Lexicon and Theory of Mind Understanding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rollo, D.; Buttiglieri, F.

In recent years, a number of studies that have examined how social experiences are related to children's theory of mind development, have found that: (1) the frequency of mothers' mental state utterances used in mother-child picture-book reading, is correlated with children's theory of mind abilities; (2) mothers' use of cognitive terms is related more strongly to children's theory of mind performances than the mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Adrian, Clemente, Villanueva, Rieffe, 2005; Ruffman, Slade, Crowe, 2002; Taumoepeau, Ruffman, 2006; Dunn, 2002). Despite the evidence for the role of mothers' language, there is disagreement over how exactly it improves children's theory of mind development. In short, mentalistic comments contain distinctive words, grammatical constructions and pragmatic features. The question is, however, which factor is critical (de Rosnay, Pons, Harris, Morrell, 2004). The present study addresses this issue and focuses on relationship between mothers' mental state terms and children's performances in theory of mind tasks (emotion understanding and false belief tasks). Mothers were asked to read some pictures to 10 children between 3;0 and 5;0. Among the different mental state references (perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral and communicative), it was found that the frequency and variety of mothers' mental state words were significantly associated with children's mental lexicon. In addition, emotional terms correlated positively with children's false belief performance. Kind of emotional words that are used by the mothers with reference to the Italian language will be discussed.

Developing the Frith-Happé animations: a quick and objective test of Theory of Mind for adults with autism.

PubMed

White, Sarah J; Coniston, Devorah; Rogers, Rosannagh; Frith, Uta

2011-04-01

It is now widely accepted that individuals with autism have a Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalizing deficit. This has traditionally been assessed with false-belief tasks and, more recently, with silent geometric animations, an on-line ToM task. In adults with milder forms of autism standard false-belief tests, originally devised for children, often prove insensitive, while the Frith-Happé animations have had rather better success at capturing the on-line ToM deficit in this population. However, analysis of participants' verbal descriptions of these animations, which span scenarios from "Random" to "Goal-Directed" and "ToM," is time consuming and subjective. In this study, we developed and established the feasibility of an objective method of response through a series of multiple-choice questions. Sixteen adults with autism and 15 typically developing adults took part, matched for age and intelligence. The adults with autism were less accurate as a group at categorizing the Frith-Happé animations by the presence or absence of mental and physical interactions. Furthermore, they were less able to select the correct emotions that are typically attributed to the triangles in the mental state animations. This new objective method for assessing the understanding of the animations succeeded in being as sensitive as the original subjective method in detecting the mentalizing difficulties in autism, as well as being quicker and easier to administer and analyze. Copyright © 2011, International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites.

PubMed

Hoffman, Kelly M; Trawalter, Sophie; Axt, Jordan R; Oliver, M Norman

2016-04-19

Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans. We examine whether this racial bias is related to false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites (e.g., "black people's skin is thicker than white people's skin"). Study 1 documented these beliefs among white laypersons and revealed that participants who more strongly endorsed false beliefs about biological differences reported lower pain ratings for a black (vs. white) target. Study 2 extended these findings to the medical context and found that half of a sample of white medical students and residents endorsed these beliefs. Moreover, participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient's pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations. Participants who did not endorse these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient's pain as higher, but showed no bias in treatment recommendations. These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment.

Explaining body size beliefs in anorexia.

PubMed

Gadsby, Stephen

2017-11-01

Cognitive neuropsychiatry has had much success in providing theoretical models for the causal origins of many delusional beliefs. Recently, it has been suggested that some anorexia nervosa patients' beliefs about their own body size should be considered delusions. As such, it seems high time the methods of cognitive neuropsychiatry were turned to modelling the false body size beliefs of anorexics. In this paper, I adopt an empiricist approach to modelling the causal origins of false body size beliefs in anorexia. Within the background of cognitive neuropsychiatry, empiricist models claim that abnormal beliefs are grounded by abnormal experiences bearing similar content. I discuss the kinds of abnormal experiences of body size anorexics suffer from which could ground their false beliefs about body size. These oversized experiences come in three varieties: false self-other body comparisons, spontaneous mental imagery of a fat body and distorted perception of affordances. Further theoretical and empirical research into the oversized experiences which anorexics suffer from presents a promising avenue for understanding and treating the disorder.

Promoting Physical Activity in Hong Kong Chinese Young People: Factors Influencing Their Subjective Task Values and Expectancy Beliefs in Physical Activity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pang, Bonnie

2014-01-01

According to Eccles et al.'s (1983) Expectancy Value Model, the two major constructs that influence young people's activity choice are subjective task value and expectancy beliefs (Eccles et al., 1983). Eccles et al. (1983) conceptually distinguished four dimensions of subjective task value: attainment value, intrinsic value, utility value and…

The Correlation between Gifted Students' Cost and Task Value Perceptions towards Mathematics: The Mediating Role of Expectancy Belief

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kurnaz, Ahmet

2018-01-01

In this study whether the expectancy belief has a mediating role in the correlation between cost value perception and task value perception of gifted students towards mathematics was examined. It is predicted that the correlation between cost value and task value perceptions of gifted students towards mathematics can change according to their…

Associations among False Belief Understanding, Counterfactual Reasoning, and Executive Function

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guajardo, Nicole R.; Parker, Jessica; Turley-Ames, Kandi

2009-01-01

The primary purposes of the present study were to clarify previous work on the association between counterfactual thinking and false belief performance to determine (1) whether these two variables are related and (2) if so, whether executive function skills mediate the relationship. A total of 92 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds completed false belief,…

Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Show False Belief Understanding in an Active Helping Paradigm

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buttelmann, David; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael

2009-01-01

Recently, several studies have claimed that soon after their first birthday infants understand others' false beliefs. However, some have questioned these findings based on criticisms of the looking-time paradigms used. Here we report a new paradigm to test false belief understanding in infants using a more active behavioral response: helping.…

Conservation of species, volume, and belief in patients with Alzheimer's disease: the issue of domain specificity and conceptual impairment.

PubMed

Zaitchik, Deborah; Solomon, Gregg E A

2009-09-01

Two studies investigated whether patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) suffer high-level and category-specific impairment in the conceptual domain of living things. In Experiment 1, AD patients and healthy young and healthy elderly controls took part in three tasks: the conservation of species, volume, and belief. All 3 tasks required tracking an object's identity in the face of irrelevant but salient transformations. Healthy young and elderly controls performed at or near ceiling on all tasks. AD patients were at or near ceiling on the volume and belief tasks, but only about half succeeded on the species task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the results were not due to simple task demands. AD patients' failure to conserve species indicates that they are impaired in their theoretical understanding of living things, and their success on the volume and belief tasks suggests that the impairment is domain-specific. Two hypotheses are put forward to explain the phenomenon: The first, a category-specific account, holds that the intuitive theory of biology undergoes pervasive degradation; the second, a hybrid domain-general/domain-specific account, holds that impairment to domain-general processes such as executive function interacts with core cognition, the primitive elements that are the foundation of domain-specific knowledge.

Conservation of species, volume, and belief in patients with Alzheimer’s disease: the issue of domain-specificity and conceptual impairment

PubMed Central

Zaitchik, Deborah; Solomon, Gregg E. A.

2009-01-01

Two studies investigated whether patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) suffer high-level and category-specific impairment in the conceptual domain of living things. In Study 1, AD patients and healthy young and healthy elderly controls took part in three tasks: the Conservation of Species, Volume, and Belief. All 3 tasks required tracking an object’s identity in the face of irrelevant but salient transformations. Healthy young and elderly controls performed at or near ceiling on all tasks. AD patients were at or near ceiling on the Volume and Belief tasks, but only about half succeeded on the Species task. Study 2 demonstrated that the results were not due to simple task demands. AD patients’ failure to conserve species indicates that they are impaired in their theoretical understanding of living things, and their success on the Volume and Belief tasks suggests that the impairment is domain-specific. Two hypotheses are put forward to explain the phenomenon: the first, a category-specific account, holds that the intuitive theory of biology undergoes pervasive degradation; the second, a hybrid domain-general/domain-specific account, holds that impairment to domain-general processes such as executive function interacts with core cognition, the primitive elements that are the foundation of domain-specific knowledge. PMID:20043252

The role of cognitive and emotional perspective taking in economic decision making in the ultimatum game.

PubMed

Takagishi, Haruto; Koizumi, Michiko; Fujii, Takayuki; Schug, Joanna; Kameshima, Shinya; Yamagishi, Toshio

2014-01-01

We conducted a simple resource allocation game known as the ultimatum game (UG) with preschoolers to examine the role of cognitive and emotional perspective-taking ability on allocation and rejection behavior. A total of 146 preschoolers played the UG and completed a false belief task and an emotional perspective-taking test. Results showed that cognitive perspective taking ability had a significant positive effect on the proposer's offer and a negative effect on the responder's rejection behavior, whereas emotional perspective taking ability did not impact either the proposer's or responder's behavior. These results imply that the ability to anticipate the responder's beliefs, but not their emotional state, plays an important role in the proposer's choice of a fair allocation in an UG, and that children who have not acquired theory of mind still reject unfair offers.

Reasoning about beliefs: a human specialization?

PubMed

Povinelli, D J; Giambrone, S

2001-01-01

A recent meta-analysis performed by Wellman, Cross, and Watson clears the air surrounding young children's performance on tests of false belief by showing that it is highly likely that there is some type of conceptual development between 3 and 5 years of age that supports improved task performance. The data concerning the evolutionary origin of these abilities, however, is considerably less clear. Nonetheless, there is some reason to suspect that theory of mind is unique to our species, and that its original function was to provide a more abstract level of describing ancient behavioral patterns (such as deception, reconciliation, and gaze following)-behaviors that humans share in common with many other species. Thus, the initial selective advantage of theory of mind may have been because it increased the flexibility of already-existing behaviors, not because it generated scores of radically new ones.

Infants Understand Deceptive Intentions to Implant False Beliefs about Identity: New Evidence for Early Mentalistic Reasoning

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Richman, Josh C.; Baillargeon, Renée

2015-01-01

Are infants capable of representing false beliefs, as the mentalistic account of early psychological reasoning suggests, or are they incapable of doing so, as the minimalist account suggests? The present research sought to shed light on this debate by testing the minimalist claim that a signature limit of early psychological reasoning is a specific inability to understand false beliefs about identity: because of their limited representational capabilities, infants should be unable to make sense of situations where an agent mistakes one object for another, visually identical object. To evaluate this claim, three experiments examined whether 17-month-olds could reason about the actions of a deceptive agent who sought to implant in another agent a false belief about the identity of an object. In each experiment, a thief attempted to secretly steal a desirable rattling toy during its owner’s absence by substituting a less desirable silent toy. Infants realized that this substitution could be effective only if the silent toy was visually identical to the rattling toy (Experiment 1) and the owner did not routinely shake her toy when she returned (Experiment 2). When these conditions were met, infants expected the owner to be deceived and to mistake the silent toy for the rattling toy she had left behind (Experiment 3). Together, these results cast doubt on the minimalist claim that infants cannot represent false beliefs about identity. More generally, these results indicate that infants in the 2nd year of life can reason not only about the actions of agents who hold false beliefs, but also about the actions of agents who seek to implant false beliefs, thus providing new support for the mentalistic claim that an abstract capacity to reason about false beliefs emerges early in human development. PMID:26374383

An instrument to assess subjective task value beliefs regarding the decision to pursue postgraduate training.

PubMed

Hagemeier, Nicholas E; Murawski, Matthew M

2014-02-12

To develop and validate an instrument to assess subjective ratings of the perceived value of various postgraduate training paths followed using expectancy-value as a theoretical framework; and to explore differences in value beliefs across type of postgraduate training pursued and type of pharmacy training completed prior to postgraduate training. A survey instrument was developed to sample 4 theoretical domains of subjective task value: intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value, and perceived cost. Retrospective self-report methodology was employed to examine respondents' (N=1,148) subjective task value beliefs specific to their highest level of postgraduate training completed. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic techniques were used to evaluate and validate value belief constructs. Intrinsic, attainment, utility, cost, and financial value constructs resulted from exploratory factor analysis. Cross-validation resulted in a 26-item instrument that demonstrated good model fit. Differences in value beliefs were noted across type of postgraduate training pursued and pharmacy training characteristics. The Postgraduate Training Value Instrument demonstrated evidence of reliability and construct validity. The survey instrument can be used to assess value beliefs regarding multiple postgraduate training options in pharmacy and potentially inform targeted recruiting of individuals to those paths best matching their own value beliefs.

False-belief understanding and social preference over the first 2 years of school: a longitudinal study.

PubMed

Fink, Elian; Begeer, Sander; Hunt, Caroline; de Rosnay, Marc

2014-01-01

The role of false belief in establishing children's social relationships during the transition to school was examined and compared to other social cognitive constructs. One hundred and fourteen 5-year-olds were recruited during their 1st year of school (Time 1); 106 children were retained 1 year later. False belief, emotion expression recognition, empathy, verbal ability, and peer-rated social preference were measured at both times. False belief at Time 1 had a direct influence on concurrent social preference, over and above the influence of emotion expression recognition and empathy. False belief made no independent contribution to later social preference accounting for stability in social preference. The role of social cognitive development is discussed with respect to how children establish and maintain their position in a peer group. © 2014 The Authors. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning.

PubMed

Kovács, Agnes Melinda

2009-01-01

In their first years, children's understanding of mental states seems to improve dramatically, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are still unclear. Such 'theory of mind' (ToM) abilities may arise during development, or have an innate basis, developmental changes reflecting limitations of other abilities involved in ToM tasks (e.g. inhibition). Special circumstances such as early bilingualism may enhance ToM development or other capacities required by ToM tasks. Here we compare 3-year-old bilinguals and monolinguals on a standard ToM task, a modified ToM task and a control task involving physical reasoning. The modified ToM task mimicked a language-switch situation that bilinguals often encounter and that could influence their ToM abilities. If such experience contributes to an early consolidation of ToM in bilinguals, they should be selectively enhanced in the modified task. In contrast, if bilinguals have an advantage due to better executive inhibitory abilities involved in ToM tasks, they should outperform monolinguals on both ToM tasks, inhibitory demands being similar. Bilingual children showed an advantage on the two ToM tasks but not on the control task. The precocious success of bilinguals may be associated with their well-developed control functions formed during monitoring and selecting languages.

Are There Gender Differences in Emotion Comprehension? Analysis of the Test of Emotion Comprehension.

PubMed

Fidalgo, Angel M; Tenenbaum, Harriet R; Aznar, Ana

2018-01-01

This article examines whether there are gender differences in understanding the emotions evaluated by the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC). The TEC provides a global index of emotion comprehension in children 3-11 years of age, which is the sum of the nine components that constitute emotion comprehension: (1) recognition of facial expressions, (2) understanding of external causes of emotions, (3) understanding of desire-based emotions, (4) understanding of belief-based emotions, (5) understanding of the influence of a reminder on present emotional states, (6) understanding of the possibility to regulate emotional states, (7) understanding of the possibility of hiding emotional states, (8) understanding of mixed emotions, and (9) understanding of moral emotions. We used the answers to the TEC given by 172 English girls and 181 boys from 3 to 8 years of age. First, the nine components into which the TEC is subdivided were analysed for differential item functioning (DIF), taking gender as the grouping variable. To evaluate DIF, the Mantel-Haenszel method and logistic regression analysis were used applying the Educational Testing Service DIF classification criteria. The results show that the TEC did not display gender DIF. Second, when absence of DIF had been corroborated, it was analysed for differences between boys and girls in the total TEC score and its components controlling for age. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of independence between gender and level of comprehension in 8 of the 9 components of the TEC. Several hypotheses are discussed that could explain the differences found between boys and girls in the belief component. Given that the Belief component is basically a false belief task, the differences found seem to support findings in the literature indicating that girls perform better on this task.

Intrinsic motivation towards sports in Singaporean students: the role of sport ability beliefs.

PubMed

Wang, C K John; Biddle, Stuart J H

2003-09-01

This study investigated determinants of active lifestyles in Singaporean university students. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a measure of lay beliefs concerning athletic ability was confirmed. Other results confirmed hypotheses that beliefs reflecting that athletic ability can be developed over time (incremental beliefs) predict an achievement task (self-referenced) orientation, while beliefs reflecting that athletic ability is relatively stable (entity beliefs) predict an ego (other-person, comparative) orientation. Goal orientations directly affect perceived competence which, in turn, influence intrinsic motivation to be physically active. A task orientation had a direct link to intrinsic motivation. Results suggest that intrinsic motivation towards sport and physical activity might be enhanced through interventions that focus on self-referenced and self-improvement notions of ability as well as perceived competence.

The missing explanation of the false-belief advantage in bilingual children: a longitudinal study.

PubMed

Diaz, Vanessa; Farrar, M Jeffrey

2018-07-01

Bilingual preschoolers often perform better than monolingual children on false-belief understanding. It has been hypothesized that this is due to their enhanced executive function skills, although this relationship has rarely been tested or supported. The current longitudinal study tested whether metalinguistic awareness was responsible for this advantage. Further, we examined the contributions of both executive functioning and language ability to false-belief understanding by including multiple measures of both. Seventy-eight children (n = 40 Spanish-English bilingual; age M = 49.29, SD = 7.38 and, n = 38 English monolingual; age M = 47.75, SD = 6.86) were tested. A year later the children were tested again (n = 22 bilingual, n = 25 monolingual). The results indicated that language and executive function (inhibitory control) at time 1 were related to false belief in monolinguals at time 2. In contrast, bilinguals' metalinguistic performance at time 1 was the sole predictor of false belief at time 2. The different linguistic and cognitive profiles of monolinguals and bilinguals may create different pathways for their development of false-belief understanding. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/vILn2gKjFxw. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs

PubMed Central

van Elk, Michiel

2015-01-01

Previous studies have shown that one’s prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face / house categorization task; Experiment 1) or a visual attention task (i.e. the global / local processing task; Experiment 2). In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. In the second experiment, it was found that skeptics showed a classical ‘global-to-local’ interference effect, whereas believers in conspiracy theories were characterized by a stronger ‘local-to-global interference effect’. The present study shows that individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are associated with perceptual and attentional biases, thereby extending the growing body of work in this field indicating effects of cultural learning on basic perceptual processes. PMID:26114604

Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs.

PubMed

van Elk, Michiel

2015-01-01

Previous studies have shown that one's prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face/house categorization task; Experiment 1) or a visual attention task (i.e. the global/local processing task; Experiment 2). In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. In the second experiment, it was found that skeptics showed a classical 'global-to-local' interference effect, whereas believers in conspiracy theories were characterized by a stronger 'local-to-global interference effect'. The present study shows that individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are associated with perceptual and attentional biases, thereby extending the growing body of work in this field indicating effects of cultural learning on basic perceptual processes.

Developmental changes and gender effects on motivational constructs based on the expectancy-value model in Czech and United States students regarding learning of science, mathematics, and other subjects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Eun-Mi

This study employed American and Czech student samples to investigate the motivational constructs used in Eccles and Wigfield's (1983) expectancy-value model. To predict achievement behavior, the model specifies relationships among expectancy for-success and task value, task-specific self-concept, perception of task-difficulty, perceptions of social environment, and interpretations and attributions for past events in relation to the social world. Czech and American students (n = 1,145) in grades 4--12 were the participants in this study. The causal relationships among the constructs were tested to investigate structural similarities and differences in the models for both countries. This study also explored developmental changes, gender, and national differences in the students' motivational beliefs for these motivational constructs: Expectancy for Success, Intrinsic Interest Value, Task-specific Self-concept, Perception of Task-difficulty, and Perceived Vocational Gender Dominance for science, mathematics, and other school subjects. The findings indicated that, for both countries, with respect to changes over grade level, compared to the younger students, the older students showed lower motivational beliefs for most subject areas except reading. However, the Czech students in grades 6--8 showed more positive motivational beliefs in life science and social studies than did the Czech students in other grade levels. In comparing genders, the male students exhibited more positive motivational beliefs in physical science than did the female students, and female students showed more positive motivational beliefs in reading than did the male students. For life science, the Czech female students rated Intrinsic Interest Value and Task-specific Self-concept higher than did their peer male students. The American students' motivational beliefs in reading were more positive than were Czech students', and the Czech students held more positive motivational beliefs in life science than did the American students. With minor variations for each country, the expectancy-value model provided a reasonable tool for understanding the causal relationships among the motivational beliefs. For the Czech sample, Perception of Task-difficulty was a strong negative predictor for Expectancy for Success for most school subjects except life science whereas, for the American sample, it was a weak but significant negative predictor for Intrinsic Interest Value for most school subjects except social studies. Implications for science education are discussed.

Mental Rotation in False Belief Understanding.

PubMed

Xie, Jiushu; Cheung, Him; Shen, Manqiong; Wang, Ruiming

2018-05-01

This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation (EET) in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective taking such as false belief reasoning may also involve EET because of what has been widely reported in the embodied cognition literature, showing that our processing of abstract, propositional information is often grounded in concrete bodily sensations which are not apparently linked to higher cognition. In Experiment 1, an agent placed a ball into one of two boxes and left. The ball then rolled out and moved either into the other box (new box) or back into the original one (old box). The participants were to decide from which box they themselves or the agent would try to recover the ball. Results showed that false belief performance was affected by increased orientation disparity between the participants and the agent, suggesting involvement of embodied transformation. In Experiment 2, false belief was similarly induced and the participants were to decide if the agent would try to recover the ball in one specific box. Orientation disparity was again found to affect false belief performance. The present results extend previous findings on EET in visuospatial perspective taking and suggest that false belief reasoning, which is a kind of psychological perspective taking, can also involve embodied rotation, consistent with the embodied cognition view. Copyright © 2018 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Optimism as a Prior Belief about the Probability of Future Reward

PubMed Central

Kalra, Aditi; Seriès, Peggy

2014-01-01

Optimists hold positive a priori beliefs about the future. In Bayesian statistical theory, a priori beliefs can be overcome by experience. However, optimistic beliefs can at times appear surprisingly resistant to evidence, suggesting that optimism might also influence how new information is selected and learned. Here, we use a novel Pavlovian conditioning task, embedded in a normative framework, to directly assess how trait optimism, as classically measured using self-report questionnaires, influences choices between visual targets, by learning about their association with reward progresses. We find that trait optimism relates to an a priori belief about the likelihood of rewards, but not losses, in our task. Critically, this positive belief behaves like a probabilistic prior, i.e. its influence reduces with increasing experience. Contrary to findings in the literature related to unrealistic optimism and self-beliefs, it does not appear to influence the iterative learning process directly. PMID:24853098

Do Growth Mindsets in Math Benefit Females? Identifying Pathways between Gender, Mindset, and Motivation.

PubMed

Degol, Jessica L; Wang, Ming-Te; Zhang, Ya; Allerton, Julie

2018-05-01

Despite efforts to increase female representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), females continue to be less motivated to pursue STEM careers than males. A short-term longitudinal study used a sample of 1449 high school students (grades 9-12; 49% females) to examine pathways from gender and mindset onto STEM outcomes via motivational beliefs (i.e., expectancy beliefs, task value, and cost). Mindset, motivational beliefs, and STEM career aspirations were assessed between the fall and winter months of the 2014-2015 school year and math grades were obtained at the conclusion of the same year. Student growth mindset beliefs predicted higher task values in math. Task values also mediated the pathway from a growth mindset to higher STEM career aspirations. Expectancy beliefs mediated the pathway between gender and math achievement. This mediated pathway was stronger for females than for males, such that females had higher math achievement than males when they endorsed a growth mindset. Findings suggest possible avenues for improving female's interest in STEM.

Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites

PubMed Central

Hoffman, Kelly M.; Trawalter, Sophie; Axt, Jordan R.; Oliver, M. Norman

2016-01-01

Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans. We examine whether this racial bias is related to false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites (e.g., “black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s skin”). Study 1 documented these beliefs among white laypersons and revealed that participants who more strongly endorsed false beliefs about biological differences reported lower pain ratings for a black (vs. white) target. Study 2 extended these findings to the medical context and found that half of a sample of white medical students and residents endorsed these beliefs. Moreover, participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations. Participants who did not endorse these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient’s pain as higher, but showed no bias in treatment recommendations. These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment. PMID:27044069

Flexible goal attribution in early mindreading.

PubMed

Michael, John; Christensen, Wayne

2016-03-01

The 2-systems theory developed by Apperly and Butterfill (2009; Butterfill & Apperly, 2013) is an influential approach to explaining the success of infants and young children on implicit false-belief tasks. There is extensive empirical and theoretical work examining many aspects of this theory, but little attention has been paid to the way in which it characterizes goal attribution. We argue here that this aspect of the theory is inadequate. Butterfill and Apperly's characterization of goal attribution is designed to show how goals could be ascribed by infants without representing them as related to other psychological states, and the minimal mindreading system is supposed to operate without employing flexible semantic-executive cognitive processes. But research on infant goal attribution reveals that infants exhibit a high degree of situational awareness that is strongly suggestive of flexible semantic-executive cognitive processing, and infants appear moreover to be sensitive to interrelations between goals, preferences, and beliefs. Further, close attention to the structure of implicit mindreading tasks--for which the theory was specifically designed--indicates that flexible goal attribution is required to succeed. We conclude by suggesting 2 approaches to resolving these problems. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

From simple desires to ordinary beliefs: the early development of everyday psychology.

PubMed

Wellman, H M; Woolley, J D

1990-06-01

We provide evidence for the claim that before young children construe human action in terms of beliefs and desires they understand action only in terms of simple desires. This type of naive psychology--a simple desire psychology--constitutes a coherent understanding of human action, but it differs from the belief--desire psychology of slightly older children and adults. In this paper we characterize what we mean by a simple desire psychology and report two experiments. In Experiment 1 we demonstrate that 2-year-old can predict actions and reactions related to simple desires. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that many 2-year-old pass desire reasoning tasks while at the same time failing belief reasoning tasks that are passed by slightly older children, and that are as comparable as possible to the desire tasks they pass with ease.

Bridging the Gap between Implicit and Explicit Understanding: How Language Development Promotes the Processing and Representation of False Belief

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

San Juan, Valerie; Astington, Janet Wilde

2012-01-01

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the…

Chinese Preservice Teachers’ Professional Identity Links with Education Program Performance: The Roles of Task Value Belief and Learning Motivations

PubMed Central

Zhang, Yan; Hawk, Skyler T.; Zhang, Xiaohui; Zhao, Hongyu

2016-01-01

Professional identity is a key issue spanning the entirety of teachers’ career development. Despite the abundance of existing research examining professional identity, its link with occupation-related behavior at the primary career stage (i.e., GPA in preservice education) and the potential process that underlies this association is still not fully understood. This study explored the professional identity of Chinese preservice teachers, and its links with task value belief, intrinsic learning motivation, extrinsic learning motivation, and performance in the education program. Grade-point average (GPA) of courses (both subject and pedagogy courses) was examined as an indicator of performance, and questionnaires were used to measure the remaining variables. Data from 606 preservice teachers in the first 3 years of a teacher-training program indicated that: (1) variables in this research were all significantly correlated with each other, except the correlation between intrinsic learning motivation and program performance; (2) professional identity was positively linked to task value belief, intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivations, and program performance in a structural equation model (SEM); (3) task value belief was positively linked to intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivation; (4) higher extrinsic (but not intrinsic) learning motivation was associated with increased program performance; and (5) task value belief and extrinsic learning motivation were significant mediators in the model. PMID:27199810

Chinese Preservice Teachers' Professional Identity Links with Education Program Performance: The Roles of Task Value Belief and Learning Motivations.

PubMed

Zhang, Yan; Hawk, Skyler T; Zhang, Xiaohui; Zhao, Hongyu

2016-01-01

Professional identity is a key issue spanning the entirety of teachers' career development. Despite the abundance of existing research examining professional identity, its link with occupation-related behavior at the primary career stage (i.e., GPA in preservice education) and the potential process that underlies this association is still not fully understood. This study explored the professional identity of Chinese preservice teachers, and its links with task value belief, intrinsic learning motivation, extrinsic learning motivation, and performance in the education program. Grade-point average (GPA) of courses (both subject and pedagogy courses) was examined as an indicator of performance, and questionnaires were used to measure the remaining variables. Data from 606 preservice teachers in the first 3 years of a teacher-training program indicated that: (1) variables in this research were all significantly correlated with each other, except the correlation between intrinsic learning motivation and program performance; (2) professional identity was positively linked to task value belief, intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivations, and program performance in a structural equation model (SEM); (3) task value belief was positively linked to intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivation; (4) higher extrinsic (but not intrinsic) learning motivation was associated with increased program performance; and (5) task value belief and extrinsic learning motivation were significant mediators in the model.

Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars.

PubMed

Mascaro, Olivier; Morin, Olivier; Sperber, Dan

2017-09-01

We suggest that preschoolers' frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies (N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and 2). Similarly, four-year-olds, though capable of treating assertions as false, trust deceptive informants (Study 3). We suggest that children's reduced sensitivity to the opportunities of lying, and to the risks of being lied to might help explain their difficulties on standard false belief tasks.

True- and false-belief reasoning in children and adults: an event-related potential study of theory of mind.

PubMed

Meinhardt, Jörg; Sodian, Beate; Thoermer, Claudia; Döhnel, Katrin; Sommer, Monika

2011-01-01

The understanding that another person's belief can differ from reality and that behaviour is guided by beliefs and not by reality reflects an important cornerstone in the development of a Theory of Mind. The present event-related potential (ERP) study had two aims: first, to reveal ERPs that distinguish between false- and true-belief reasoning and second, to investigate the neural changes in the development of false- and true-belief reasoning from childhood to adulthood. True- and false-belief cartoon stories were presented to adults and 6-8-year-old children. Results revealed two waveforms that differentiated between the two conditions: a late positive complex (LPC) associated with the reorientation from external stimuli to internal mental representations and a late anterior slow wave (LSW) associated with stimulus-independent processing of internal mental representations, a process that might be centrally involved in the decoupling mechanism. Additionally, we found developmental effects at an ERP level. Children showed a more posterior localization of the LPC and a broader frontal distribution of the LSW. The results may reflect developmental progress in conceptualizing the mental domain and support the idea that the cortical mentalizing network continues to develop even after children are able to master false beliefs. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Content Specificity of Expectancy Beliefs and Task Values in Elementary Physical Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Ang; Martin, Robert; Ennis, Catherine D.; Sun, Haichun

2008-01-01

The curriculum may superimpose a content-specific context that mediates motivation (Bong, 2001). This study examined content specificity of the expectancy-value motivation in elementary school physical education. Students' expectancy beliefs and perceived task values from a cardiorespiratory fitness unit, a muscular fitness unit, and a traditional…

Task Complexity, Epistemological Beliefs and Metacognitive Calibration: An Exploratory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stahl, Elmar; Pieschl, Stephanie; Bromme, Rainer

2006-01-01

This article presents an explorative study, which is part of a comprehensive project to examine the impact of epistemological beliefs on metacognitive calibration during learning processes within a complex hypermedia information system. More specifically, this study investigates: 1) if learners differentiate between tasks of different complexity,…

The Role of Age and Oral Lexical Competence in False Belief Understanding by Children and Adolescents with Hearing Loss

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gonzalez, Antonia; Quintana, Inmaculada; Barajas, Carmen; Linero, Maria Jose

2007-01-01

In the past decade, most studies have reported that children who are deaf and hard of hearing who have parents with typical hearing experience a serious delay in the understanding of false belief. False belief understanding consists of the ability to infer that someone else believes that something is true when one knows it to be wrong. This…

Limits on efficient human mindreading: convergence across Chinese adults and Semai children.

PubMed

Wang, Bo; Hadi, Nur Shafiqah Abdul; Low, Jason

2015-11-01

We tested Apperly and Butterfill's (2009, Psychological Review, 116, 753) theory that humans have two mindreading systems whereby the efficient-system guiding anticipatory glances displays signature limits that do not apply to the flexible system guiding verbal predictions. Experiments 1 and 2 tested urban Mainland-Chinese adults (n = 64) and Experiment 3 tested Semai children living in the rainforests of Peninsular Malaysia (3- to 4-year-olds, n = 60). Participants - across different ages, groups and methods - anticipated others' false-beliefs about object-location but not object-identity. Convergence in signature limits signalled that the early-developing efficient system involved minimal theory-of-mind. Chinese adults and older Semai children showed flexibility in their direct predictions. The flexible mindreading system in ascribing others' beliefs as such was task-sensitive and implicated maturational and cultural contributions. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

[Mentalization and theory of mind].

PubMed

Wyl, Agnes

2014-01-01

Both concepts, mentalization and the theory of mind, describe metacognitive processes. Mentalization mainly concerns the reflection of affective mental states. In contrast, theory of mind focuses on epistemic states such as beliefs, intentions and persuasions. Gender differences have proved to be relevant for both, the development of mentalization and the theory of mind. However, there are few studies and findings are inconsistent. In an own study, we investigated the relationship between early competences in metacognition (tested in a false-belief-task second order) and narrative skills of kindergarten children. Results show that children who had successfully passed the theory of mind test tended to face conflicts more directly in the stories. In consequence, these children showed less narrative avoidance. However, differences were only found in girls and not in boys. The precise understanding of developmental differences in metacognition between girls and boys may be an important aspect with regards to improving mentalization based therapy of children.

Content Specificity of Expectancy Beliefs and Task Values in Elementary Physical Education

PubMed Central

Chen, Ang; Martin, Robert; Ennis, Catherine D.; Sun, Haichun

2015-01-01

The curriculum may superimpose a content-specific context that mediates motivation (Bong, 2001). This study examined content specificity of the expectancy-value motivation in elementary school physical education. Students’ expectancy beliefs and perceived task values from a cardiorespiratory fitness unit, a muscular fitness unit, and a traditional skill/game unit were analyzed using constant comparison coding procedures, multivariate analysis of variance, χ2, and correlation analyses. There was no difference in the intrinsic interest value among the three content conditions. Expectancy belief, attainment, and utility values were significantly higher for the cardiorespiratory fitness curriculum. Correlations differentiated among the expectancy-value components of the content conditions, providing further evidence of content specificity in the expectancy-value motivation process. The findings suggest that expectancy beliefs and task values should be incorporated in the theoretical platform for curriculum development based on the learning outcomes that can be specified with enhanced motivation effect. PMID:18664044

Atypical development of spontaneous social cognition in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Senju, Atsushi

2013-02-01

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have profound impairment in the development of social interaction and communication. However, it is also known that some 'high-functioning' individuals with ASD show apparently typical capacity to process social information in a controlled experimental settings, despite their difficulties in daily life. The current paper overviews the spontaneous social cognition, spontaneous processing of social information in the absence of explicit instruction or task demand, in individuals with ASD. Three areas of the researches, false belief attribution, imitation/mimicry, and eye gaze processing, have been reviewed. The literatures suggest that high-functioning individuals with ASD (a) do not spontaneously attribute false belief to others, even though they can easily do so when explicitly instructed, (b) can imitate others' goal-directed actions under explicit instruction and show spontaneous mimicry of others' actions when they attend to the action, but are less likely to show spontaneous mimicry without the task structure to navigate attention to others' action and (c) can process others' gaze direction and shift attention to others' gaze directions, but fail to spontaneously attend to another person's eyes in social and communicative context, and less likely to be prompted to respond in response to perceived eye contact. These results are consistent with the claim that individuals with ASD do not spontaneously attend to socially relevant information, even though they can easily process the same information when their attention is navigated towards it. Copyright © 2012 The Japanese Society of Child Neurology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Generativity and imagination in autism spectrum disorder: evidence from individual differences in children's impossible entity drawings.

PubMed

Low, Jason; Goddard, Elizabeth; Melser, Joseph

2009-06-01

This study examined the cognitive underpinnings of spontaneous imagination in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by way of individual differences. Children with ASD (N = 27) and matched typically developing (TD) children were administered Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) imaginative drawing task, along with measures that tapped specific executive functions (generativity, visuospatial planning, and central coherence processing style) and false belief theory of mind (ToM) understanding. The ASD group drawings displayed deficits in imaginative content and a piecemeal pictorial style. ASD participants also showed group deficits in generativity, planning and ToM, and exhibited weak coherence. Individual differences in generativity were related to imaginative drawing content in the ASD group, and the association was mediated through planning ability. Variations in weak coherence were separately related to a piecemeal drawing style in the ASD group. Variations in generativity were also linked with imaginative drawing content in the TD group; the connection unfolded when it received pooled variance from receptive language ability, and thereupon mediated through false belief reasoning to cue imaginative content. Results are discussed in terms of how generativity plays a broad and important role for imagination in ASD and typical development, albeit in different ways.

An exploratory study of the relationship between neurological soft signs and theory of mind deficits in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Romeo, Stefano; Chiandetti, Alessio; Siracusano, Alberto; Troisi, Alfonso

2014-08-15

Indirect evidence suggests partially common pathogenetic mechanisms for Neurological Soft Signs (NSS), neurocognition, and social cognition in schizophrenia. However, the possible association between NSS and mentalizing impairments has not yet been examined. In the present study, we assessed the ability to attribute mental states to others in patients with schizophrenia and predicted that the presence of theory of mind deficits would be significantly related to NSS. Participants were 90 clinically stable patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia. NSS were assessed using the Neurological Evaluation Scale (NES). Theory of mind deficits were assessed using short verbal stories designed to measure false belief understanding. The findings of the study confirmed our hypothesis. Impaired sequencing of complex motor acts was the only neurological abnormality correlated with theory of mind deficits. By contrast, sensory integration, motor coordination and the NES Others subscale had no association with patients׳ ability to pass first- or second-order false belief tasks. If confirmed by future studies, the current findings provide the first preliminary evidence for the claim that specific NSS and theory of mind deficits may reflect overlapping neural substrates. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Role of Tasks and Epistemological Beliefs in Online Peer Questioning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cho, Young Hoan; Lee, Jaejin; Jonassen, David H.

2011-01-01

The current study examines the assertion that students are motivated and learn more by carrying out tasks consistent with their epistemological beliefs in web-based learning environments. In the study, 120 undergraduate students in an educational technology course participated as part of their coursework. Using a wiki, triads reciprocally asked…

Children's Attention to Others' Beliefs during Persuasion: Improvised and Selected Arguments to Puppets and People

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bartsch, Karen; Wade, Christine E.; Estes, David

2011-01-01

Until now children's attention to the beliefs of people they wish to persuade has been examined experimentally via tasks that were artificial in important respects. To determine whether such research has underestimated children's psychological perspective taking, two studies that manipulated task elements pertinent to ecological validity were…

Pre-Service Teachers' Knowledge and Teaching Comfort Levels for Agricultural Science and Technology Objectives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wingenbach, Gary J.; White, Judith McIntosh; Degenhart, Shannon; Pannkuk, Tim; Kujawski, Jenna

2007-01-01

Self-efficacy beliefs are defined as context-specific assessments of one's competence to perform specific tasks, influence one's efforts, persistence, and resilience to succeed in a given task. Such beliefs are important determinants when considering agricultural science teachers' subject matter knowledge, teaching comfort levels, and their…

Beliefs about willpower moderate the effect of previous day demands on next day’s expectations and effective goal striving

PubMed Central

Bernecker, Katharina; Job, Veronika

2015-01-01

Research suggests that beliefs about willpower affect self-regulation following previous self-regulatory demands (Job et al., 2010). Some people believe that their willpower is limited, meaning that after a demanding task it needs to be replenished (limited theory). By contrast, others believe that willpower is not limited and that previous self-control tasks even activate willpower (non-limited theory). We hypothesized that when people experience a demanding day their beliefs about willpower predict their expected capacity to self-regulate and their actual self-regulation on the following day. In a daily diary study (N = 157), we measured students’ daily level of demands, their expected performance in unpleasant tasks, and their effective goal striving. Results showed that following a demanding day, students with a non-limited theory had higher expectations about their progress in unpleasant tasks and were striving more efficiently for their goals than students with a limited theory. These findings suggest that beliefs about willpower affect whether demands experienced on a previous day have positive or negative consequences on people’s self-regulation. PMID:26528198

Belief revision and delusions: how do patients with schizophrenia take advice?

PubMed

Kaliuzhna, Mariia; Chambon, Valérian; Franck, Nicolas; Testud, Bérangère; Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste

2012-01-01

The dominant cognitive model that accounts for the persistence of delusional beliefs in schizophrenia postulates that patients suffer from a general deficit in belief revision. It is generally assumed that this deficit is a consequence of impaired reasoning skills. However, the possibility that such inflexibility affects the entire system of a patient's beliefs has rarely been empirically tested. Using delusion-neutral material in a well-documented advice-taking task, the present study reports that patients with schizophrenia: 1) revise their beliefs, 2) take into account socially provided information to do so, 3) are not overconfident about their judgments, and 4) show less egocentric advice-discounting than controls. This study thus shows that delusional patients' difficulty in revising beliefs is more selective than had been previously assumed. The specificities of the task and the implications for a theory of delusion formation are discussed.

Belief Revision and Delusions: How Do Patients with Schizophrenia Take Advice?

PubMed Central

Kaliuzhna, Mariia; Chambon, Valérian; Franck, Nicolas; Testud, Bérangère; Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste

2012-01-01

The dominant cognitive model that accounts for the persistence of delusional beliefs in schizophrenia postulates that patients suffer from a general deficit in belief revision. It is generally assumed that this deficit is a consequence of impaired reasoning skills. However, the possibility that such inflexibility affects the entire system of a patient's beliefs has rarely been empirically tested. Using delusion-neutral material in a well-documented advice-taking task, the present study reports that patients with schizophrenia: 1) revise their beliefs, 2) take into account socially provided information to do so, 3) are not overconfident about their judgments, and 4) show less egocentric advice-discounting than controls. This study thus shows that delusional patients' difficulty in revising beliefs is more selective than had been previously assumed. The specificities of the task and the implications for a theory of delusion formation are discussed. PMID:22536329

Comparison of elicitation methods for moral and affective beliefs in the theory of planned behaviour.

PubMed

Dean, M; Arvola, A; Vassallo, M; Lähteenmäki, L; Raats, M M; Saba, A; Shepherd, R

2006-09-01

Although the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) has been applied successfully in the area of food choice, it has been criticized for its pure utilitarian approach to the factors determining behaviour. Despite the increase in predictive power of the model with added components such as affective attitude and moral and ethical concerns, in most studies the elicitation process still only addresses people's utilitarian beliefs about the behaviour with little attention paid to other aspects. This study compares the traditional method of elicitation of advantages and disadvantages with two other methods (word association and open-ended) in the elicitations of beliefs, attitudes and moral concerns in relation to the consumption of organic foods. Results show the traditional method to be best for eliciting cognitive beliefs, open-ended emotion task for eliciting emotional beliefs and open-ended beliefs task best for moral concerns. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed.

False Belief Development in Children Who Are Hard of Hearing Compared With Peers With Normal Hearing

PubMed Central

Ambrose, Sophie E.; Oleson, Jacob; Moeller, Mary Pat

2017-01-01

Purpose This study investigates false belief (FB) understanding in children who are hard of hearing (CHH) compared with children with normal hearing (CNH) at ages 5 and 6 years and at 2nd grade. Research with this population has theoretical significance, given that the early auditory–linguistic experiences of CHH are less restricted compared with children who are deaf but not as complete as those of CNH. Method Participants included CHH and CNH who had completed FB tasks as part of a larger multicenter, longitudinal study on outcomes of children with mild-to-severe hearing loss. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data were analyzed. Results At age 5 years, CHH demonstrated significant delays in FB understanding relative to CNH. Both hearing status and spoken-language abilities contributed to FB performance in 5-year-olds. A subgroup of CHH showed protracted delays at 6 years, suggesting that some CHH are at risk for longer term delays in FB understanding. By 2nd grade, performance on 1st- and 2nd-order FBs did not differ between CHH and CNH. Conclusions Preschool-age CHH are at risk for delays in understanding others' beliefs, which has consequences for their social interactions and pragmatic communication. Research related to FB in children with hearing loss has the potential to inform our understanding of mechanisms that support social–cognitive development, including the roles of language and conversational access. PMID:29209697

It Depends on the Partner: Person-Related Sources of Efficacy Beliefs and Performance for Athlete Pairs.

PubMed

Habeeb, Christine M; Eklund, Robert C; Coffee, Pete

2017-06-01

This study explored person-related sources of variance in athletes' efficacy beliefs and performances when performing in pairs with distinguishable roles differing in partner dependence. College cheerleaders (n = 102) performed their role in repeated performance trials of two low- and two high-difficulty paired-stunt tasks with three different partners. Data were obtained on self-, other-, and collective efficacy beliefs and subjective performances, and objective performance assessments were obtained from digital recordings. Using the social relations model framework, total variance in each belief/assessment was partitioned, for each role, into numerical components of person-related variance relative to the self, the other, and the collective. Variance component by performance role by task-difficulty repeated-measures analysis of variances revealed that the largest person-related variance component differed by athlete role and increased in size in high-difficulty tasks. Results suggest that the extent the athlete's performance depends on a partner relates to the extent the partner is a source of self-, other-, and collective efficacy beliefs.

Deafness, Thought Bubbles, and Theory-of-Mind Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wellman, Henry M.; Peterson, Candida C.

2013-01-01

The processes and mechanisms of theory-of-mind development were examined via a training study of false-belief conceptions in deaf children of hearing parents (N = 43). In comparison to 2 different control conditions, training based on thought-bubble instruction about beliefs was linked with improved false-belief understanding as well as progress…

Do 10-Month-Old Infants Understand Others' False Beliefs?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luo, Yuyan

2011-01-01

As adults, we know that others' mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others' false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed…

The use of EMDR in positive verbal material: results from a patient study

PubMed Central

Matthijssen, Suzy Johanna Martina Adriana; van den Hout, Marcel

2016-01-01

Background According to the working memory (WM) theory of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), dual tasks that tax WM during memory recall reduce image vividness and emotionality of memory during future recalls when no dual task is carried out. There is some evidence that WM taxing also reduces vividness and emotionality of auditory or verbal imagery. Objective The present study tests the effect of eye movements (EM) on positive verbal material (verbal imagery), which is used in different parts of the EMDR protocol. In the Dutch version of the standard EMDR protocol, a procedure “Positive Closure” (PC) is performed, which uses verbal imagery under dual task condition (EM). The value of EM in this procedure has not been established and according to the WM account would be counterproductive. Two earlier studies with undergraduates, with a set-up comparable to the present one, showed no additive value of the EM in the procedure, but no counterproductive effect either. Method Thirty-six patients rated the belief in possessing two positive personality traits and emotionality of the traits. They then had an EMDR session targeting a negative memory and recalled and re-rated the belief and emotionality of the traits afterward. Subsequently, they recalled one trait while dual tasking (EM) and the other trait without dual tasking. Afterward, they re-rated the belief and emotionality. Results EM did not affect the belief in possessing the trait or the emotionality. Secondary analysis shows an effective EMDR session itself enhances the belief in the traits, compared to a less or non-effective EMDR session. Conclusions EM are not effective in enhancing the belief in possessing a personality trait or the emotionality. If replicated by other patient studies, this suggests elimination of the PC procedure. Highlights of the article In this study the additive value of EM on verbal material (in the procedure Positive Closure) is not found. No effect of the procedure Positive Closure on the Belief in a personality trait nor the emotional intensity of the trait was found. An effective EMDR session (large reduction of the SUD during the session) was effective in changing the Belief in personality traits. PMID:27387844

Self-help memory training for healthy older adults in a residential care center: specific and transfer effects on performance and beliefs.

PubMed

Cavallini, Elena; Bottiroli, Sara; Capotosto, Emanuela; De Beni, Rossana; Pavan, Giorgio; Vecchi, Tomaso; Borella, Erika

2015-08-01

Cognitive flexibility has repeatedly been shown to improve after training programs in community-dwelling older adults, but few studies have focused on healthy older adults living in other settings. This study investigated the efficacy of self-help training for healthy older adults in a residential care center on memory tasks they practiced (associative and object list learning tasks) and any transfer to other tasks (grocery lists, face-name learning, figure-word pairing, word lists, and text learning). Transfer effects on everyday life (using a problem-solving task) and on participants' beliefs regarding their memory (efficacy and control) were also examined. With the aid of a manual, the training adopted a learner-oriented approach that directly encouraged learners to generalize strategic behavior to new tasks. The maintenance of any training benefits was assessed after 6 months. The study involved 34 residential care center residents (aged 70-99 years old) with no cognitive impairments who were randomly assigned to two programs: the experimental group followed the self-help training program, whereas the active control group was involved in general cognitive stimulation activities. Training benefits emerged in the trained group for the tasks that were practiced. Transfer effects were found in memory and everyday problem-solving tasks and on memory beliefs. The effects of training were generally maintained in both practiced and unpracticed memory tasks. These results demonstrate that learner-oriented self-help training enhances memory performance and memory beliefs, in the short term at least, even in residential care center residents. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

False-Belief Understanding and Language Ability Mediate the Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Prosocial Orientation in Preschoolers.

PubMed

Ornaghi, Veronica; Pepe, Alessandro; Grazzani, Ilaria

2016-01-01

Emotion comprehension (EC) is known to be a key correlate and predictor of prosociality from early childhood. In the present study, we examined this relationship within the broad theoretical construct of social understanding which includes a number of socio-emotional skills, as well as cognitive and linguistic abilities. Theory of mind, especially false-belief understanding, has been found to be positively correlated with both EC and prosocial orientation. Similarly, language ability is known to play a key role in children's socio-emotional development. The combined contribution of false-belief understanding and language to explaining the relationship between EC and prosociality has yet to be investigated. Thus, in the current study, we conducted an in-depth exploration of how preschoolers' false-belief understanding and language ability each contribute to modeling the relationship between children's comprehension of emotion and their disposition to act prosocially toward others, after controlling for age and gender. Participants were 101 4- to 6-year-old children (54% boys), who were administered measures of language ability, false-belief understanding, EC and prosocial orientation. Multiple mediation analysis of the data suggested that false-belief understanding and language ability jointly and fully mediated the effect of preschoolers' EC on their prosocial orientation. Analysis of covariates revealed that gender exerted no statistically significant effect, while age had a trivial positive effect. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Secondary Teachers’ Mathematics-related Beliefs and Knowledge about Mathematical Problem-solving

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

E Siswono, T. Y.; Kohar, A. W.; Hartono, S.

2017-02-01

This study investigates secondary teachers’ belief about the three mathematics-related beliefs, i.e. nature of mathematics, teaching mathematics, learning mathematics, and knowledge about mathematical problem solving. Data were gathered through a set of task-based semi-structured interviews of three selected teachers with different philosophical views of teaching mathematics, i.e. instrumental, platonist, and problem solving. Those teachers were selected from an interview using a belief-related task from purposively selected teachers in Surabaya and Sidoarjo. While the interviews about knowledge examine teachers’ problem solving content and pedagogical knowledge, the interviews about beliefs examine their views on several cases extracted from each of such mathematics-related beliefs. Analysis included the categorization and comparison on each of beliefs and knowledge as well as their interaction. Results indicate that all the teachers did not show a high consistency in responding views of their mathematics-related beliefs, while they showed weaknesses primarily on problem solving content knowledge. Findings also point out that teachers’ beliefs have a strong relationship with teachers’ knowledge about problem solving. In particular, the instrumental teacher’s beliefs were consistent with his insufficient knowledge about problem-solving, while both platonist and problem-solving teacher’s beliefs were consistent with their sufficient knowledge of either content or pedagogical problem solving.

Promoting Mentalizing in Pupils by Acting on Teachers: Preliminary Italian Evidence of the “Thought in Mind” Project

PubMed Central

Valle, Annalisa; Massaro, Davide; Castelli, Ilaria; Sangiuliano Intra, Francesca; Lombardi, Elisabetta; Bracaglia, Edoardo; Marchetti, Antonella

2016-01-01

Mentalization research focuses on different aspects of this topic, highlighting individual differences in mentalizing and proposing programs of intervention for children and adults to increase this ability. The “Thought in Mind Project” (TiM Project) provides training targeted to adults—teachers or parents—to increase their mentalization and, consequently, to obtain mentalization improvement in children. The present research aimed to explore for the first time ever the potential of training for teachers based on the TiM Project, regarding the enhancement of mentalizing of an adult who would have interacted as a teacher with children. For this reason, two teachers – similar for meta-cognitive and meta-emotional skills - and their classes (N = 46) were randomly assigned to the training or control condition. In the first case, the teacher participated in training on the implementation of promotion of mentalizing in everyday school teaching strategies; in the second case the teacher participated in a control activity, similar to training for scheduling and methods, but without promoting the implementation of mentalization (in both conditions two meetings lasting about 3 h at the beginning of the school year and two supervisions during the school year were conducted). The children were tested by tasks assessing several aspects of mentalization (second and third-order false belief understanding, Strange Stories, Reading the mind in the Eyes, Mentalizing Task) both before and after the teacher participate in the TiM or control training (i.e., at the beginning and at the end of the school year). The results showed that, although some measured components of mentalization progressed over time, only the TiM Project training group significantly improved in third order false belief understanding and changed - in a greater way compared to the control group – in two of the three components of the Mentalizing Task. These evidences are promising about the idea that the creation of a mentalizing community promotes the mentalization abilities of its members. PMID:27630586

Promoting Mentalizing in Pupils by Acting on Teachers: Preliminary Italian Evidence of the "Thought in Mind" Project.

PubMed

Valle, Annalisa; Massaro, Davide; Castelli, Ilaria; Sangiuliano Intra, Francesca; Lombardi, Elisabetta; Bracaglia, Edoardo; Marchetti, Antonella

2016-01-01

Mentalization research focuses on different aspects of this topic, highlighting individual differences in mentalizing and proposing programs of intervention for children and adults to increase this ability. The "Thought in Mind Project" (TiM Project) provides training targeted to adults-teachers or parents-to increase their mentalization and, consequently, to obtain mentalization improvement in children. The present research aimed to explore for the first time ever the potential of training for teachers based on the TiM Project, regarding the enhancement of mentalizing of an adult who would have interacted as a teacher with children. For this reason, two teachers - similar for meta-cognitive and meta-emotional skills - and their classes (N = 46) were randomly assigned to the training or control condition. In the first case, the teacher participated in training on the implementation of promotion of mentalizing in everyday school teaching strategies; in the second case the teacher participated in a control activity, similar to training for scheduling and methods, but without promoting the implementation of mentalization (in both conditions two meetings lasting about 3 h at the beginning of the school year and two supervisions during the school year were conducted). The children were tested by tasks assessing several aspects of mentalization (second and third-order false belief understanding, Strange Stories, Reading the mind in the Eyes, Mentalizing Task) both before and after the teacher participate in the TiM or control training (i.e., at the beginning and at the end of the school year). The results showed that, although some measured components of mentalization progressed over time, only the TiM Project training group significantly improved in third order false belief understanding and changed - in a greater way compared to the control group - in two of the three components of the Mentalizing Task. These evidences are promising about the idea that the creation of a mentalizing community promotes the mentalization abilities of its members.

Influence of Significant Others on High School Students' Expectancies of Success and Task Value in Physical Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Skip M.; Weiss, Windee

2018-01-01

This study examined the perceived influence of significant others' beliefs on students' expectancies of success and task value in physical education (PE). PE students (N = 231) between Grades 9 and 12 participated. Multiple regressions examined the influence of perceived parents', teachers', and classmates' beliefs on students' ability…

Academic Self-Efficacy in the College Classroom: An Examination of Undergraduate Students' Reported Efficacy for Learning Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Conner, Timothy W., II; Aagaard, Lola; Skidmore, Ronald L.

2011-01-01

Self-efficacy is a personal belief in one's ability to accomplish particular tasks. Academic self-efficacy relates to one's belief in ability to accomplish learning activities. A convenient cluster sample (n = 105) of undergraduate students at a regional university in the midsouth was administered a survey that measured student academic…

I believe I'm good at orienting myself… But is that true?

PubMed

Nori, Raffaella; Piccardi, Laura

2015-08-01

The present study aimed to analyse beliefs that men and women have with respect to their sense of direction (SOD) and whether they correlate with spatial environmental task performance. Eighty-four students filled in the short version of the Familiarity and Spatial Cognitive Style Scale to evaluate beliefs on their SOD, knowledge of the city (TK), spatial ability (SA) and wayfinding (WA) and performed three spatial environmental tasks. Results showed that gender did not predict the performance on the spatial environmental tasks, whereas it can be predicted by participants' beliefs related to their SOD and TK. The findings point out the need to identify specific training aimed at improving women's metacognitive skills in order to delete or reduce gender differences in SA.

The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: a training study.

PubMed

Lohmann, Heidemarie; Tomasello, Michael

2003-01-01

The current study used a training methodology to determine whether different kinds of linguistic interaction play a causal role in children's development of false belief understanding. After 3 training sessions, 3-year-old children improved their false belief understanding both in a training condition involving perspective-shifting discourse about deceptive objects (without mental state terms) and in a condition in which sentential complement syntax was used (without deceptive objects). Children did not improve in a condition in which they were exposed to deceptive objects without accompanying language. Children showed most improvement in a condition using both perspective-shifting discourse and sentential complement syntax, suggesting that each of these types of linguistic experience plays an independent role in the ontogeny of false belief understanding.

Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God.

PubMed

Barlev, Michael; Mermelstein, Spencer; German, Tamsin C

2017-04-01

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., "God has beliefs that are true"] or false according to both [e.g., "All beliefs God has are false"]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., "God has beliefs that are false"] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., "All beliefs God has are true"]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God-a supernatural religious entity-but not for a natural religious entity (a priest). Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Reliability and validity of advanced theory-of-mind measures in middle childhood and adolescence.

PubMed

Hayward, Elizabeth O; Homer, Bruce D

2017-09-01

Although theory-of-mind (ToM) development is well documented for early childhood, there is increasing research investigating changes in ToM reasoning in middle childhood and adolescence. However, the psychometric properties of most advanced ToM measures for use with older children and adolescents have not been firmly established. We report on the reliability and validity of widely used, conventional measures of advanced ToM with this age group. Notable issues with both reliability and validity of several of the measures were evident in the findings. With regard to construct validity, results do not reveal a clear empirical commonality between tasks, and, after accounting for comprehension, developmental trends were evident in only one of the tasks investigated. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Second-order false belief tasks have acceptable internal consistency. The Eyes Test has poor internal consistency. Validity of advanced theory-of-mind tasks is often based on the ability to distinguish clinical from typical groups. What does this study add? This study examines internal consistency across six widely used advanced theory-of-mind tasks. It investigates validity of tasks based on comprehension of items by typically developing individuals. It further assesses construct validity, or commonality between tasks. © 2017 The British Psychological Society.

Belief Inhibition in Children's Reasoning: Memory-Based Evidence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steegen, Sara; Neys, Wim De

2012-01-01

Adult reasoning has been shown as mediated by the inhibition of intuitive beliefs that are in conflict with logic. The current study introduces a classic procedure from the memory field to investigate belief inhibition in 12- to 17-year-old reasoners. A lexical decision task was used to probe the memory accessibility of beliefs that were cued…

Educational Supervisors' Metaphorical Roots of Beliefs about Teaching and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buaraphan, Khajornsak

2012-01-01

Beliefs are a complex psychological construct that have potential to drive a person to make decisions and act. A person's metaphors can serve as roots of their beliefs. In this study, the metaphor construction task (MCT) was utilized to uncover beliefs about teaching and learning held by 216 educational supervisors from 10 provinces in the central…

Epistemic Beliefs and Their Relation to Multiple-Text Comprehension: A Norwegian Program of Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferguson, Leila E.

2015-01-01

Nowadays, students are required to use multiple information sources to complete tasks, both in and out of school. The beliefs that students hold about knowledge and knowing--their epistemic beliefs-- have been linked to successful integration of information across multiple texts. Framed by literature on epistemic belief research from an…

Delusions as harmful malfunctioning beliefs.

PubMed

Miyazono, Kengo

2015-05-01

Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is clearly distinguished from being false or being irrational. Anna might falsely believe that his husband is having an affair but it might just be a simple mistake. Again, Sam might irrationally believe, without good evidence, that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the other hand, when a patient with brain damage caused by a car accident believes that his father was replaced by an imposter or another patient with schizophrenia believes that "The Organization" painted the shops on a street in red and green to convey a message, these beliefs are not merely false or irrational. They are pathological. What makes delusions pathological? This paper explores the negative features because of which delusional beliefs are pathological. First, I critically examine the proposals according to which delusional beliefs are pathological because of (1) their strangeness, (2) their extreme irrationality, (3) their resistance to folk psychological explanations or (4) impaired responsibility-grounding capacities of people with them. I present some counterexamples as well as theoretical problems for these proposals. Then, I argue, following Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder, that delusional beliefs are pathological because they involve some sorts of harmful malfunctions. In other words, they have a significant negative impact on wellbeing (=harmful) and, in addition, some psychological mechanisms, directly or indirectly related to them, fail to perform the jobs for which they were selected in the past (=malfunctioning). An objection to the proposal is that delusional beliefs might not involve any malfunctions. For example, they might be playing psychological defence functions properly. Another objection is that a harmful malfunction is not sufficient for something to be pathological. For example, false beliefs might involve some malfunctions according to teleosemantics, a popular naturalist account of mental content, but harmful false beliefs do not have to be pathological. I examine those objections in detail and show that they should be rejected after all. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Math-related career aspirations and choices within Eccles et al.'s expectancy-value theory of achievement-related behaviors.

PubMed

Lauermann, Fani; Tsai, Yi-Miau; Eccles, Jacquelynne S

2017-08-01

Which occupation to pursue is one of the more consequential decisions people make and represents a key developmental task. Yet the underlying developmental processes associated with either individual or group differences in occupational choices are still not well understood. This study contributes toward filling this gap, focusing in particular on the math domain. We examined two aspects of Eccles et al.'s (1983) expectancy-value theory of achievement-related behaviors: (a) the reciprocal associations between adolescents' expectancy and subjective task value beliefs and adolescents' career plans and (b) the multiplicative association between expectancies and values in predicting occupational outcomes in the math domain. Our analyses indicate that adolescents' expectancy and subjective task value beliefs about math and their math- or science-related career plans reported at the beginning and end of high school predict each other over time, with the exception of intrinsic interest in math. Furthermore, multiplicative associations between adolescents' expectancy and subjective task value beliefs about math predict math-related career attainment approximately 15 years after graduation from high school. Gender differences emerged regarding career-related beliefs and career attainment, with male students being more likely than female to both pursue and attain math-related careers. These gender differences could not be explained by differences in beliefs about math as an academic subject. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

"What I believe is true": Belief-confirming reasoning bias in social anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Vroling, Maartje S; Glashouwer, Klaske A; Lange, Wolf-Gero; Allart-van Dam, Esther; de Jong, Peter J

2016-12-01

Research shows that people tend to consider believable conclusions as valid and unbelievable conclusions as invalid (belief bias). When applied to anxiogenic beliefs, this belief bias could well hinder the correction of dysfunctional convictions. Previous work has shown that high socially anxious students indeed display such fear-confirming, belief biased, reasoning. A critical next question is whether these findings translate to a clinical population of people with social anxiety disorder (SAD). We test whether (i) patients with SAD show belief bias with regard to SAD-relevant themes, (ii) this belief bias is specific for SAD patients or can also be found in panic disorder (PD) patients, (iii) differential belief bias effects in SAD are restricted to social anxiety concerns or are also evident in the context of reasoning with neutral themes. 45 SAD patients, 24 PD patients, and 45 non-symptomatic controls (NSCs) completed a syllogistic belief bias task with SAD-relevant and neutral content. SAD patients displayed belief bias for social anxiety related materials, while the PD group and the NSC group did not. Yet, the difference between SAD and PD was not significant. All groups showed similar belief bias effects for neutral content. Content of the belief bias task was not tailored to idiosyncratic beliefs. The study lacked power to detect medium or small differences. SAD patients showed concern-congruent belief biased interference effects when judging the logical validity of social anxiety relevant syllogisms. Such concern-relevant belief bias may contribute to the persistence of anxiogenic beliefs. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

What is "theory of mind"? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences.

PubMed

Apperly, Ian A

2012-01-01

Research on "theory of mind" has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.

On Supporting Physical Skill Discovery

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Furukawa, Koichi; Suwa, Masaki; Kato, Takaaki

One of the main difficulties in motor skill acquisition is attributed to body control based on wrong mental models. This is true to various domains such as playing sports and playing musical instruments. In order to acquire adequate motor skill by modifying false belief, we need to help people find appropriate key points in achieving a body control and integrate them. In this paper, we investigate three approaches to realize such support. The first one is to encourage exploration of the relations among key points constituting a motor skill, using a technique of meta-cognitive verbalization. The second one is to represent a motor skill by appropriate mechanical models. The third one is to integrate rules for component tasks in achieving a compound task. These three approaches, we argue, help people build an integrated mental model consisting of multiple relations among various key points, one that seems to be indispensable for acquisition of motor skills. These ideas suggest the possibility to create new skill rules to perform difficult tasks automatically.

Theory of mind abilities in young siblings of children with autism.

PubMed

Shaked, Michal; Gamliel, Ifat; Yirmiya, Nurit

2006-03-01

Deficits in theory of mind (ToM), evident in most individuals with autism, have been suggested as a core deficit of autism. ToM difficulties in young siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) compared to siblings of typically developing children (SIBS-TD) would place the former within the broad phenotype. We examined ToM's possible associations with measures of language, cognition, and daily living skills. Participants comprised 24 SIBS-A and 24 matched SIBSTD aged 4.6 years. They completed the false belief and the strange stories tasks. We also collected measures of verbal and cognitive ability and daily living skills. Non-significant differences emerged between the groups on both ToM tasks. Differences did emerge in within-group associations between ToM ability and receptive language. The conclusion is that SIBS-A show resilience in ToM abilities. Possibly, these deficits are not genetically transferred to siblings, at least as measured in laboratory-based ToM tasks.

Effect of religious context on the content of visual hallucinations in individuals high in religiosity.

PubMed

Reed, Phil; Clarke, Natasha

2014-03-30

This study investigated the interaction between the current environment and personality factors associated with religiosity in determining the content of false perceptions (used as a model for hallucinations). A primed word-detection task was used to investigate the effect of a 'religious' context on false perceptions in individuals scoring highly on religiosity. After a subliminal prime, participants viewed letter strings, and stated any words that they saw. The prime and the actual words could have a religious connotation or not. Participants measuring high on religiosity were more likely to report false perceptions of a religious type than participants low on religiosity. It is suggested that context affects the content of false perceptions through the activation of stored beliefs and values, which vary between individuals, offering a mechanism for the effect of context on idiosyncratic content of hallucinations in schizophrenia. The effect of context and individual differences on false-perception content in the current study provides possibilities for future work regarding the underlying nature of hallucinations and their treatment. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Exploring Young Children's Self-Efficacy Beliefs Related to Mathematical and Nonmathematical Tasks Performed in Kindergarten: Abused and Neglected Children and Their Peers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tirosh, Dina; Tsamir, Pessia; Levenson, Esther; Tabach, Michal; Barkai, Ruthi

2013-01-01

This article reports on young children's self-efficacy beliefs and their corresponding performance of mathematical and nonmathematical tasks typically encountered in kindergarten. Participants included 132 kindergarten children aged 5-6 years old. Among the participants, 69 children were identified by the social welfare department as being abused…

Effects of Home Literacy, Parents' Beliefs, and Children's Task-Focused Behavior on Emergent Literacy and Word Reading Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stephenson, Kathy A.; Parrila, Rauno K.; Georgiou, George K.; Kirby, John R.

2008-01-01

We examined the effects of home literacy (shared book reading, teaching activities, and number of books), children's task-focused behavior, and parents' beliefs and expectations about their child's reading and academic ability on kindergarten children's (N = 61) phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge and on Grade 1 word reading. The results…

Relation between Belief and Performance in Perceptual Decision Making

PubMed Central

Drugowitsch, Jan; Moreno-Bote, Rubén; Pouget, Alexandre

2014-01-01

In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires that subjects form and maintain a belief about the correctness of their choices, a process called meta-cognition. Prediction of future outcomes and self-monitoring are only effective if belief closely matches behavioral performance. Equality between belief and performance is also critical for experimentalists to gain insight into the subjects' belief by simply measuring their performance. Assuming that the decision maker holds the correct model of the world, one might indeed expect that belief and performance should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, we show here that this is rarely the case when performance is defined as the percentage of correct responses for a fixed stimulus, a standard definition in psychophysics. In this case, belief equals performance only for a very narrow family of tasks, whereas in others they will only be very weakly correlated. As we will see it is possible to restore this equality in specific circumstances but this remedy is only effective for a decision-maker, not for an experimenter. We furthermore show that belief and performance do not match when conditioned on task difficulty – as is common practice when plotting the psychometric curve – highlighting common pitfalls in previous neuroscience work. Finally, we demonstrate that miscalibration and the hard-easy effect observed in humans' and other animals' certainty judgments could be explained by a mismatch between the experimenter's and decision maker's expected distribution of task difficulties. These results have important implications for experimental design and are of relevance for theories that aim to unravel the nature of meta-cognition. PMID:24816801

Relation between belief and performance in perceptual decision making.

PubMed

Drugowitsch, Jan; Moreno-Bote, Rubén; Pouget, Alexandre

2014-01-01

In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires that subjects form and maintain a belief about the correctness of their choices, a process called meta-cognition. Prediction of future outcomes and self-monitoring are only effective if belief closely matches behavioral performance. Equality between belief and performance is also critical for experimentalists to gain insight into the subjects' belief by simply measuring their performance. Assuming that the decision maker holds the correct model of the world, one might indeed expect that belief and performance should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, we show here that this is rarely the case when performance is defined as the percentage of correct responses for a fixed stimulus, a standard definition in psychophysics. In this case, belief equals performance only for a very narrow family of tasks, whereas in others they will only be very weakly correlated. As we will see it is possible to restore this equality in specific circumstances but this remedy is only effective for a decision-maker, not for an experimenter. We furthermore show that belief and performance do not match when conditioned on task difficulty--as is common practice when plotting the psychometric curve--highlighting common pitfalls in previous neuroscience work. Finally, we demonstrate that miscalibration and the hard-easy effect observed in humans' and other animals' certainty judgments could be explained by a mismatch between the experimenter's and decision maker's expected distribution of task difficulties. These results have important implications for experimental design and are of relevance for theories that aim to unravel the nature of meta-cognition.

How do I know what I can do? Anticipating expectancy of success regarding novel academic tasks.

PubMed

Gorges, Julia; Göke, Thomas

2015-03-01

After graduation from secondary school, academic tasks (i.e., learning contents) are no longer structured in terms of school subjects (i.e., English, mathematics). Therefore, learners lack past performance and mastery experience to inform their expectancy of success (i.e., ability beliefs) regarding novel tasks. In this paper, we investigate how individuals establish expectancy of success regarding novel academic tasks. We hypothesize that individuals draw on ability beliefs regarding known tasks that are deemed similar to novel tasks to estimate expectancy of success (generalization hypothesis). Participants were first-year students (n = 354) in the field of business administration (Study 1), and (Study 2) psychology students predominantly (n = 174). In Study 1, we analysed relations between ability beliefs (i.e., academic self-concepts of ability) regarding four school subjects and four fields of study varying in similarity. In Study 2, we assessed mastery experience regarding two school subjects and expectancy of success (i.e., self-efficacy) regarding a fictitious course manipulating participants' similarity judgement. We analysed the data using mainly structural equation modelling. Results support the generalization hypothesis regarding both indicators of expectancy of success (i.e., self-concept and self-efficacy). Subject-specific self-concepts of ability predict study-related self-concepts of ability according to individuals' similarity judgements. Subject-specific mastery experience predicts expectancy of success only if the respective school subject is emphasized in the course description. Individuals apparently draw on established ability beliefs regarding known tasks to inform their expectancy of success regarding novel tasks. Findings further our understanding of the development of motivation to learn in adulthood. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

False-Belief Understanding and Language Ability Mediate the Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Prosocial Orientation in Preschoolers

PubMed Central

Ornaghi, Veronica; Pepe, Alessandro; Grazzani, Ilaria

2016-01-01

Emotion comprehension (EC) is known to be a key correlate and predictor of prosociality from early childhood. In the present study, we examined this relationship within the broad theoretical construct of social understanding which includes a number of socio-emotional skills, as well as cognitive and linguistic abilities. Theory of mind, especially false-belief understanding, has been found to be positively correlated with both EC and prosocial orientation. Similarly, language ability is known to play a key role in children’s socio-emotional development. The combined contribution of false-belief understanding and language to explaining the relationship between EC and prosociality has yet to be investigated. Thus, in the current study, we conducted an in-depth exploration of how preschoolers’ false-belief understanding and language ability each contribute to modeling the relationship between children’s comprehension of emotion and their disposition to act prosocially toward others, after controlling for age and gender. Participants were 101 4- to 6-year-old children (54% boys), who were administered measures of language ability, false-belief understanding, EC and prosocial orientation. Multiple mediation analysis of the data suggested that false-belief understanding and language ability jointly and fully mediated the effect of preschoolers’ EC on their prosocial orientation. Analysis of covariates revealed that gender exerted no statistically significant effect, while age had a trivial positive effect. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. PMID:27774075

Left inferior-parietal lobe activity in perspective tasks: identity statements

PubMed Central

Arora, Aditi; Weiss, Benjamin; Schurz, Matthias; Aichhorn, Markus; Wieshofer, Rebecca C.; Perner, Josef

2015-01-01

We investigate the theory that the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is closely associated with tracking potential differences of perspective. Developmental studies find that perspective tasks are mastered at around 4 years of age. Our first study, meta-analyses of brain imaging studies shows that perspective tasks specifically activate a region in the left IPL and precuneus. These tasks include processing of false belief, visual perspective, and episodic memory. We test the location specificity theory in our second study with an unusual and novel kind of perspective task: identity statements. According to Frege's classical logical analysis, identity statements require appreciation of modes of presentation (perspectives). We show that identity statements, e.g., “the tour guide is also the driver” activate the left IPL in contrast to a control statements, “the tour guide has an apprentice.” This activation overlaps with the activations found in the meta-analysis. This finding is confirmed in a third study with different types of statements and different comparisons. All studies support the theory that the left IPL has as one of its overarching functions the tracking of perspective differences. We discuss how this function relates to the bottom-up attention function proposed for the bilateral IPL. PMID:26175677

Systematic Comparison of Brain Imaging Meta-Analyses of ToM with vPT

PubMed Central

Schurz, Matthias; Perner, Josef

2017-01-01

In visual perspective taking (vPT) one has to concern oneself with what other people see and how they see it. Since seeing is a mental state, developmental studies have discussed vPT within the domain of “theory of mind (ToM)” but imaging studies have not treated it as such. Based on earlier results from several meta-analyses, we tested for the overlap of visual perspective taking studies with 6 different kinds of ToM studies: false belief, trait judgments, strategic games, social animations, mind in the eyes, and rational actions. Joint activation was observed between the vPT task and some kinds of ToM tasks in regions involving the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anterior precuneus, left middle occipital gyrus/extrastriate body area (EBA), and the left inferior frontal and precentral gyrus. Importantly, no overlap activation was found for the vPT tasks with the joint core of all six kinds of ToM tasks. This raises the important question of what the common denominator of all tasks that fall under the label of “theory of mind” is supposed to be if visual perspective taking is not one of them. PMID:28367446

Systematic Comparison of Brain Imaging Meta-Analyses of ToM with vPT.

PubMed

Arora, Aditi; Schurz, Matthias; Perner, Josef

2017-01-01

In visual perspective taking (vPT) one has to concern oneself with what other people see and how they see it. Since seeing is a mental state, developmental studies have discussed vPT within the domain of "theory of mind (ToM)" but imaging studies have not treated it as such. Based on earlier results from several meta-analyses, we tested for the overlap of visual perspective taking studies with 6 different kinds of ToM studies: false belief, trait judgments, strategic games, social animations, mind in the eyes, and rational actions. Joint activation was observed between the vPT task and some kinds of ToM tasks in regions involving the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anterior precuneus, left middle occipital gyrus/extrastriate body area (EBA), and the left inferior frontal and precentral gyrus. Importantly, no overlap activation was found for the vPT tasks with the joint core of all six kinds of ToM tasks. This raises the important question of what the common denominator of all tasks that fall under the label of "theory of mind" is supposed to be if visual perspective taking is not one of them.

Theory of mind in Alzheimer disease: Evidence of authentic impairment during social interaction.

PubMed

Moreau, Noémie; Rauzy, Stéphane; Viallet, François; Champagne-Lavau, Maud

2016-03-01

The present study aimed to investigate theory of mind (the ability to infer others' mental states) deficit in 20 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and 20 healthy controls, with 2 theory of mind tasks, 1 of them being a real interactive task. Previous results concerning preserved or altered theory of mind abilities in Alzheimer's disease have been inconsistent and relationships with other cognitive dysfunctions (notably episodic memory and executive functions) are still unclear. The first task we used was a false belief paradigm as frequently used in literature whereas the second task, a referential communication task, assessed theory of mind in a real situation of interaction. Participants also underwent neuropsychological evaluation to investigate potential relationships between theory of mind and memory deficits. The results showed that Alzheimer patients presented a genuine and significant theory of mind deficit compared to control participants characterized notably by difficulties to attribute knowledge to an interlocutor in a real social interaction. These results further confirm that theory of mind is altered in early stages of Alzheimer dementia which is consistent with previous works. More specifically, this study is the first to objectivize this impairment in social interaction. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Spirituality and Ten False Beliefs and Pursuits of Women with Eating Disorders: Implications for Counselors.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardman, Randy K.; Berrett, Michael E.; Richards, P. Scott

2003-01-01

Authors describe ten false beliefs that women with eating disorders may hold. They explain how the pursuit of these beliefs can prevent the women from connecting with God and with others in genuine ways. They also suggest some therapeutic strategies that may help women with eating disorders find a healing and helpful spiritual perspective.…

18-Month-Olds Predict Specific Action Mistakes through Attribution of False Belief, Not Ignorance, and Intervene Accordingly

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Knudsen, Birgit; Liszkowski, Ulf

2012-01-01

This study employed a new "anticipatory intervening" paradigm to tease apart false belief and ignorance-based interpretations of 18-month-olds' helpful informing. We investigated in three experiments whether 18-month-old infants inform an adult selectively about one of the two locations depending on the adult's belief about which of the two…

Two Sources of Evidence on the Non-Automaticity of True and False Belief Ascription

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Back, Elisa; Apperly, Ian A.

2010-01-01

A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by "default" (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the…

False belief and counterfactual reasoning in a social environment.

PubMed

Van Hoeck, Nicole; Begtas, Elizabet; Steen, Johan; Kestemont, Jenny; Vandekerckhove, Marie; Van Overwalle, Frank

2014-04-15

Behavioral studies indicate that theory of mind and counterfactual reasoning are strongly related cognitive processes. In a neuroimaging study, we explored the common and distinct regions underlying these inference processes. We directly compared false belief reasoning (inferring an agent's false belief about an object's location or content) and counterfactual reasoning (inferring what the object's location or content would be if an agent had acted differently), both in contrast with a baseline condition of conditional reasoning (inferring what the true location or content of an object is). Results indicate that these three types of reasoning about social scenarios are supported by activations in the mentalizing network (left temporo-parietal junction and precuneus) and the executive control network (bilateral prefrontal cortex [PFC] and right inferior parietal lobule). In addition, representing a false belief or counterfactual state (both not directly observable in the external world) recruits additional activity in the executive control network (left dorsolateral PFC and parietal lobe). The results further suggest that counterfactual reasoning is a more complex cognitive process than false belief reasoning, showing stronger activation of the dorsomedial, left dorsolateral PFC, cerebellum and left temporal cortex. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Matching achievement contexts with implicit theories to maximize motivation after failure: a congruence model.

PubMed

El-Alayli, Amani

2006-12-01

Previous research has shown that matching person variables with achievement contexts can produce the best motivational outcomes. The current study examines whether this is also true when matching entity and incremental beliefs with the appropriate motivational climate. Participants were led to believe that a personal attribute was fixed (entity belief) or malleable (incremental belief). After thinking that they failed a test that assessed the attribute, participants performed a second (related) task in a context that facilitated the pursuit of either performance or learning goals. Participants were expected to exhibit greater effort on the second task in the congruent conditions (entity belief plus performance goal climate and incremental belief plus learning goal climate) than in the incongruent conditions. These results were obtained, but only for participants who either valued competence on the attribute or had high achievement motivation. Results are discussed in terms of developing strategies for optimizing motivation in achievement settings.

Knowledge about infertility risk factors, fertility myths and illusory benefits of healthy habits in young people.

PubMed

Bunting, Laura; Boivin, Jacky

2008-08-01

Previous research has highlighted a lack of fertility awareness in the general population especially in relation to the optimal fertile period during the menstrual cycle, incidence of infertility and duration of the reproductive life span. The current study assessed fertility knowledge more broadly in young people and investigated three areas of knowledge, namely risk factors associated with female infertility (e.g. smoking), beliefs in false fertility myths (e.g. benefits of rural living) and beliefs in the illusory benefits of healthy habits (e.g. exercising regularly) on female fertility. The sample (n = 149) consisted of 110 female and 39 male postgraduate and undergraduate university students (average age 24.01, SD = 7.81). Knowledge scores were based on a simple task requiring the participants to estimate the effect a factor would have on a group of 100 women trying to get pregnant. Items (n = 21) were grouped according to three categories: risk factors (e.g. smoking; 7 items), myths (e.g. living in countryside; 7 items) and healthy habits (e.g. being normal weight; 7 items). An analysis of variance showed a significant main effect of factor (P < 0.001) and post hoc tests revealed that young people were significantly better at correctly identifying the effects of risks compared with null effects of healthy habits (P < 0.001) or fertility myths (P < 0.001). Young people are aware that the negative lifestyle factors reduce fertility but falsely believe in fertility myths and the benefits of healthy habits. We suggest that the public education campaigns should be directed to erroneous beliefs about pseudo protective factors.

Together I Can! Joint Attention Boosts 3- to 4-Year-Olds' Performance in a Verbal False-Belief Test.

PubMed

Psouni, Elia; Falck, Andreas; Boström, Leni; Persson, Martin; Sidén, Lisa; Wallin, Maria

2018-04-20

Effects of joint attention were addressed on 3- to 4-year-olds' performance in a verbal false-Belief Test (FBT), featuring the experimenter as co-watcher rather than narrator. In two experiments, children (N = 183) watched a filmed-FBT jointly with a test leader, disjointed from a test leader, or alone. Children attending jointly with a test leader were more likely to pass the FBT compared with normative data and to spontaneously recall information indicating false-belief understanding, suggesting that joint attention strengthens the plausibility of the FBT and renders plot-critical information more salient. In a third experiment (N = 59), results were replicated using a typical, image-based FBT. Overall findings highlight the profound impact of experimenter as social context in verbal FBTs, and link recall of specific story features to false-belief understanding. © 2018 Society for Research in Child Development.

Themes and Interplay of Beliefs in Mathematical Reasoning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sumpter, Lovisa

2013-01-01

Upper secondary students' task solving reasoning was analysed with a focus on arguments for strategy choices and conclusions. Passages in their arguments for reasoning that indicated the students' beliefs were identified and, by using a thematic analysis, categorized. The results stress three themes of beliefs used as arguments for…

Finding the Optimal Scaffoldings for Learners' Epistemological Beliefs during Ill-Structured Problem Solving

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shin, Suhkyung; Song, Hae-Deok

2016-01-01

This study investigates how scaffolding type and learners' epistemological beliefs influence ill-structured problem solving. The independent variables in this study include the type of scaffolding (task-supported, self-monitoring) and the student's epistemological belief level (more advanced, less advanced). The dependent variables include three…

Belief-bias reasoning in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals.

PubMed

Anandakumar, T; Connaughton, E; Coltheart, M; Langdon, R

2017-03-01

It has been proposed that people with delusions have difficulty inhibiting beliefs (i.e., "doxastic inhibition") so as to reason about them as if they might not be true. We used a continuity approach to test this proposal in non-clinical adults scoring high and low in psychometrically assessed delusion-proneness. High delusion-prone individuals were expected to show greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on "conflict" items of a "belief-bias" reasoning task (i.e. when required to reason logically about statements that conflicted with reality), but not on "non-conflict" items. Twenty high delusion-prone and twenty low delusion-prone participants (according to the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory) completed a belief-bias reasoning task and tests of IQ, working memory and general inhibition (Excluded Letter Fluency, Stroop and Hayling Sentence Completion). High delusion-prone individuals showed greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on the Stroop and Excluded Letter Fluency tests of inhibition, but no greater difficulty on the conflict versus non-conflict items of the belief-bias task. They did, however, make significantly more errors overall on the belief-bias task, despite controlling for IQ, working memory and general inhibitory control. The study had a relatively small sample size and used non-clinical participants to test a theory of cognitive processing in individuals with clinically diagnosed delusions. Results failed to support a role for doxastic inhibitory failure in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals. These individuals did, however, show difficulty with conditional reasoning about statements that may or may not conflict with reality, independent of any general cognitive or inhibitory deficits. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Belief-bias reasoning in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals.

PubMed

Anandakumar, T; Connaughton, E; Coltheart, M; Langdon, R

2017-09-01

It has been proposed that people with delusions have difficulty inhibiting beliefs (i.e., "doxastic inhibition") so as to reason about them as if they might not be true. We used a continuity approach to test this proposal in non-clinical adults scoring high and low in psychometrically assessed delusion-proneness. High delusion-prone individuals were expected to show greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on "conflict" items of a "belief-bias" reasoning task (i.e. when required to reason logically about statements that conflicted with reality), but not on "non-conflict" items. Twenty high delusion-prone and twenty low delusion-prone participants (according to the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory) completed a belief-bias reasoning task and tests of IQ, working memory and general inhibition (Excluded Letter Fluency, Stroop and Hayling Sentence Completion). High delusion-prone individuals showed greater difficulty than low delusion-prone individuals on the Stroop and Excluded Letter Fluency tests of inhibition, but no greater difficulty on the conflict versus non-conflict items of the belief-bias task. They did, however, make significantly more errors overall on the belief-bias task, despite controlling for IQ, working memory and general inhibitory control. The study had a relatively small sample size and used non-clinical participants to test a theory of cognitive processing in individuals with clinically diagnosed delusions. Results failed to support a role for doxastic inhibitory failure in non-clinical delusion-prone individuals. These individuals did, however, show difficulty with conditional reasoning about statements that may or may not conflict with reality, independent of any general cognitive or inhibitory deficits. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder: behavioral and neural responses to three socio-emotional tasks

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is thought to involve deficits in emotion regulation, and more specifically, deficits in cognitive reappraisal. However, evidence for such deficits is mixed. Methods Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal, we examined reappraisal-related behavioral and neural responses in 27 participants with generalized SAD and 27 healthy controls (HC) during three socio-emotional tasks: (1) looming harsh faces (Faces); (2) videotaped actors delivering social criticism (Criticism); and (3) written autobiographical negative self-beliefs (Beliefs). Results Behaviorally, compared to HC, participants with SAD had lesser reappraisal-related reduction in negative emotion in the Beliefs task. Neurally, compared to HC, participants with SAD had lesser BOLD responses in reappraisal-related brain regions when reappraising faces, in visual and attention related regions when reappraising criticism, and in the left superior temporal gyrus when reappraising beliefs. Examination of the temporal dynamics of BOLD responses revealed late reappraisal-related increased responses in HC, compared to SAD. In addition, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), which showed reappraisal-related increased activity in both groups, had similar temporal dynamics in SAD and HC during the Faces and Criticism tasks, but greater late response increases in HC, compared to SAD, during the Beliefs task. Reappraisal-related greater late DMPFC responses were associated with greater percent reduction in negative emotion ratings in SAD patients. Conclusions These results suggest a dysfunction of cognitive reappraisal in SAD patients, with overall reduced late brain responses in prefrontal regions, particularly when reappraising faces. Decreased late activity in the DMPFC might be associated with deficient reappraisal and greater negative reactivity. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00380731 PMID:24517388

Children's motivation in elementary physical education: an expectancy-value model of achievement choice.

PubMed

Xiang, Ping; McBride, Ron; Guan, Jianmin; Solmon, Melinda

2003-03-01

This study examined children's motivation in elementary physical education within an expectancy-value model developed by Eccles and her colleagues. Four hundred fourteen students in second and fourth grades completed questionnaires assessing their expectancy-related beliefs, subjective task values, and intention for future participation in physical education. Results indicated that expectancy-related beliefs and subjective task values were clearly distinguishable from one another across physical education and throwing. The two constructs were related to each other positively. Children's intention for future participation in physical education was positively associated with their subjective task values and/or expectancy-related beliefs. Younger children had higher motivation for learning in physical education than older children. Gender differences emerged and the findings provided empirical evidence supporting the validity of the expectancy-value model in elementary physical education.

Development of the social brain from age three to twelve years.

PubMed

Richardson, Hilary; Lisandrelli, Grace; Riobueno-Naylor, Alexa; Saxe, Rebecca

2018-03-12

Human adults recruit distinct networks of brain regions to think about the bodies and minds of others. This study characterizes the development of these networks, and tests for relationships between neural development and behavioral changes in reasoning about others' minds ('theory of mind', ToM). A large sample of children (n = 122, 3-12 years), and adults (n = 33), watched a short movie while undergoing fMRI. The movie highlights the characters' bodily sensations (often pain) and mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions), and is a feasible experiment for young children. Here we report three main findings: (1) ToM and pain networks are functionally distinct by age 3 years, (2) functional specialization increases throughout childhood, and (3) functional maturity of each network is related to increasingly anti-correlated responses between the networks. Furthermore, the most studied milestone in ToM development, passing explicit false-belief tasks, does not correspond to discontinuities in the development of the social brain.

The Development of Gender Constancy in Early Childhood and Its Relation to Time Comprehension and False-Belief Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zmyj, Norbert; Bischof-Köhler, Doris

2015-01-01

What is the developmental course of children's gender constancy? Do other cognitive abilities such as time comprehension and false-belief understanding foster gender constancy and the subcomponents gender stability and gender consistency? We examined the development of gender constancy and its relation to time comprehension and false-belief…

Temporo-parietal dysfunction in Tourette syndrome: Insights from an fMRI study of Theory of Mind.

PubMed

Eddy, Clare M; Cavanna, Andrea E; Rickards, Hugh E; Hansen, Peter C

2016-10-01

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by tics, repetitive movements and vocalizations which are prompted by a sensory-cognitive premonitory urge. Complex tics include environmentally dependent social behaviors such as echoing of other people's speech and actions. Recent studies have suggested that adults with TS can show differences to controls in Theory of Mind (ToM): reasoning about mental states (e.g. beliefs, emotions). In this study, twenty-five adults with uncomplicated TS (no co-morbid disorders, moderate tic severity), and twenty-five healthy age and gender matched controls were scanned with fMRI during an established ToM task. Neural activity was contrasted across ToM trials involving reasoning about false-belief, and matched trials requiring judgments about physical states rather than mental states. Contrasting task conditions uncovered differential fMRI activation in TS during ToM involving the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), right amygdala and posterior cingulate. Further analysis revealed that activity within the right TPJ as localised by this task covaried with the severity of symptoms including echophenomena, impulse control problems and premonitory urges in TS. Amygdala activation was also linked to premonitory urges, while activity in the left TPJ during ToM was linked to ratings of non-obscene socially inappropriate symptoms. These findings indicate that patients with TS exhibit atypical functional activation within key neural substrates involved in ToM. More generally, our data could highlight an important role for TPJ dysfunction in driving compulsive behaviors. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Theory of mind and executive function in Chinese preschool children.

PubMed

Duh, Shinchieh; Paik, Jae H; Miller, Patricia H; Gluck, Stephanie C; Li, Hui; Himelfarb, Igor

2016-04-01

Cross-cultural research on children's theory of mind (ToM) understanding has raised questions about its developmental sequence and relationship with executive function (EF). The current study examined how ToM develops (using the tasks from Wellman & Liu, 2004) in relation to 2 EF skills (conflict inhibition, working memory) in 997 Chinese preschoolers (ages 3, 4, 5) in Chengdu, China. Compared with prior research with other Chinese and non-Chinese children, some general patterns in development were replicated in this sample. However, the children showed culture-specific reversals in the developmental sequence of ToM. For example, Chengdu children performed differently on the 2 false-belief tasks that were thought to be equivalent. Furthermore, conflict inhibition as well as working memory uniquely predicted ToM performance. We discuss the issues of ToM development as they relate to test items and cross-cultural--and subcultural--differences. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Expectancy-Value Theory of Achievement Motivation.

PubMed

Wigfield; Eccles

2000-01-01

We discuss the expectancy-value theory of motivation, focusing on an expectancy-value model developed and researched by Eccles, Wigfield, and their colleagues. Definitions of crucial constructs in the model, including ability beliefs, expectancies for success, and the components of subjective task values, are provided. These definitions are compared to those of related constructs, including self-efficacy, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and interest. Research is reviewed dealing with two issues: (1) change in children's and adolescents' ability beliefs, expectancies for success, and subjective values, and (2) relations of children's and adolescents' ability-expectancy beliefs and subjective task values to their performance and choice of activities. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Beliefs about expectations moderate the influence of expectations on pain perception.

PubMed

Handley, Ian M; Fowler, Stephanie L; Rasinski, Heather M; Helfer, Suzanne G; Geers, Andrew L

2013-03-01

Expectations congruently influence, or bias, pain perception. Recent social psychological research reveals that individuals differ in the extent to which they believe in expectation biases and that individuals who believe in expectation biases may adjust for this bias in their perceptions and reactions. That is, idiosyncratic beliefs about expectations can moderate the influence of expectations on experience. Prior research has not examined whether idiosyncratic beliefs about expectations can alter the degree to which one's expectations influence pain perception. Using a laboratory pain stimulus, we examined the possibility that beliefs about expectation biases alter pain responses following both pain- and placebo-analgesic expectations. Participants' beliefs about expectation biases were measured. Next, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a pain expectation or a placebo-analgesia expectation prior to a cold-pressor task. After the task, participants rated their pain. Beliefs about expectation biases significantly influenced pain reports. Specifically, pain reports were more influenced by provided expectations the less participants believed in expectation biases (i.e., pain expectations resulted in more pain than analgesia expectations). Beliefs about the expectation bias are an important and under-examined predictor of pain and placebo analgesia.

How beliefs about self-creation inflate value in the human brain.

PubMed

Koster, Raphael; Sharot, Tali; Yuan, Rachel; De Martino, Benedetto; Norton, Michael I; Dolan, Raymond J

2015-01-01

Humans have a tendency to overvalue their own ideas and creations. Understanding how these errors in judgement emerge is important for explaining suboptimal decisions, as when individuals and groups choose self-created alternatives over superior or equal ones. We show that such overvaluation is a reconstructive process that emerges when participants believe they have created an item, regardless of whether this belief is true or false. This overvaluation is observed both when false beliefs of self-creation are elicited (Experiment 1) or implanted (Experiment 2). Using brain imaging data we highlight the brain processes mediating an interaction between value and belief of self-creation. Specifically, following the creation manipulation there is an increased functional connectivity during valuation between the right caudate nucleus, where we show BOLD activity correlated with subjective value, and the left amygdala, where we show BOLD activity is linked to subjective belief. Our study highlights psychological and neurobiological processes through which false beliefs alter human valuation and in doing so throw light on a common source of error in judgements of value.

How beliefs about self-creation inflate value in the human brain

PubMed Central

Koster, Raphael; Sharot, Tali; Yuan, Rachel; De Martino, Benedetto; Norton, Michael I.; Dolan, Raymond J.

2015-01-01

Humans have a tendency to overvalue their own ideas and creations. Understanding how these errors in judgement emerge is important for explaining suboptimal decisions, as when individuals and groups choose self-created alternatives over superior or equal ones. We show that such overvaluation is a reconstructive process that emerges when participants believe they have created an item, regardless of whether this belief is true or false. This overvaluation is observed both when false beliefs of self-creation are elicited (Experiment 1) or implanted (Experiment 2). Using brain imaging data we highlight the brain processes mediating an interaction between value and belief of self-creation. Specifically, following the creation manipulation there is an increased functional connectivity during valuation between the right caudate nucleus, where we show BOLD activity correlated with subjective value, and the left amygdala, where we show BOLD activity is linked to subjective belief. Our study highlights psychological and neurobiological processes through which false beliefs alter human valuation and in doing so throw light on a common source of error in judgements of value. PMID:26388755

Improving Low-Income Preschoolers’ Theory of Mind: A Training Study

PubMed Central

Tompkins, Virginia

2015-01-01

This study examined the efficacy of training theory of mind via storybook interactions focused on characters' mental states (i.e., beliefs and emotions) in a sample of 73 low-income preschoolers, and determined if training transferred to social competence. Children in the experimental group participated in experimenter-led book interactions in which characters' false beliefs and emotions were discussed. Children in the first control group were read the same stories, but without the embedded discussions; children in the second control group were not read books. Children's false belief understanding, emotion understanding, and social competence were assessed at pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest two months later. Children in the experimental group outperformed both controls on false belief understanding, but not emotion understanding or social competence, at both posttests. PMID:26294810

Adolescents' Attainability and Aspiration Beliefs for Famous Musician Role Models

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ivaldi, Antonia; O'Neill, Susan A.

2010-01-01

This study examines the role that adolescents' competence beliefs and subjective task values for music have in relation to their aspirations and expectations for becoming like their musician role models. A total of 381 adolescents (aged 13-14) completed a questionnaire about their competence beliefs and values for music, the musicians they admired…

Expectancy Beliefs and English Language Performance of Secondary Schools Students in Maiduguri Metropolis, Borno State, Nigeria

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Musa, Alice K. J.; Nwachukwu, Kelechukwu I.; Ali, Domiya Geoffrey

2016-01-01

The study determined Relationship between Students' Expectancy Beliefs and English Language Performance of Students in Maiduguri Metropolis, Borno State, Nigeria. Correlation design was adopted for the study. Four hypotheses which determined the relationships between the components of expectancy beliefs: ability, tasks difficulty, and past…

False Signs and the Non-Specificity of Theory of Mind: Evidence that Preschoolers Have General Difficulties in Understanding Representations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leekam, Susan; Perner, Josef; Healey, Laura; Sewell, Claire

2008-01-01

The discovery that 3-year-old children have difficulties understanding false belief has fuelled two decades of research directed at understanding why children have this problem. One unresolved question is whether false belief problems are due to difficulties with mental or representational aspects of mental states. This question has implications…

Theories of willpower affect sustained learning.

PubMed

Miller, Eric M; Walton, Gregory M; Dweck, Carol S; Job, Veronika; Trzesniewski, Kali H; McClure, Samuel M

2012-01-01

Building cognitive abilities often requires sustained engagement with effortful tasks. We demonstrate that beliefs about willpower-whether willpower is viewed as a limited or non-limited resource-impact sustained learning on a strenuous mental task. As predicted, beliefs about willpower did not affect accuracy or improvement during the initial phases of learning; however, participants who were led to view willpower as non-limited showed greater sustained learning over the full duration of the task. These findings highlight the interactive nature of motivational and cognitive processes: motivational factors can substantially affect people's ability to recruit their cognitive resources to sustain learning over time.

Theories of Willpower Affect Sustained Learning

PubMed Central

Miller, Eric M.; Walton, Gregory M.; Dweck, Carol S.; Job, Veronika; Trzesniewski, Kali H.; McClure, Samuel M.

2012-01-01

Building cognitive abilities often requires sustained engagement with effortful tasks. We demonstrate that beliefs about willpower–whether willpower is viewed as a limited or non-limited resource–impact sustained learning on a strenuous mental task. As predicted, beliefs about willpower did not affect accuracy or improvement during the initial phases of learning; however, participants who were led to view willpower as non-limited showed greater sustained learning over the full duration of the task. These findings highlight the interactive nature of motivational and cognitive processes: motivational factors can substantially affect people’s ability to recruit their cognitive resources to sustain learning over time. PMID:22745675

Beliefs about behavior account for age differences in the correspondence bias.

PubMed

Stanley, Jennifer Tehan; Blanchard-Fields, Fredda

2011-03-01

Older adults tend to exhibit the correspondence bias to a greater extent than young adults. The current study examined whether these age differences are a function of the degree to which an individual subscribes to a lay theory of attitude-behavior consistency. First, participants responded to questions regarding their beliefs about attitude-behavior consistency. Approximately 2 weeks later, 144 (67 young adults and 77 older adults) participants completed the correspondence bias task. As expected, older adults were more biased than young adults. Analyses revealed that the degree to which an individual holds attitude-behavior consistency beliefs in the dishonesty domain accounted for age-related differences in the correspondence bias. The results of this study suggest that age differences in the correspondence bias task are in part driven by older adults holding stronger attitude-behavior consistency beliefs than young adults.

Can an agent’s false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants

PubMed Central

Song, Hyun-joo; Onishi, Kristine H.; Baillargeon, Renée; Fisher, Cynthia

2008-01-01

Do 18-month-olds understand that an agent’s false belief can be corrected by an appropriate, though not an inappropriate, communication? In Experiment 1, infants watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers: a box and a cup. To start, agent1 played with the ball and then hid it in the box, while agent2 looked on. Next, in agent1’s absence, agent2 moved the ball from the box to the cup. When agent1 returned, agent2 told her “The ball is in the cup!” (informative-intervention condition) or “I like the cup!” (uninformative-intervention condition). During test, agent1 reached for either the box (box event) or the cup (cup event). In the informative-intervention condition, infants who saw the box event looked reliably longer than those who saw the cup event; in the uninformative-intervention condition, the reverse pattern was found. These results suggest that infants expected agent1’s false belief about the ball’s location to be corrected when she was told “The ball is in the cup!”, but not “I like the cup!”. In Experiment 2, agent2 simply pointed to the ball’s new location, and infants again expected agent1’s false belief to be corrected. These and control results provide additional evidence that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to agents. In addition, the results suggest that by 18 months of age infants expect agents’ false beliefs to be corrected by relevant communications involving words or gestures. PMID:18976745

Short-term changes in general and memory-specific control beliefs and their relationship to cognition in younger and older adults.

PubMed

Bielak, Allison A M; Hultsch, David F; Levy-Ajzenkopf, Judi; MacDonald, Stuart W S; Hunter, Michael A; Strauss, Esther

2007-01-01

We examined short-term changes in younger and older adults' control beliefs. Participants completed measures of general and memory-specific competence and locus of control on 10 bi-monthly occasions. At each occasion, participants rated their control beliefs prior to and following completion of a battery of cognitive tasks. Exposure to the set of cognitively demanding tasks led to declines in older adults' ratings of both general and memory-specific competence compared to little change or increases in younger adults' ratings. Older adults were also more inconsistent in their reported locus of control beliefs across the 10 occasions. Analyses examining the relationship between control beliefs and actual cognitive performance revealed few significant effects, suggesting that short-term changes in perceived control are not driven by monitoring changes in actual performance. The results suggest the importance of assessing short-term as well as long-term changes in perceived control to obtain a complete picture of aging-related changes.

Language, cognitive flexibility, and explicit false belief understanding: longitudinal analysis in typical development and specific language impairment.

PubMed

Farrant, Brad M; Maybery, Murray T; Fletcher, Janet

2012-01-01

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of explicit false belief understanding in 91 English-speaking typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months) and 30 children with specific language impairment (M age = 63.0 months). Concurrent and longitudinal findings converge in supporting a model in which maternal language input predicts the child's memory for false complements, which predicts cognitive flexibility, which in turn predicts explicit false belief understanding. © 2011 The Authors. Child Development © 2011 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Young Children's Understanding of Belief Constraints on Intention.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moses, Louis J.

1993-01-01

One important characteristic of rational action is that intentions should be consistent with beliefs. Two studies examined whether three year olds understand belief constraints on intention. In both studies, subjects' understanding of unfulfilled intentions was excellent and significantly better than their understanding of false beliefs, but…

Reading to Write an Argumentation: The Role of Epistemological, Reading and Writing Beliefs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mateos, Mar; Cuevas, Isabel; Martin, Elena; Martin, Ana; Echeita, Gerardo; Luna, Maria

2011-01-01

The general aim of this study was to examine the relations among epistemological, reading and writing beliefs held by psychology undergraduates and the role played by these three types of belief in influencing the degree of perspectivism manifested in a written argumentation task based on reading two texts presenting conflicting perspectives on…

Representational and Executive Selection Resources in "Theory of Mind": Evidence from Compromised Belief-Desire Reasoning in Old Age

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

German, Tim P.; Hehman, Jessica A.

2006-01-01

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities--the capacity to represent the mental states as such--as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population…

Following the Instructions! Effects of Gender Beliefs in Mental Rotation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moe, Angelica; Pazzaglia, Francesca

2006-01-01

Research has widely demonstrated male superiority in the Mental Rotation Test (MRT). Various explanations have been put forward to account for these differences. We considered gender beliefs and argued that women may fare less well than men partly because they are considered unable to perform this kind of task. Beliefs about spatial ability were…

Logic, Beliefs, and Instruction: A Test of the Default Interventionist Account of Belief Bias

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Handley, Simon J.; Newstead, Stephen E.; Trippas, Dries

2011-01-01

According to dual-process accounts of thinking, belief-based responses on reasoning tasks are generated as default but can be intervened upon in favor of logical responding, given sufficient time, effort, or cognitive resource. In this article, we present the results of 5 experiments in which participants were instructed to evaluate the…

32 CFR 1636.6 - Analysis of belief.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false Analysis of belief. 1636.6 Section 1636.6... CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS § 1636.6 Analysis of belief. (a) A registrant claiming conscientious objection is not... group opposed to participation in war in any form. (b) The registrant who identifies his beliefs with...

32 CFR 1636.6 - Analysis of belief.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false Analysis of belief. 1636.6 Section 1636.6... CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS § 1636.6 Analysis of belief. (a) A registrant claiming conscientious objection is not... group opposed to participation in war in any form. (b) The registrant who identifies his beliefs with...

32 CFR 1636.6 - Analysis of belief.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2014-07-01 2014-07-01 false Analysis of belief. 1636.6 Section 1636.6... CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS § 1636.6 Analysis of belief. (a) A registrant claiming conscientious objection is not... group opposed to participation in war in any form. (b) The registrant who identifies his beliefs with...

32 CFR 1636.6 - Analysis of belief.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Analysis of belief. 1636.6 Section 1636.6... CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS § 1636.6 Analysis of belief. (a) A registrant claiming conscientious objection is not... group opposed to participation in war in any form. (b) The registrant who identifies his beliefs with...

32 CFR 1636.6 - Analysis of belief.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Analysis of belief. 1636.6 Section 1636.6... CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS § 1636.6 Analysis of belief. (a) A registrant claiming conscientious objection is not... group opposed to participation in war in any form. (b) The registrant who identifies his beliefs with...

Mental Rotation in False Belief Understanding

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Xie, Jiushu; Cheung, Him; Shen, Manqiong; Wang, Ruiming

2018-01-01

This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation (EET) in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective…

The Role of Frontal Cortical and Medial-Temporal Lobe Brain Areas in Learning a Bayesian Prior Belief on Reversals

PubMed Central

Jang, Anthony I.; Costa, Vincent D.; Rudebeck, Peter H.; Chudasama, Yogita; Murray, Elisabeth A.

2015-01-01

Reversal learning has been extensively studied across species as a task that indexes the ability to flexibly make and reverse deterministic stimulus–reward associations. Although various brain lesions have been found to affect performance on this task, the behavioral processes affected by these lesions have not yet been determined. This task includes at least two kinds of learning. First, subjects have to learn and reverse stimulus–reward associations in each block of trials. Second, subjects become more proficient at reversing choice preferences as they experience more reversals. We have developed a Bayesian approach to separately characterize these two learning processes. Reversal of choice behavior within each block is driven by a combination of evidence that a reversal has occurred, and a prior belief in reversals that evolves with experience across blocks. We applied the approach to behavior obtained from 89 macaques, comprising 12 lesion groups and a control group. We found that animals from all of the groups reversed more quickly as they experienced more reversals, and correspondingly they updated their prior beliefs about reversals at the same rate. However, the initial values of the priors that the various groups of animals brought to the task differed significantly, and it was these initial priors that led to the differences in behavior. Thus, by taking a Bayesian approach we find that variability in reversal-learning performance attributable to different neural systems is primarily driven by different prior beliefs about reversals that each group brings to the task. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The ability to use prior knowledge to adapt choice behavior is critical for flexible decision making. Reversal learning is often studied as a form of flexible decision making. However, prior studies have not identified which brain regions are important for the formation and use of prior beliefs to guide choice behavior. Here we develop a Bayesian approach that formally characterizes learning set as a concept, and we show that, in macaque monkeys, the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex have a role in establishing an initial belief about the stability of the reward environment. PMID:26290251

Performance on verbal and low-verbal false belief tasks: evidence from children with Williams syndrome.

PubMed

Van Herwegen, Jo; Dimitriou, Dagmara; Rundblad, Gabriella

2013-01-01

Previous studies that have investigated the relationship between performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks and verbal abilities in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have reported contradictory findings with some showing that language abilities aid performance on ToM tasks while others have found that participants with WS fail these tasks because of their verbal demands. The current study investigated this relationship again comparing performance on a classical change-location task to two newly developed low-verbal tasks, one change-location task and one unexpected content task. Thirty children with WS (aged 5-17;01 years) and 30 typically developing (TD) children (aged between 2;10 years and 9;09 years), who were matched for vocabulary comprehension scores were included in the study. Although performance in the WS group was significantly poorer compared to the TD group on all three tasks, performance was not predicted by their receptive vocabulary or grammatical ability scores. In addition, ToM abilities in both groups depended on the cognitive demands of the task at hand. This finding shows that performance on ToM tasks in WS is not necessarily hindered by their delayed language abilities but rather by the task administered. This could potentially affect the diagnosis of developmental disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders, and comparison of ToM abilities across developmental disorders. Readers of this article should be able to (1) describe the current state of theory of mind research in Williams syndrome, (2) identify which cognitive abilities might explain performance on theory of mind tasks in both typically developing children and in children with Williams syndrome, and (3) interpret the importance of task demands when assessing children's theory of mind abilities. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The hot hand belief and framing effects.

PubMed

MacMahon, Clare; Köppen, Jörn; Raab, Markus

2014-09-01

Recent evidence of the hot hand in sport-where success breeds success in a positive recency of successful shots, for instance-indicates that this pattern does not actually exist. Yet the belief persists. We used 2 studies to explore the effects of framing on the hot hand belief in sport. We looked at the effect of sport experience and task on the perception of baseball pitch behavior as well as the hot hand belief and free-throw behavior in basketball. Study 1 asked participants to designate outcomes with different alternation rates as the result of baseball pitches or coin tosses. Study 2 examined basketball free-throw behavior and measured predicted success before each shot as well as general belief in the hot hand pattern. The results of Study 1 illustrate that experience and stimulus alternation rates influence the perception of chance in human performance tasks. Study 2 shows that physically performing an act and making judgments are related. Specifically, beliefs were related to overall performance, with more successful shooters showing greater belief in the hot hand and greater predicted success for upcoming shots. Both of these studies highlight that the hot hand belief is influenced by framing, which leads to instability and situational contingencies. We show the specific effects of framing using accumulated experience of the individual with the sport and knowledge of its structure and specific experience with sport actions (basketball shots) prior to judgments.

The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.

PubMed

Vohs, Kathleen D; Schooler, Jonathan W

2008-01-01

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

Beliefs About Behavior Account for Age Differences in the Correspondence Bias

PubMed Central

Blanchard-Fields, Fredda

2011-01-01

Objectives. Older adults tend to exhibit the correspondence bias to a greater extent than young adults. The current study examined whether these age differences are a function of the degree to which an individual subscribes to a lay theory of attitude–behavior consistency. Methods. First, participants responded to questions regarding their beliefs about attitude–behavior consistency. Approximately 2 weeks later, 144 (67 young adults and 77 older adults) participants completed the correspondence bias task. Results. As expected, older adults were more biased than young adults. Analyses revealed that the degree to which an individual holds attitude–behavior consistency beliefs in the dishonesty domain accounted for age-related differences in the correspondence bias. Discussion. The results of this study suggest that age differences in the correspondence bias task are in part driven by older adults holding stronger attitude–behavior consistency beliefs than young adults. PMID:21071624

False Belief and Emotion Understanding in Post-Institutionalized Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tarullo, Amanda R.; Bruce, Jacqueline; Gunnar, Megan R.

2007-01-01

Deficits in social cognition may impair the ability to negotiate social transactions and relationships and contribute to socio emotional difficulties experienced by some post-institutionalized children. We examined false belief and emotion understanding in 40 institutional care-adopted children, 40 foster care-adopted children and 40 birth…

Suboptimal foraging behavior: A new perspective on gambling

PubMed Central

Addicott, Merideth A.; Pearson, John M.; Kaiser, Nicole; Platt, Michael L.; McClernon, F. Joseph

2015-01-01

Why do people gamble? Conventional views hold that gambling may be motivated by irrational beliefs, risk-seeking, impulsive temperament, or dysfunction within the same reward circuitry affected by drugs of abuse. An alternate, unexplored perspective is that gambling is an extension of natural foraging behavior to a financial environment. However, when these foraging algorithms are applied to stochastic gambling outcomes, undesirable results may occur. To test this hypothesis, we recruited participants based on their frequency of gambling – yearly (or less), monthly, and weekly – and investigated how gambling frequency related to irrational beliefs, risk-taking/impulsivity, and foraging behavior. We found that increased gambling frequency corresponded to greater gambling-related beliefs, more exploratory choices on an explore/exploit foraging task, and fewer points earned on a patchy foraging task. Gambling-related beliefs negatively related to performance on the patchy foraging task, indicating that individuals with more gambling-related cognitions tended to leave a patch too quickly. This indicates that frequent gamblers have reduced foraging ability to maximize rewards; however, gambling frequency- and by extension, poor foraging ability- was not related to risk-taking or impulsive behavior. These results suggest that gambling reflects the application of a dysfunctional foraging process to financial outcomes. PMID:26191945