Children’s and adults’ use of verbal information to visually anticipate others’ actions: A study on explicit and implicit social-cognitive processing

Reading minds or reading scripts? De-intellectualising theory of mind

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on 'implicit' ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and empirical limitations, including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting 'script theory' for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others.

An Intervention Study on Children's Healthy Joint Attention Skills Based on a Mixed Instructional Approach of DTT and PRT

Joint attention is an important element that influences children's early development of communication and sociality, and joint attention is more often than not the earliest incipient of their prosocial behavior. Joint attention skills are one of the core deficits of children with autism, and identifying and remediating the core problems of autism is a popular area of interest, with joint attention being the focus of attention. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the combined orientation model of Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) and Pivotal Response Training (PRT) could improve the joint attention skills of children with autism. This study used a cross-behavioral multitest design in a single-subject study with two preschool children with autism as subjects, with the independent variable being joint attention teaching and the dependent variable being the three joint attention skills (eye gaze, following directions, and active display). After the instructional intervention, children with autism showed a significant increase in the correctness of "eye alternation," "following directions," and "moving displays."

Neural processing of moral content reflects moral identity in 10-year-old children

Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying prosocial and antisocial behavior, while electroencephalographic responses were collected. Analyses of event-related potentials (ERPs) showed that, for children with a strong moral identity, antisocial scenes elicited a greater early posterior negativity (EPN) as compared to prosocial scenes. Thus, for children with a strong moral identity, antisocial scenes capture more attentional resources than prosocial ones in early processing stages. In contrast to previous findings with adults, the implicit moral self-concept was not related to any ERP differences. Overall, the results show that, even in its developmental emergence, moral identity relates to the neurocognitive processing of third-party moral content. Together, the study supports the social-cognitive model of the development of moral identity a based on a chronical activation of moral schemas that guide a person's perception of the social world. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Adults, but not preschoolers or toddlers integrate situational constraints in their action anticipations: a developmental study on the flexibility of anticipatory gaze

Recent theories stress the role of situational information in understanding others' behaviour. For example, the predictive coding framework assumes that people take contextual information into account when anticipating other's actions. Likewise, the teleological stance theory assumes an early developing ability to consider situational constraints in action prediction. The current study investigates, over a wide age range, whether humans flexibly integrate situational constraints in their action anticipations. By means of an eye-tracking experiment, 2-year-olds, 5-year-olds, younger and older adults (together N = 181) observed an agent repeatedly taking one of two paths to reach a goal. Then, this path became blocked, and for test trials only the other path was passable. Results demonstrated that in test trials younger and older adults anticipated that the agent would take the continuous path, indicating that they took the situational constraints into account. In contrast, 2- and 5-year-olds anticipated that the agent would take the blocked path, indicating that they still relied on the agent's previous observed behaviour and-contrary to claims by the teleological stance theory-did not take the situational constraints into account. The results highlight developmental changes in human's ability to include situational constraints in their visual anticipations. Overall, the study contributes to theories on predictive coding and the development of action understanding.

Action prediction during real-time parent-infant interactions

Social interactions provide a crucial context for early learning and cognitive development during infancy. Action prediction-the ability to anticipate an observed action-facilitates successful, coordinated interaction and is an important social-cognitive skill in early development. However, current knowledge about infant action prediction comes largely from screen-based laboratory tasks. We know little about what infants' action prediction skills look like during real-time, free-flowing interactions with a social partner. In the current study, we used head-mounted eyetracking to quantify 9-month-old infants' visual anticipations of their parents' actions during free-flowing parent-child play. Our findings reveal that infants do anticipate their parents' actions during dynamic interactions at rates significantly higher than would be expected by chance. In addition, the frequency with which they do so is associated with child-led joint attention and hand-eye coordination. These findings are the first to reveal infants' action prediction behaviors in a more naturalistic context than prior screen-based studies, and they support the idea that action prediction is inherently linked to motor development and plays an important role in infants' social-cognitive development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HrmcicfiqE.

Do Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Condition Anticipate Others' Actions as Goal-Directed? A Predictive Coding Perspective

An action's end state can be anticipated by considering the agent's goal, or simply by projecting the movement trajectory. Theories suggest that individuals with autism spectrum condition (ASC) have difficulties anticipating other's goal-directed actions, caused by an impairment using prior information. We examined whether children, adolescents and adults with and without ASC visually anticipate another's action based on its goal or movement trajectory by presenting participants an agent repeatedly taking different paths to reach the same of two targets. The ASC group anticipated the goal and not just the movement pattern, but needed more time to perform goal-directed anticipations. Results are in line with predictive coding accounts, claiming that the use of prior information is impaired in ASC.