Emergence of shared reference and shared minds in infancy

Thought and language: Effects of group-mindedness on young children's interpretation of exclusive we

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a speaker puppet responded, "We did!" In one condition, the speaker was near one and distant from another puppet, implying a dyadic interpretation of we. In another condition, the speaker was distant from both, thus pulling for a group interpretation. In the former condition, 2- and 4-year-olds favored the dyadic interpretation. In the latter condition, only 4-year-olds favored the group interpretation. Age-related conceptual development "expands" the set of conceivable plural person referents.

Communicative signals during joint attention promote neural processes of infants and caregivers

Communicative signals such as eye contact increase infants' brain activation to visual stimuli and promote joint attention. Our study assessed whether communicative signals during joint attention enhance infant-caregiver dyads' neural responses to objects, and their neural synchrony. To track mutual attention processes, we applied rhythmic visual stimulation (RVS), presenting images of objects to 12-month-old infants and their mothers (n = 37 dyads), while we recorded dyads' brain activity (i.e., steady-state visual evoked potentials, SSVEPs) with electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning. Within dyads, mothers either communicatively showed the images to their infant or watched the images without communicative engagement. Communicative cues increased infants' and mothers' SSVEPs at central-occipital-parietal, and central electrode sites, respectively. Infants showed significantly more gaze behaviour to images during communicative engagement. Dyadic neural synchrony (SSVEP amplitude envelope correlations, AECs) was not modulated by communicative cues. Taken together, maternal communicative cues in joint attention increase infants' neural responses to objects, and shape mothers' own attention processes. We show that communicative cues enhance cortical visual processing, thus play an essential role in social learning. Future studies need to elucidate the effect of communicative cues on neural synchrony during joint attention. Finally, our study introduces RVS to study infant-caregiver neural dynamics in social contexts.

Shared reality, memory goal satisfaction, and psychological well-being during conversational remembering

Conversational remembering, or sharing autobiographical memories with others, occurs frequently in everyday communication. The current project examined how the experience of shared reality with a conversation partner when describing autobiographical memories to them can operate to enhance the self, social, and directive uses of a recalled memory and explored the role of shared reality experienced as a result of conversational remembering in psychological well-being. In this project, conversational remembering was examined using experimental (Study 1) and daily diary (Study 2) methodologies. Results indicated that experiencing a shared reality during conversational remembering of an autobiographical memory enhanced self, social, and directive memory goal fulfilment and was positively associated with greater psychological well-being. The current investigation highlights important benefits of sharing our life stories with others, especially those with whom we develop a sense of shared reality.

Marked pointing facilitates learning part names: A test of lexical constraint versus social pragmatic accounts of word learning

The empirical study of word learning is driven by a theoretical debate between lexical constraint and social-pragmatic accounts; it has still not been determined which of these two best explains the evidence. We investigated whether the markedness of a pointing accompanying a verbal reference could help to learn a part name. Participants were 35 two-and-a-half-year-olds, 42 four-and-a-half-year-olds, and 38 undergraduate university students in Japan. The experimenter pointed to a novel part (embedded in a novel whole object) with either "marked" pointing, which was touching the part with a small circular motion, or with usual pointing. Touch accompanied by circular motion reliably elicited learning of part names in all age groups. Usual distal pointing without motion reliably elicited learning of whole object names. The pattern of findings rejects a whole-object constraint in early word learning and demonstrates that marked pointing can promote learning novel part names, supporting a social-pragmatic account.

Neural substrates of shared visual experiences: a hyperscanning fMRI study

Sharing experience is a fundamental human social cognition. Since visual experience is a mental state directed toward the world, we hypothesized that sharing visual experience is mediated by joint attention (JA) for sharing directedness and mentalizing for mental state inferences. We conducted a hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging with 44 healthy adult volunteers to test this hypothesis. We employed spoken-language-cued spatial and feature-based JA tasks. The initiator attracts the partner's attention by a verbal command to a spatial location or an object feature to which the responder directs their attention. Pair-specific inter-individual neural synchronization of task-specific activities was found in the right anterior insular cortex (AIC)-inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) complex, the core node of JA and salience network, and the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, which represents the shared categories of the target. The right AIC-IFG also showed inter-individual synchronization of the residual time-series data, along with the right temporoparietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex-the core components for mentalization and the default mode network (DMN). This background synchronization represents sharing the belief of sharing the situation. Thus, shared visual experiences are represented by coherent coordination between the DMN and salience network linked through the right AIC-IFG.

Three-year-olds' spontaneous lying in a novel interaction-based paradigm and its relations to explicit skills and motivational factors

Previous research has investigated children's lying and its motivational and social-cognitive correlates mostly through explicit tasks. The current study used an anticipatory interaction-based paradigm adopted from research with preverbal infants. We investigated 3-year-olds' spontaneous lying within interaction and its motivational basis and relations to explicit skills of lying, false belief understanding, inhibitory control, and socialization. Children interacted with puppets to secure stickers that were hidden in one of two boxes. Either a friend or a competitor puppet tried to obtain the stickers. Nearly all children helpfully provided information about the sticker's location to the friend, and about half of the sample anticipatorily provided false information to the competitor. Children misinformed the competitor significantly more often than the friend, both when the reward was for themselves and when it was for someone else. Explicitly planning to lie in response to a question occurred significantly less often but predicted spontaneous lying, as did passing the explicit standard false belief task. Thus, by 3 years of age, children spontaneously invoke false beliefs in others. This communicative skill reveals an interactional use of false belief understanding in that it requires holding one's perspective to pursue one's goal while providing a different perspective to distract a competitor. Findings support the view that practical theory of mind skills emerge for social coordination and serve as a basis for developing explicit false belief reasoning.

Inferring hidden objects from still and communicative onlookers at 8, 14, and 36 months of age

The current study investigated across five eye-tracking experiments children's developing skill of adopting others' referential perspective (Level 1 perspective taking) and to what extent it involves automatic processes or requires ostensive communicative cues. Three age groups (8-, 14-, and 36-month-olds) were tested on their expectation of an object appearing behind one of two peripheral occluders. A centrally presented person in profile either provided an ostensive communicative pointing cue or sat still, oriented to one of the two occluders. The 14-month-olds anticipated the hidden object when the onlooker had communicatively pointed to the location, as revealed by faster target detection in congruent trials (latency effect) and longer dwell times to the empty side in incongruent trials (violation-of-expectation effect). This was not the case when a still person was only oriented to one side. Adding emotional expressions to the still person (Experiment 2) did not help to produce the effects. However, at 36 months of age (Experiment 3), children showed both effects for the still person. The 8-month-olds did not show the violation-of-expectation effect for communicative pointing (Experiment 4) or for a matched abbreviated reach (Experiment 5b), showing it only for a complete reach behind the occluder (Experiment 5a), although they were faster to detect the congruent object in Experiment 4 and 5a. Findings reveal that automatic perspective taking develops after communicative perspective taking and that communicative perspective taking is a developmental outcome of the first year of life. The developmental pattern suggests a continuous social construction process of perspective-taking skills.

Mentalizing during social InterAction: A four component model

Mentalizing, conventionally defined as the process in which we infer the inner thoughts and intentions of others, is a fundamental component of human social cognition. Yet its role, and the nuanced layers involved, in real world social interaction are rarely discussed. To account for this lack of theory, we propose the interactive mentalizing theory (IMT) -to emphasize the role of metacognition in different mentalizing components. We discuss the connection between mentalizing, metacognition, and social interaction in the context of four elements of mentalizing: (i) Metacognition-inference of our own thought processes and social cognitions and which is central to all other components of mentalizing including: (ii) first-order mentalizing-inferring the thoughts and intentions of an agent's mind; (iii) personal second-order mentalizing-inference of other's mentalizing of one's own mind; (iv) Collective mentalizing: which takes at least two forms (a) vicarious mentalizing: adopting another's mentalizing of an agent (i.e., what we think others think of an agent) and (b) co-mentalizing: mentalizing about an agent in conjunction with others' mentalizing of that agent (i.e., conforming to others beliefs about another agent's internal states). The weights of these four elements is determined by metacognitive insight and confidence in one's own or another's mentalizing ability, yielding a dynamic interaction between these circuits. To advance our knowledge on mentalizing during live social interaction, we identify how these subprocesses can be organized by different target agents and facilitated by combining computational modeling and interactive brain approaches.

Understanding Others' Minds: Social Inference in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The study used an eye-tracking task to investigate whether preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to make inferences about others' behavior in terms of their mental states in a social setting. Fifty typically developing (TD) 4- and 5-year-olds and 22 5-year-olds with ASD participated in the study, where their eye-movements were recorded as automatic responses to given situations. The results show that unlike their TD peers, children with ASD failed to exhibit eye gaze patterns that reflect their ability to infer about others' behavior by spontaneously encoding socially relevant information and attributing mental states to others. Implications of the findings were discussed in relation to the proposal that implicit/spontaneous Theory of Mind is persistently impaired in ASD.

The Social Origins of Human Prosociality

From early in life, children help, comfort, and share with others. Recent research has deepened scientific understanding of the development of prosociality - efforts to promote the welfare of others. This article discusses two key insights about the emergence and early development of prosocial behavior, focusing on the development of helping. First, children's motivations and capabilities for helping change in quality as well as quantity over the opening years of life. Specifically, helping begins in participatory activities without prosocial intent in the first year of life, becoming increasingly autonomous and motivated by prosocial intent over the second year. Second, helping emerges through bidirectional social interactions, starting at birth, in which caregivers and others support the development of helping in a variety of ways and young children play active roles, often influencing caregiver behavior. The question now is not whether, but how social interactions contribute to the development of prosocial behavior. Recent methodological and theoretical advances provide exciting avenues for future research on the social and emotional origins of human prosociality.

A Tool for Assessing the Experience of Shared Reality: Validation of the German SR-T

Humans are highly motivated to achieve shared reality - common inner states (i.e., judgments, opinions, attitudes) with others about a target object. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon has been rapidly growing over the last decade, culminating in the development of a five-item self-report scale for Shared Reality about a Target (SR-T; Schmalbach et al., unpublished). The present study aims to validate the German version of the scale. Individuals can establish shared reality either by receiving social verification (i.e., agreement or confirmation from an interaction partner) or by aligning their inner state with that of their partner. To increase the scope of the present validation, we implemented both pathways of shared-reality creation in three studies (N = 522). Study 1 employed a social judgment task, in which participants assessed ambiguous social situations and received confirming (vs. disconfirming) feedback from their partner. Studies 2 and 3 build on the saying-is-believing paradigm, in which participants align their own evaluation of the target with their partner's judgment. Based on an evaluatively ambiguous description, participants communicated about a target person and later recalled information about the target (Study 2). To further generalize the findings, message production was omitted from the paradigm in Study 3. Overall, the five-item model of the SR-T evinced good fit and reliability. In Study 1, the SR-T reflected experimentally induced differences in commonality of judgments- even when controlling for several related state measures, such as Inclusion of Other in the Self and Need Threat. In Studies 2 and 3, the SR-T predicted participants' evaluative recall bias, which is an established, indirect index of communicators' shared-reality creation. This effect was stronger when participants overtly communicated with their study partner, but it still emerged without overt communication. Across all studies, correlations with related constructs support the convergent validity of the SR-T. In sum, we recommend the use of the SR-T in research on interpersonal processes and communication.