Cognitive Architecture of Belief Reasoning in Children and Adults: A Primer on the Two-Systems Account

The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment

Meta-analytic evidence indicates that the quality of the attachment relationship that infants establish with their primary caregiver has enduring significance for socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which early attachment experiences contribute to subsequent development remain underspecified. According to attachment theory, early attachment experiences become embodied in the form of cognitive-affective representations, referred to as internal working models (IWMs), that guide future behavior. Little is known, however, about the cognitive architecture of IWMs in infancy. In this article, we discuss significant advances made in the field of infant cognitive development and propose that leveraging insights from this research has the potential to fundamentally shape our understanding of the cognitive architecture of attachment representations in infancy. We also propose that the integration of attachment research into cognitive research can shed light on the role of early experiences, individual differences, and stability and change in infant cognition, as well as open new routes of investigation in cognitive studies, which will further our understanding of human knowledge. We provide recommendations for future research throughout the article and conclude by using our collaborative research as an example.

Does implicit mentalizing involve the representation of others' mental state content? Examining domain-specificity with an adapted Joint Simon task

Implicit mentalizing involves the automatic awareness of others' perspectives, but its domain-specificity is debated. The Joint Simon task demonstrates implicit mentalizing as a Joint Simon effect (JSE), proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner's frame of reference in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. Here, we investigated the content of co-representation through a novel Joint Simon task where participants viewed a set of distinct images assigned to either themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task allowed us to identify partner-driven effects exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. We did not observe a significant JSE, preventing us from drawing confident conclusions about the effect's domain-specificity. However, the recognition task results revealed that participants in the Joint task did not recognize their partner's stimuli more accurately than participants in the Individual task. This implies that participants were no more likely to encode content from their partner's perspective during the Joint task. Overall, this study pushes methodological boundaries regarding the elicitation of co-representation in the Joint Simon task and demonstrates the potential utility of a surprise recognition task.

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

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.

Five-year-olds' sensitivity to knowledge discrepancies about object identity during online language comprehension

In everyday communication, children experience situations where their knowledge or perspectives differ from those of their communicative partner. The current study examined this issue in the context of real-time language comprehension, focusing on 5-year-old children's ability to manage knowledge discrepancies about the identity of mutually visible objects. In Experiment 1, we examined 5-year-olds' ability to manage privileged knowledge about an object's identity. Using a referential communication task, we tested children (N = 60) in either a shared knowledge condition, where both the child and the speaker knew the identity of a visually misleading object (e.g., a candle that looks like an apple), or a privileged knowledge condition, where only the child knew the identity of the visually misleading object. Of interest was whether children could suppress private knowledge while processing a phonologically related word (e.g., "Look at the candy"). Results showed that children did not inhibit this knowledge during the early moments of referential interpretation. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), we contrasted the privileged knowledge condition in Experiment 1 with the more traditional scenario used to test common ground use, where the child knows the speaker cannot see certain display objects. Results confirmed a stronger ability to manage discrepancies in the latter case. Together, the findings demonstrate differences in children's ability to manage distinct types of knowledge discrepancies during real-time language comprehension.

How robust are egocentric and altercentric interference effects in social cognition? a test with explicit and implicit versions of a continuous false belief task

It has been long assumed that meta-representational theory of mind (ToM) -our ability to ascribe mental states to ourselves and other people- emerges around age four as indicated in performance on explicit verbal false belief tasks. In contrast, newer studies assessing false belief understanding with implicit, non-verbal measures suggest that some form of ToM may be present even in infancy. But these studies now face replication issues, and it remains unclear whether they can provide robust evidence for implicit ToM. One line of research on implicit ToM, however, may remain promising: Studies that tap so-called altercentric biases. Such biases occur when agents in their judgments about the world are influenced (perform slower, more error-prone) in light of another agent's deviating perspective even if that perspective is completely irrelevant to the task; they thus can be seen as indicators of spontaneous and implicit ToM. Altercentric biases are the mirror images of egocentric biases (agents are influenced by their own perspective when evaluating another agent's deviating perspective). In three studies with adults, we aimed to tap both egocentric and altercentric interference effects within the same task format. We used the so-called Sandbox task, a false belief task with continuous locations. In Study 1, we tested an online adaptation of the Sandbox task, which we also used to explore potential cross-cultural differences in these biases. Studies 2 and 3 combined the Sandbox task with mouse-tracking measures. These studies revealed neither egocentric nor altercentric biases. These null results are discussed with regard to the question whether absence of evidence here may present evidence of absence of such spontaneous perspective-taking biases or merely false negatives.

Chinese cognitive processing of ToM: Distinctions in understanding the mental states of self, close others, and strangers

Previous studies showed that people differ in attributing mental states to themselves and in understanding the mental states of others, but have not explored the differences when people attribute mental states to others at different social distances. The present study adds a 'close other' condition to the Self/Other differentiation paradigm to explore the potential differences in attributing mental states to others with different social distances. It emerged that the time required to reflect on one's self mental state is shortest in mental state attribution, longer when comprehending the mental state of close others, and longest for strangers. This result indicates that Chinese participants distinguish between close others and strangers when performing perspective-taking. When the perspective-shifting of belief-attribution is performed, a beforehand processing of information about close others or strangers does not interfere with the processing of information from oneself subsequently. However, when the information processed in the previous stage cannot be used for subsequent processing, it interferes with the processing of information from close others or strangers in the later stage. The lower the degree of automated processing of pre-processed information, the greater the interference effect produced. This finding indicated that processing the self mental state is automatically activated, but comprehending the mental state of others is not. The comprehension of others' mental states occurs only when required by the task and it entails more cognitive resources to process and maintain.

Could, would, should: Theory of mind and deontic reasoning in Tongan children

This study examined the developmental profiles of children's social reasoning about individual agentive and deontic concerns. Tongan children (N = 140, 47.9% male), aged 4–8 years, were given a set of mentalistic (standard theory‐of‐mind) and deontic reasoning tasks. On average, children found diverse desires, knowledge access, hidden emotion, and belief emotion easier than the false‐belief and diverse belief tasks. Tongan children were sensitive to social norms governing behavior, and this information was recruited for predicting behavior in a false‐belief task when embedded in a socially normative context. We discuss the potential for cultural mandates to shape children's social understanding and the impact of culture on our theoretical framing of children's development.

How do we interpret questions? Simplified representations of knowledge guide humans' interpretation of information requests

This paper investigates the cognitive mechanisms supporting humans' interpretation of requests for information. Learners can only search for a piece of information if they know that they are ignorant about it. Thus, in principle, the interpretation of requests for information could be guided by representations of Socratic ignorance (tracking what people know that they do not know). Alternatively, the interpretation of requests for information could be simplified by relying primarily on simple knowledge tracking (i.e., merely tracking what people know). We judged these hypotheses by testing two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers (N = 18), five- to seven-year-old children (N = 72), and adults (N = 384). In our experiments, a speaker asked a question that could be disambiguated by tracking her state of knowledge. We manipulated the speakers' visuals to modulate the complexity of the ignorance representation required to disambiguate their questions. Toddlers showed no tendency to appeal to representations of Socratic ignorance when disambiguating questions (Pilot S1). Five- to seven-year-olds exhibited a similar pattern of results, and they performed better when information requests could be disambiguated using simple knowledge tracking (Studies 1a-1b). Adults used representations of Socratic ignorance to interpret questions, but were more confident when simple knowledge tracking was sufficient to disambiguate information requests (Studies 2-3). Moreover, adults disambiguated questions as if speakers could request information about things that they were ignorant of, even when speakers had no reason to know about their ignorance (Studies 3-4). Thus, the interpretation of requests for information rests primarily on simple knowledge tracking-and not on representations of Socratic ignorance-a heuristic that reduces processing costs.

Can 5-month-old infants consider the perspective of a novel eyeless agent? New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.

Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents

To make sense of others' actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, young infants expect the agent to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide containers but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide box as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants' early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants' burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.

Extended difficulties with counterfactuals persist in reasoning with false beliefs: Evidence for teleology-in-perspective

Increasing evidence suggests that counterfactual reasoning is involved in false belief reasoning. Because existing work is correlational, we developed a manipulation that revealed a signature of counterfactual reasoning in participants' answers to false belief questions. In two experiments, we tested 3- to 14-year-olds and found high positive correlations (r = .56 and r = .73) between counterfactual and false belief questions. Children were very likely to respond to both questions with the same answer, also committing the same type of error. We discuss different theories and their ability to account for each aspect of our findings and conclude that reasoning about others' beliefs and actions requires similar cognitive processes as using counterfactual suppositions. Our findings question the explanatory power of the traditional frameworks, theory theory and simulation theory, in favor of views that explicitly provide for a relationship between false belief reasoning and counterfactual reasoning.

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.

Infants' performance in the indirect false belief tasks: A second-person interpretation

Research in the last 15 years has challenged the idea that false belief attribution develops at 4 years of age. Studies with indirect false belief tasks contend to provide evidence of false belief attribution in the second year of life. We review the literature on indirect false belief tasks carried out in infants using looking and active helping paradigms. Although the results are heterogeneous and not conclusive, such tasks appear to capture a real effect. However, it is misleading to call them “false belief” tasks, as it is possible to pass them without making any false belief attribution. Infants need to keep track of the object's and agent's positions, trajectories, and focus of attention, given an intentional understanding of the agent, to pass these new tasks. We, therefore, argue that the evidence can be better explained in terms of second‐person attributions, which are transparent, extensional, nonpropositional, reciprocally contingent, and implicit. Second‐person attributions can also account for primates' mentalizing abilities, as revealed by similar indirect tasks.

This article is categorized under:

Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science

Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition

Testing the stability of theory of mind: A longitudinal approach

An explicit understanding of false belief develops around the age of four years. However, tasks based on spontaneous responses have revealed an implicit understanding of belief and other theory of mind constructs in infants in their second year of life. The few longitudinal studies that have examined conceptual continuity of theory of mind from infancy to early childhood have reported mixed findings. Here we report two longitudinal experiments to investigate the developmental relation between implicit and explicit theory of mind. No link was observed in the first experiment between false belief and intention understanding measured at 14 and 18 months with the violation of expectation paradigm and tasks measuring explicit and implicit false belief at four or five years of age. In the second experiment, infants aged 18 months were tested with a battery of tasks that measured knowledge inference and false belief. They were then tested with the theory of mind scale at five years of age. The parents completed the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). As in the first experiment, there were no associations between early and later forms of theory of mind. We suggest that these findings do not support the view that there is conceptual continuity in theory of mind development.

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants' understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent - they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants' implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs.

Attention in naïve psychology

In everyday life, mentalizing is nested in a rich context of cognitive faculties and background information that potentially contribute to its success. Yet, we know little about these modulating effects. Here we propose that humans develop a naïve psychological model of attention (featured as a goal-dependent, intentional relation to the environment) and use this to fine-tune their mentalizing attempts, presuming that the way people represent their environment is influenced by the cognitive priorities (attention) their current intentions create. The attention model provides an opportunity to tailor mental state inferences to the temporary features of the agent whose mind is in the focus of mentalizing. The ability to trace attention is an exceptionally powerful aid for mindreading. Knowledge about the partner's attention provides background information, however being grounded in his current intentions, attention has direct relevance to the ongoing interaction. Furthermore, due to its causal connection to intentions, the output of the attention model remains valid for a prolonged but predictable amount of time: till the evoking intention is in place. The naïve attention model theory is offered as a novel theory on social attention that both incorporates existing evidence and identifies new directions in research.

Actions do not speak louder than words in an interactive false belief task

Traditionally, it had been assumed that meta-representational Theory of Mind (ToM) emerges around the age of 4 when children come to master standard false belief (FB) tasks. More recent research with various implicit measures, though, has documented much earlier competence and thus challenged the traditional picture. In interactive FB tasks, for instance, infants have been shown to track an interlocutor's false or true belief when interpreting her ambiguous communicative acts (Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907-912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x)). However, several replication attempts so far have produced mixed findings (e.g. Dörrenberg et al. 2018 Cogn. Dev. 46, 12-30. (doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001); Grosse Wiesmann et al. 2017 Dev. Sci. 20, e12445. (doi:10.1111/desc.12445); Király et al. 2018 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 11 477-11 482. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1803505115)). Therefore, we conducted a systematic replication study, across two laboratories, of an influential interactive FB task (the so-called 'Sefo' tasks by Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907-912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x)). First, we implemented close direct replications with the original age group (17-month-olds) and compared their performance to those of 3-year-olds. Second, we designed conceptual replications with modifications and improvements regarding pragmatic ambiguities for 2-year-olds. Third, we validated the task with explicit verbal test versions in older children and adults. Results revealed the following: the original results could not be replicated, and there was no evidence for FB understanding measured by the Sefo task in any age group except for adults. Comparisons to explicit FB tasks suggest that the Sefo task may not be a sensitive measure of FB understanding in children and even underestimate their ToM abilities. The findings add to the growing replication crisis in implicit ToM research and highlight the challenge of developing sensitive, reliable and valid measures of early implicit social cognition.

Analogical Comparison Promotes Theory-of-Mind Development

Theory-of-mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights-what processes drive this learning? We propose that analogical comparison is a key mechanism in the development of ToM. In Experiment 1, children were shown true- and false-belief scenarios and prompted to engage in multiple comparisons (e.g., belief vs. world). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, children saw a series of true- and false-belief events, varying in order and in their alignability. Across these experiments, we found that providing support for comparing true- and false-belief scenarios led to increased performance on false-belief tests. These findings show that analogical comparison can support ToM learning.

Theory of mind development: State of the science and future directions

This chapter offers a brief overview of how research on theory of mind development has developed over the recent years, with a focus on current research and theoretical accounts of theory of mind during the infancy period. The topics covered include the factors contributing to individual differences in theory of mind skills in preschoolers, the current replication crisis in theory of mind in infancy, the stability of theory of mind from infancy to childhood, and recent research suggesting that infants' concept of false belief is, at best, immature (e.g., overattribution to inanimate agents). Future directions in theory of mind research are suggested.

2.5-year-olds succeed in identity and location elicited-response false-belief tasks with adequate response practice

Researchers have argued that traditional elicited-response false-belief tasks involve considerable processing demands and hence underestimate children's false-belief understanding. Consistent with this claim, Setoh et al. (2016) recently found that when processing demands were sufficiently reduced, children could succeed in an elicited-response task as early as 2.5 years of age. Here we examined whether 2.5-year-olds could also succeed in a low-demand elicited-response task involving false beliefs about identity, which have been argued to provide a critical test of whether children truly represent beliefs, while also clarifying how the practice trials in Setoh et al.'s task facilitated children's elicited-response performance. 2.5-year-olds were tested in a version of Setoh et al.'s elicited-response task in which they heard a location or identity false-belief story. We varied whether the practice trials had the same type of wh-question as the test trial. Children who heard the same type of wh-question on all trials succeeded regardless of which story they heard (location or identity) and performance did not differ across belief type. This replicates Setoh et al.'s positive results and demonstrates that when processing demands are sufficiently reduced, children can succeed in elicited-response tasks involving false beliefs about object location or identity. This suggests that children are capable of attributing genuine false beliefs prior to 4 years of age. However, children performed at chance if the practice trials involved a different type of wh-question than the test trials, suggesting that at this age practice with the wh-question used in the test trial is essential to children's success.

Mindreading in the balance: adults' mediolateral leaning and anticipatory looking foretell others' action preparation in a false-belief interactive task

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable-where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks-for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N = 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards-rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated.

Sensor-Based Technology for Social Information Processing in Autism: A Review

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has increased strongly over the past decades, and so has the demand for adequate behavioral assessment and support for persons affected by ASD. Here we provide a review on original research that used sensor technology for an objective assessment of social behavior, either with the aim to assist the assessment of autism or with the aim to use this technology for intervention and support of people with autism. Considering rapid technological progress, we focus (1) on studies published within the last 10 years (2009-2019), (2) on contact- and irritation-free sensor technology that does not constrain natural movement and interaction, and (3) on sensory input from the face, the voice, or body movements. We conclude that sensor technology has already demonstrated its great potential for improving both behavioral assessment and interventions in autism spectrum disorders. We also discuss selected examples for recent theoretical questions related to the understanding of psychological changes and potentials in autism. In addition to its applied potential, we argue that sensor technology-when implemented by appropriate interdisciplinary teams-may even contribute to such theoretical issues in understanding autism.

Infants attribute false beliefs to a toy crane

The mentalistic view of early theory of mind posits that infants possess a robust and sophisticated understanding of false belief that is masked by the demands of traditional explicit tasks. Much of the evidence supporting this mentalistic view comes from infants' looking time at events that violate their expectations about the beliefs of a human agent. We conducted a replication of the violation-of-expectation procedure, except that the human agent was replaced by an inanimate agent. Infants watched a toy crane repeatedly move toward a box containing an object. In the absence of the crane, the object changed location. When the crane returned, 16-month-old infants looked longer when it turned toward the object's new location, consistent with the attribution of a false belief to the crane. These results suggest that infants spontaneously attribute false beliefs to inanimate agents. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/qqEPPhd9FDo.

Is implicit Theory of Mind real but hard to detect? Testing adults with different stimulus materials

Recently, Theory of Mind (ToM) research has been revolutionized by new methods. Eye-tracking studies measuring subjects' looking times or anticipatory looking have suggested that implicit and automatic forms of ToM develop much earlier in ontogeny than traditionally assumed and continue to operate outside of subjects' awareness throughout the lifespan. However, the reliability of these implicit methods has recently been put into question by an increasing number of non-replications. What remains unclear from these accumulating non-replication findings, though, is whether they present true negatives (there is no robust phenomenon of automatic ToM) or false ones (automatic ToM is real but difficult to tap). In order to address these questions, the current study implemented conceptual replications of influential anticipatory looking ToM tasks with a new variation in the stimuli. In two separate preregistered studies, we used increasingly realistic stimuli and controlled for potential confounds. Even with these more realistic stimuli, previous results could not be replicated. Rather, the anticipatory looking pattern found here remained largely compatible with more parsimonious explanations. In conclusion, the reality and robustness of automatic ToM remains controversial.

Fourteen-month-old infants track the language comprehension of communicative partners

Infants employ sophisticated mechanisms to acquire their first language, including some that rely on taking the perspective of adults as speakers or listeners. When do infants first show awareness of what other people understand? We tested 14‐month‐old infants in two experiments measuring event‐related potentials. In Experiment 1, we established that infants produce the N400 effect, a brain signature of semantic violations, in a live object naming paradigm in the presence of an adult observer. In Experiment 2, we induced false beliefs about the labeled objects in the adult observer to test whether infants keep track of the other person's comprehension. The results revealed that infants reacted to the semantic incongruity heard by the other as if they encountered it themselves: they exhibited an N400‐like response, even though labels were congruous from their perspective. This finding demonstrates that infants track the linguistic understanding of social partners.

Memory and inferential processes in false-belief tasks: An investigation of the unexpected-contents paradigm

This study investigated the extent to which 3- and 4-year-old children may rely on associative memory representations to pass an unexpected-contents false-belief task. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds performed at chance in both a standard Smarties task and a modified version highlighting the secrecy of the contents of the tube. These results were interpreted as evidence that having to infer the answer to a false-belief question (without relying on memory representations) is generally difficult for preschool children. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, 3-year-olds were tested at 3-month intervals during their first year of preschool and showed better performance in a narrative version of the Smarties task (chance level) than in the standard version (below-chance level). These children performed even better in an associative version of the narrative task (above-chance level) where they could form a memory representation associating the protagonist with the expected contents of a box. The results of a true-belief control suggest that some of these children may have relied on their memory of the protagonist's preference for the original contents of the box (rather than their understanding of what the protagonist was expecting to find inside). This suggests that when 3-year-olds passed the associative unexpected-contents task, some may have been keeping track of the protagonist's initial preference and not only (or not necessarily) of the protagonist's false belief. These results are interpreted in the light of current accounts of Theory of Mind development and failed replications of verbal false-belief tasks.

Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.

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.

A Systematic Review of Theory of Mind’s Precursors and Functions

Abstract. We conducted a systematic review of longitudinal theory of mind (ToM) studies, focusing on the precursors to and functional outcomes of ToM in typically-developing samples. Our search yielded 87 longitudinal studies, all of which involved children and adolescents. Early attention skills, executive function development, and the use of language are precursors to ToM development. Additionally, quality interaction with parents and older siblings can foster early improvements in ToM. Healthy ToM development improves social relationships with peers and produces greater desire to engage in prosocial behaviors. However, victimized individuals with highly-developed ToM may engage in increased aggression. Future longitudinal research is needed to investigate the functional outcomes resulting from ToM changes in adulthood.

Social motivation and implicit theory of mind in children with autism spectrum disorder

According to the social motivation theory of autism, children who develop Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have early deficits in social motivation, which is expressed by decreased attention to social information. These deficits are said to lead to impaired socio-cognitive development, such as theory of mind (ToM). There is little research focused on the relation between social motivation and ToM in this population. The goal of the present study was to investigate the link between one aspect of social motivation, social orienting, and ToM in preschoolers with ASD. It was expected that, in contrast to typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD would show impaired performance on tasks measuring social orienting and ToM. It was also expected that children's performance on the social orienting tasks would be correlated with their performance on the ToM task. A total of 17 children with ASD and 16 TD children participated in this study. Participants completed two social orienting tasks, a face preference task and a biological motion preference task, as well an implicit false belief task. Results reveal that TD children, but not children with ASD, exhibited social preference as measured by a preference for faces and biological motion. Furthermore, children with ASD tended to perform worse on the ToM task compared to their TD counterparts. Performance on the social motivation tasks and the ToM task tended to be related but only for the TD children. These findings suggest that ToM is multifaceted and that motivational deficits might have downstream effects even on implicit ToM. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1834-1844. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

LAY SUMMARY

The goal of the present study was to examine the link between poor attention to social information and mindreading abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Results demonstrated that children with ASD tended to perform worse than neurotypical children on both social orienting and theory of mind tasks. Preference for human faces and motion tended to be related but only for the neurotypical children. These findings provide partial support for the social motivation theory.

False-belief reasoning from 3 to 92 years of age

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.

Selective social learning in infancy: looking for mechanisms

Although there is mounting evidence that selective social learning begins in infancy, the psychological mechanisms underlying this ability are currently a controversial issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether theory of mind abilities and statistical learning skills are related to infants' selective social learning. Seventy-seven 18-month-olds were first exposed to a reliable or an unreliable speaker and then completed a word learning task, two theory of mind tasks, and a statistical learning task. If domain-general abilities are linked to selective social learning, then infants who demonstrate superior performance on the statistical learning task should perform better on the selective learning task, that is, should be less likely to learn words from an unreliable speaker. Alternatively, if domain-specific abilities are involved, then superior performance on theory of mind tasks should be related to selective learning performance. Findings revealed that, as expected, infants were more likely to learn a novel word from a reliable speaker. Importantly, infants who passed a theory of mind task assessing knowledge attribution were significantly less likely to learn a novel word from an unreliable speaker compared to infants who failed this task. No such effect was observed for the other tasks. These results suggest that infants who possess superior social-cognitive abilities are more apt to reject an unreliable speaker as informant. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/zuuCniHYzqo.

Level-2 perspectives computed quickly and spontaneously: Evidence from eight- to 9.5-year-old children

It has been widely assumed that computing how a scene looks from another perspective (level-2 perspective taking, PT) is an effortful process, as opposed to the automatic capacity of tracking visual access to objects (level-1 PT). Recently, adults have been found to compute both forms of visual perspectives in a quick but context-sensitive way, indicating that the two functions share more features than previously assumed. However, the developmental literature still shows the dissociation between automatic level-1 and effortful level-2 PT. In the current paper, we report an experiment showing that in a minimally social situation, participating in a number verification task with an adult confederate, eight- to 9.5-year-old children demonstrate similar online level-2 PT capacities as adults. Future studies need to address whether online PT shows selectivity in children as well and develop paradigms that are adequate to test preschoolers' online level-2 PT abilities. Statement of Contribution What is already known on this subject? Adults can access how objects appear to others (level-2 perspective) spontaneously and online Online level-1, but not level-2 perspective taking (PT) has been documented in school-aged children What the present study adds? Eight- to 9.5-year-olds performed a number verification task with a confederate who had the same task Children showed similar perspective interference as adults, indicating spontaneous level-2 PT Not only agent-object relations but also object appearances are computed online by eight- to 9.5-year-olds.

Revisiting Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior

In 1989, Miller and Aloise challenged the prevailing belief that preschoolers tend to explain others' behavior in terms of external events or a person's physical attributes and have little understanding of psychological causes. That review documented preschoolers' understanding of, and even preference for, psychological causes as part of an emerging renaissance in developmental social-cognitive research. The present, updated review (97 articles, participant ages 3 months to 6 years) suggests the emergence of a transformative new perspective in which social-cognition is balanced between social and cognitive aspects rather than tilted toward cognition. Recent research on infants' awareness of mental states, young children's understanding of social categories and their judgments of the trustworthiness of informants, and cultural context reveals various ways in which preschoolers' social-causal reasoning is social.

Words are not enough: how preschoolers' integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding

When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.