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

Fourteen- to Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Use Explicit Linguistic Information to Update an Agent's False Belief

The current research examined how infants exploit linguistic information to update an agent's false belief about an object's location. Fourteen- to eighteen-month-old infants first watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers (a box and a cup). Agent1 repeatedly acted on the ball and then put it in the box in the presence of agent2. Then agent1 disappeared from the scene and agent2 switched the ball's location from the box to the cup. Upon agent1's return, agent2 told her, "The ball is in the cup!" Agent1 then reached for either the cup (cup event) or the box (box event). The infants looked reliably longer if shown the box event as opposed to the cup event. However, when agent2 simply said, "The ball and the cup!" - which does not explicitly mention the ball's new location - infants looked significantly longer if shown the cup event as opposed the box event. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants expect an agent's false belief to be updated only by explicit verbal information.

Cognitive processes predicting advanced theory of mind in the broader autism phenotype

Little is known about executive functions (EFs) associated with advanced theory of mind (ToM) abilities. We aimed to determine if advanced ToM abilities were reduced in individuals with subclinical traits of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), known as the "Broader Autism Phenotype" (BAP), and identify the EFs that predicted unimpaired performance on an advanced ToM task, the faux pas test. We assessed 29 participants (13 males) with the BAP who were relatives of children with ASD. Thirteen participants showed reduced ability to understand a faux pas. A discriminant function analysis correctly classified 79% of cases as impaired or unimpaired, with high sensitivity (80%) and specificity (77%), which was best predicted by language-mediated EFs, including verbal generativity, working memory, cognitive inhibition, and flexibility. Autism Res 2020, 13: 921-934. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Little is known about the complex cognitive processes that enable accurate interpretation of another person's thoughts and emotions, known as "theory of mind." In relatives of individuals with autism, who had mild traits of autism themselves, approximately half had difficulty interpreting situations involving a social faux pas. Cognitive inhibition and flexibility, working memory, and verbal generativity were related to, and appeared to be protective for, unimpaired understanding of a faux pas.

How to Get Rid of the Belief Bias: Boosting Analytical Thinking via Pragmatics

The previous research attempts to reduce the influence of the belief bias on deductive thinking have often been unsuccessful and, when they succeeded, they failed to replicate. In this paper, we propose a new way to see an old problem. Instead of considering the analytical abilities of the respondent, we focus on the communicative characteristics of the experimental task. By changing the pragmatics into play through a subtle manipulation of the instruction of the syllogism problem, we obtained a strong improvement in the accuracy of the performance in both untrained and trained in logic respondents. We suggest that current models of deductive thinking should be broadened to consider also communicative understanding as part of the processing of the problem.

Brief Report: Young Children with Autism Can Generate Intent-Based Moral Judgments

Past research suggested that, due to difficulties in mentalistic reasoning, individuals with autism tend to base their moral judgments on the outcome of agents' actions rather than on agents' intentions. In a novel task, aimed at reducing the processing demands required to represent intentions and generate a judgment, autistic children were presented with agents that accidentally harmed or attempted but failed to harm others and were asked to judge those agents. Most of the times, children blamed the character who attempted to harm and exculpated the accidental wrongdoer, suggesting that they generated intent-based moral judgments. These findings suggest that processing limitations rather than lack of conceptual competence explain the poor performance reported in previous research on moral judgment in autism.

Removing shared information improves 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on a change-of-location explicit false belief task

The classic change-of-location explicit false belief task ends with a test question of the form "Where will the [agent] look for the [object]?" It has been proposed that by including mention of the target object, the question creates unwanted attention to the actual object location. A standard explanation is that children are biased to answer according to their own knowledge of reality. We proposed that mention of the target object brings attention to the reality location via memory-based processes that are biased to retrieve previous shared information. We manipulated whether the experimenter who asked the test question had witnessed the change of location with the children. For the experimental group (age range = 3.00-4.17 years, M_age = 3.61 years, SD = 0.36), a second experimenter took the place of the first after the object location was changed. Performance was compared with a control group (age range = 3.00-4.25 years, M_age = 3.66 years, SD = 0.34) in which one experimenter conducted the whole procedure. Participants also undertook the Bear/Dragon task, a test of conflict inhibitory control. In the control group, 6 of 19 children (32%) passed, similar to previous results. In the experimental group, 12 of 19 (63%) passed. The groups did not differ significantly on their inhibitory control scores, and a logistic regression analysis revealed that only condition significantly predicted performance. We conclude that a bias toward shared information is a relevant factor in understanding children's difficulty with the standard test question used in the change-of-location explicit false belief task.

Progressing from an implicit to an explicit false belief understanding: A matter of executive control?

In a longitudinal study ( N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children’s implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to second-order false belief understanding at 5 years of age. Also, replicating a number of studies, explicit first- and second-order false belief understanding, in contrast to implicit false belief understanding, were related to executive functioning. This indicates that executive functions play a role in standard explicit false belief tasks, but not in implicit false belief understanding. We argue that spontaneous, implicit false belief understanding does not require conscious control, whereas explicit false belief understanding is based on conscious, reflective processing. In sum, we suggest a developmental enrichment account of theory of mind development, with belief processing becoming increasingly reflective and controlled with advancing age.

The Protracted Maturation of Associative Layer IIIC Pyramidal Neurons in the Human Prefrontal Cortex During Childhood: A Major Role in Cognitive Development and Selective Alteration in Autism

The human specific cognitive shift starts around the age of 2 years with the onset of self-awareness, and continues with extraordinary increase in cognitive capacities during early childhood. Diffuse changes in functional connectivity in children aged 2-6 years indicate an increase in the capacity of cortical network. Interestingly, structural network complexity does not increase during this time and, thus, it is likely to be induced by selective maturation of a specific neuronal subclass. Here, we provide an overview of a subclass of cortico-cortical neurons, the associative layer IIIC pyramids of the human prefrontal cortex. Their local axonal collaterals are in control of the prefrontal cortico-cortical output, while their long projections modulate inter-areal processing. In this way, layer IIIC pyramids are the major integrative element of cortical processing, and changes in their connectivity patterns will affect global cortical functioning. Layer IIIC neurons have a unique pattern of dendritic maturation. In contrast to other classes of principal neurons, they undergo an additional phase of extensive dendritic growth during early childhood, and show characteristic molecular changes. Taken together, circuits associated with layer IIIC neurons have the most protracted period of developmental plasticity. This unique feature is advanced but also provides a window of opportunity for pathological events to disrupt normal formation of cognitive circuits involving layer IIIC neurons. In this manuscript, we discuss how disrupted dendritic and axonal maturation of layer IIIC neurons may lead into global cortical disconnectivity, affecting development of complex communication and social abilities. We also propose a model that developmentally dictated incorporation of layer IIIC neurons into maturing cortico-cortical circuits between 2 to 6 years will reveal a previous (perinatal) lesion affecting other classes of principal neurons. This "disclosure" of pre-existing functionally silent lesions of other neuronal classes induced by development of layer IIIC associative neurons, or their direct alteration, could be found in different forms of autism spectrum disorders. Understanding the gene-environment interaction in shaping cognitive microcircuitries may be fundamental for developing rehabilitation and prevention strategies in autism spectrum and other cognitive disorders.

Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research

Humans have the capacity to share others' emotions, be they positive or negative. Elicited by the observed or imagined emotion of another person, an observer develops a similar emotional state herself. This capacity, empathy, is one of the pillars of social understanding and interaction as it creates a representation of another's inner, mental state. Empathy needs to be dissociated from other social emotions and, crucially, also from cognitive mechanisms of understanding others, the ability to take others' perspective. Here, we describe the conceptual distinctions of these constructs and review behavioral and neural evidence that dissociates them. The main focus of the present review lies on the intraindividual changes in empathy and perspective-taking across the lifespan and on interindividual differences on subclinical and clinical levels. The data show that empathy and perspective-taking recruit distinct neural circuits and can be discerned already during early and throughout adult development. Both capacities also vary substantially between situations and people. Differences can be systematically related to situational characteristics as well as personality traits and mental disorders. The clear distinction of affect sharing from other social emotions like compassion and from cognitive perspective-taking, argues for a clear-cut terminology to describe these constructs. In our view, this speaks against using empathy as an umbrella term encompassing all affective and cognitive routes to understanding others. Unifying the way we speak about these phenomena will help to further research on their underlying mechanisms, psychopathological alterations, and plasticity in training and therapy.

Belief and Counterfactuality: A Teleological Theory of Belief Attribution

Abstract. The development and relation of counterfactual reasoning and false belief understanding were examined in 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 75) and adult controls (N = 14). The key question was whether false belief understanding engages counterfactual reasoning to infer what somebody else falsely believes. Findings revealed a strong correlation between false belief and counterfactual questions even in conditions in which children could commit errors other than the reality bias (r_p = .51). The data suggest that mastery of belief attribution and counterfactual reasoning is not limited to one point in development but rather develops over a longer period. Moreover, the rare occurrence of reality errors calls into question whether young children’s errors in the classic false belief task are indeed the result of a failure to inhibit what they know to be actually the case. The data speak in favor of a teleological theory of belief attribution and challenges established theories of belief attribution.

Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children

A current debate in psychology and cognitive science concerns the nature of young children's ability to attribute and track others' beliefs. Beliefs can be attributed in at least two different ways: prospectively, during the observation of belief-inducing situations, and in a retrospective manner, based on episodic retrieval of the details of the events that brought about the beliefs. We developed a task in which only retrospective attribution, but not prospective belief tracking, would allow children to correctly infer that someone had a false belief. Eighteen- and 36-month-old children observed a displacement event, which was witnessed by a person wearing sunglasses (Experiment 1). Having later discovered that the sunglasses were opaque, 36-month-olds correctly inferred that the person must have formed a false belief about the location of the objects and used this inference in resolving her referential expressions. They successfully performed retrospective revision in the opposite direction as well, correcting a mistakenly attributed false belief when this was necessary (Experiment 3). Thus, children can compute beliefs retrospectively, based on episodic memories, well before they pass explicit false-belief tasks. Eighteen-month-olds failed in such a task, suggesting that they cannot retrospectively attribute beliefs or revise their initial belief attributions. However, an additional experiment provided evidence for prospective tracking of false beliefs in 18-month-olds (Experiment 2). Beyond identifying two different modes for tracking and updating others' mental states early in development, these results also provide clear evidence of episodic memory retrieval in young children.

A Bayesian framework for the development of belief-desire reasoning: Estimating inhibitory power

A robust empirical finding in theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning, as measured by standard false-belief tasks, is that children four years old or older succeed whereas three-year-olds typically fail in predicting a person's behavior based on an attributed false belief. Nevertheless, when the child's own belief is undermined by increasing their subjective uncertainty about the truth, as introduced in low-demand false-belief tasks, three-year-olds can better appreciate another person's false belief. Inhibition is believed to play a critical role in such developmental patterns. Within a Bayesian framework, using meta-data, we present the first computational implementation of inhibition, as specified by the Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) model, to account for both the developmental shift from three to four years of age and the change in children's performances between high-demand and low-demand false-belief tasks. A Bayesian framework enables us to evaluate the predictive power of the model and infer the underlying psychological parameters. Together with behavioral evidence, we discuss the critical role of inhibitory control, as specified by ToMM, in children's theory-of-mind development.

The relationship between parental mental-state language and 2.5-year-olds' performance on a nontraditional false-belief task

A growing body of evidence suggests that children succeed in nontraditional false-belief tasks in the first years of life. However, few studies have examined individual differences in infants' and toddlers' performance on these tasks. Here we investigated whether parental use of mental-state language (i.e. think, understand), which predicts children's performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks at older ages, also predicts toddlers' performance on a nontraditional task. We tested 2.5-year-old children in a verbal nontraditional false-belief task that included two looking time measures, anticipatory looking and preferential looking, and measured parents' use of mental-state language during a picture-book task. Parents' use of mental-state language positively predicted children's performance on the anticipatory-looking measure of the nontraditional task. These results provide the first evidence that social factors relate to children's false-belief understanding prior to age 3 and that this association extends to performance on nontraditional tasks. These findings add to a growing number of studies suggesting that mental-state language supports mental-state understanding across the lifespan.

The robustness and generalizability of findings on spontaneous false belief sensitivity: a replication attempt

Influential studies showed that 25-month-olds and neurotypical adults take an agent's false belief into account in their anticipatory looking patterns (Southgate et al. 2007 Psychol. Sci.18, 587-592 (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x); Senju et al. 2009 Science325, 883-885 (doi:10.1126/science.1176170)). These findings constitute central pillars of current accounts distinguishing between implicit and explicit Theory of Mind. In our first experiment, which initially included a replication as well as two manipulations, we failed to replicate the original finding in 2- to 3-year-olds (N = 48). Therefore, we ran a second experiment with the sole purpose of seeing whether the effect can be found in an independent, tightly controlled, sufficiently powered and preregistered replication study. This replication attempt failed again in a sample of 25-month-olds (N = 78), but was successful in a sample of adults (N = 115). In all samples, a surprisingly high number of participants did not correctly anticipate the agent's action during the familiarization phase. This led to massive exclusion rates when adhering to the criteria of the original studies and strongly limits the interpretability of findings from the test phase. We discuss both the reliability of our replication attempts as well as the replicability of non-verbal anticipatory looking paradigms of implicit false belief sensitivity, in general.

Helping as an early indicator of a theory of mind: Mentalism or Teleology?

This article challenges the claim that young children's helping responses in Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (2009) task are based on ascribing a false belief to a mistaken agent. In our first Study 18- to 32-month old children (N = 28) were more likely to help find a toy in the false belief than in the true belief condition. In Study 2, with 54 children of the same age, we assessed the authors' mentalist interpretation of this result against an alternative teleological interpretation that does not make the assumption of belief ascription. The data speak in favor of our alternative. Children's social competency is based more on inferences about what is likely to happen in a particular situation and on objective reasons for action than on inferences about agents' mental states. We also discuss the need for testing serious alternative interpretations of claims about early belief understanding.

Mental files theory of mind: When do children consider agents acquainted with different object identities?

Mental files theory explains why children pass many perspective taking tasks like the false belief test around age 4 (Perner & Leahy, 2016). It also explains why older children struggle to understand that beliefs about an object depend on how one is acquainted with it (intensionality or aspectuality). If Heinz looks at an object that is both a die and an eraser, but cannot tell by looking that it is an eraser, he will not reach for it if he needs an eraser. Four- to 6-year olds find this difficult (Apperly & Robinson, 1998). We tested 129 35- to 86-month olds with a modified version of Apperly and Robinson’s task. Each child faced four tasks resulting from two experimental factors, timing and mode of information. Timing: Children saw Heinz learn the die’s location either before or after they learn that the die is an eraser. Mode of information: Heinz learns where the die is either perceptually or verbally. When Heinz’ learning is verbal, he never perceives the die at all. We found that Apperly and Robinson’s problem occurs only in the seen-after condition, where Heinz sees the die after children had learnt that it was also an eraser. It vanishes when Heinz learns where the die is before children learn that it is also an eraser. The problem also vanishes when Heinz learns where the die is purely verbally (e.g., “The die is in the red box”) and never sees it. This evidence lets us refine existing mental files theory, and eliminate several alternatives from the literature.

The Developmental Origins of False-Belief Understanding

Understanding that individuals can be mistaken, or hold false beliefs, about the world is an important human ability that plays a vital role in social interactions. When and how does this ability develop? Traditional investigations using elicited-response tasks suggested that false-belief understanding did not emerge until at least age 4. However, more recent studies have shown that children demonstrate false-belief understanding much earlier when tested via other means. In the present article, I summarize recent evidence that a robust, flexible understanding of false belief emerges in infancy and discuss why older children fail elicited-response tasks despite their ability to represent beliefs.