Measuring Beliefs in Centimeters: Private Knowledge Biases Preschoolers' and Adults' Representation of Others' Beliefs

TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults

Traditional measures of social cognition used in developmental research often lack satisfactory psychometric properties and are not designed to capture variation between individuals. Here, we present the TANGO (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open); a brief (approx. 5-10min), reliable, open-source task to quantify individual differences in the understanding of gaze cues. Localizing the attentional focus of an agent is crucial in inferring their mental states, building common ground, and thus, supporting cooperation. Our interactive browser-based task works across devices and enables in-person and remote testing. The implemented spatial layout allows for discrete and continuous measures of participants' click imprecision and is easily adaptable to different study requirements. Our task measures inter-individual differences in a child (N = 387) and an adult (N = 236) sample. Our two study versions and data collection modes yield comparable results that show substantial developmental gains: the older children are, the more accurately they locate the target. High internal consistency and test-retest reliability estimates underline that the captured variation is systematic. Associations with social-environmental factors and language skills speak to the validity of the task. This work shows a promising way forward in studying individual differences in social cognition and will help us explore the structure and development of our core social-cognitive processes in greater detail.

Measures of individual differences in adult theory of mind: A systematic review

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand and reason about mental states, has been extensively studied in young children and clinical populations. A growing interest in examining ToM in adults has emerged over the past two decades, but the extent to which existing measures are suitable for studying adults, especially in detecting individual differences, remains understudied. In this systematic review of 273 studies, 75 measures used to investigate individual differences in adults' ToM were identified. Their sensitivity to individual differences, reliability, and validity were examined. Results suggest that ceiling effects were prevalent, and there was limited evidence to establish the reliability or validity of these measures due to the lack of reports of psychometric properties. Interrelations among measures were inconsistent. These findings highlight the need for future empirical and theoretical work to broaden the evidence base regarding psychometric properties of measures, to develop new measures, and to lay out more specific hypotheses about the relevance of ToM for different social outcomes.

Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task

Understanding what other people think is crucial to our everyday interactions. We seem to be affected by the perspective of others even in situations where it is irrelevant to us. This intrusion from others' perspectives has been referred to as altercentric bias and has been suggested to reflect implicit belief processing. There is an ongoing debate about how robust such altercentric effects are and whether they indeed reflect true mentalizing or result from simpler, domain-general processes. As a critical test for true mentalizing, the blindfold manipulation has been proposed. That is, participants are familiarized with a blindfold that is either transparent or opaque. When they then observe a person wearing this blindfold, they can only infer what this person can or cannot see based on their knowledge of the blindfold's transparency. Here, we used this blindfold manipulation to test whether participants' reaction times in detecting an object depended on the agent's belief about the object's location, itself manipulated with a blindfold. As a second task, we asked participants to detect where the agent was going to look for the object. Across two experiments with a large participant pool (N = 234) and different settings (online/lab), we found evidence against altercentric biases in participants' response times in detecting the object. We did, however, replicate a well-documented reality congruency effect. When asked to detect the agent's action, in turn, participants were biased by their own knowledge of where the object should be, in line with egocentric biases previously found in false belief reasoning. These findings suggests that altercentric biases do not reflect belief processing but lower-level processes, or alternatively, that implicit belief processing does not occur when the belief needs to be inferred from one's own experience.

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.

The audience who knew too much: investigating the role of spontaneous theory of mind on the processing of dramatic irony scenes in film

As in real life, cinema viewers rely on spontaneous theory of mind (SToM) to interpret characters' mental states. Thus, analyzing cinematic structures offers a unique opportunity to examine ecologically valid sociocognitive processes. We conducted a proof-of-concept study (N = 42) to explore how SToM inferences impact film event comprehension in dramatic irony scenes, where knowledge divergence exists between the audience and characters. We hypothesized that spectators would focus more on characters' mental states in such false-belief inducing scenarios compared to scenarios without such disparity. We used six Harold Lloyd silent comedy clips in a narrative comprehension and spontaneous mental state attribution study with a between-subject (Knowledge Manipulation: Installation vs. Control) and within-subject (Phase: Context vs. Exploitation) comparisons. We provided critical information unknown to the characters only to the Installation group and withheld it from the Control group. By comparing differences in participants' descriptions of the clips during the Context phase (varying across groups) and Exploitation phase (same across groups), we evaluated viewers' processing of the same scenes based on their false- or true-belief representations. Our findings indicate that the Installation group used more cognitive mental state words during the Exploitation phase relative to the Context phase, suggesting that exposure to undisclosed critical information enhances the frequency of spontaneous epistemic state inferences and integration into event models of the exploitation. This research advances neurocinematics by highlighting spontaneous sociocognitive processes in event perception and comprehension and provides a novel dramatic irony film corpus and measures for future moment-to-moment SToM processing studies across cognitive-behavioral, physiological, and neural levels.

No signs of automatic perspective-taking or its modulation by joint attention in toddlers using an object retrieval task

It is currently debated whether simple forms of social perspective-taking that are in place by late infancy are performed automatically. We conducted two experiments (N = 124) to test whether 3-year-olds show automatic perspective-taking during object searches, and whether automatic perspective-taking is facilitated by joint attention. Children were asked to retrieve an object immediately after it was moved from one (L1) to another (L2) location within a container, e.g. a sandbox. In Experiment 1, a between-subjects design was used, with children being randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: one in which child and other jointly attended to the object in L1 (joint attention condition); one in which the other was present but unengaged with the child when the object was placed in L1 (other present condition) and a baseline condition in which only the child was present (no other condition). Automatic perspective-taking should manifest in biased searches toward L1 in the other present and joint attention conditions, but not in the no other condition. No automatic perspective-taking was observed in either experiment, regardless of whether the other person left and remained absent (Experiment 1) or returned after the object was relocated (Experiment 2). The findings contribute to a growing body of empirical data that questions the existence of automatic perspective-taking.

Spelling out some unaddressed conceptual and methodological challenges in empirical lifespan research

The importance of taking a lifespan approach to describe and understand human development has long been acknowledged (e.g., Baltes, 1987). Nevertheless, theoretical or empirical research that actually encompasses the entire lifespan, that is, from early childhood to old age, is rare. This is not surprising given the challenges such an approach entails. Many of these challenges (e.g., establishing measurement invariance between age groups) have been addressed in the previous literature, but others have not yet been sufficiently considered. The main purpose of this article is to present several examples of such largely unaddressed conceptual and methodological challenges and reflect upon possible ways to address them. We discuss the usefulness of a lifespan approach and the generalization of the challenges to other research comparing different groups, such as gender, culture, or species.

Closeness impeded self-perspective inhibition whereas facilitated explicit perspective calculation

This study examined whether and how closeness affected the calculation and selection processes underlying perspective taking. Using the visual dot perspective taking task, we introduced a close friend and a stranger from the participants' university as the perspective-taking targets. Friend and stranger trials were mixed in a block in Experiment 1 but separated in different blocks in Experiment 2. Results revealed a significant effect of closeness on egocentric but not altercentric interference. The analyses on other-consistent and other-inconsistent trials suggested that closeness impeded responding from the avatar's perspective when self and other perspectives differed but facilitated responding from the avatar's perspective when self and other perspectives were consistent. However, the analyses on self-consistent and self-inconsistent trials revealed that the processing cost induced by implicit perspective calculation and other-inhibition was comparable between friends and strangers. These suggested that closeness selectively impeded self-perspective inhibition whereas facilitated explicit perspective calculation.

The unreliability of egocentric bias across self-other and memory-belief distinctions in the Sandbox Task

Humans are often considered egocentric creatures, particularly (and ironically) when we are supposed to take another person's perspective over our own (i.e. when we use our theory of mind). We investigated the underlying causes of this phenomenon. We gave young adult participants a false belief task (Sandbox Task) in which objects were first hidden at one location by a protagonist and then moved to a second location within the same space but in the protagonist's absence. Participants were asked to indicate either where the protagonist remembered the item to be (reasoning about another's memory), believed it to be (reasoning about another's false belief), or where the protagonist would look for it (action prediction of another based on false belief). The distance away from Location A (the original one) towards Location B (the new location) was our measure of egocentric bias. We found no evidence that egocentric bias varied according to reasoning type, and no evidence that participants actually were more biased when reasoning about another person than when simply recalling the first location from memory. We conclude that the Sandbox Task paradigm may not be sensitive enough to draw out consistent effects related to mental state reasoning in young adults.

Egocentric bias across mental and non-mental representations in the Sandbox Task

In the Sandbox Task, participants indicate where a protagonist who has a false belief about the location of an object will look for that object in a trough filled with a substrate that conceals the hidden object's location. Previous findings that participants tend to indicate a location closer to where they themselves know the object to be located have been interpreted as evidence of egocentric bias when attributing mental states to others. We tested the assumption that such biases occur as a result of reasoning about mental states specifically. We found that participants showed more egocentric bias when reasoning from a protagonist's false belief than from their own memory, but found equivalent levels of bias when they were asked to indicate where a false film would depict the object as when they were asked about a protagonist's false belief. Our findings suggest that that egocentric biases found in adult false belief tasks are more likely due to a general difficulty with reasoning about false representations than a specialised difficulty with reasoning about false mental states.

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

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

Does altercentric interference rely on mentalizing?: Results from two level-1 perspective-taking tasks

Considerable debate has focused on whether adults possess an implicit system for representing others' mental states. Some argue that people automatically represent the perspective of others using evidence from altercentric interference-cases in which another agent's perspective affects the speed with which one can report one's own perspective. Others have argued that altercentric interference is not always specific to social stimuli and thus may represent a simpler process such as submentalizing. To distinguish between these positions, Study 1 developed a novel measure of altercentric interference-a "sandbox" measure-that allowed us to more sensitively assess altercentric interference across social and non-social conditions. We replicated previous findings showing that participants experience both egocentric and altercentric interference, but we found that these effects emerge equally in social and non-social conditions. To further test whether altercentric interference emerges in social perspective-taking situations, Study 2 conducted a conceptual replication of a study which used a novel "goggle" paradigm to assess whether individuals implicitly represent others' perspectives. Although we failed to find evidence of altercentric interference in response times, participants' accuracy reflected the possibility of interference from others' perspectives. We argue that these findings provide support for the idea that altercentric interference in response to social stimuli (an avatar) is driven by perspective-taking mechanisms, while such interference in response to non-social stimuli (an arrow) is driven by attention-cuing mechanisms.

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.

Intergroup visual perspective-taking: Shared group membership impairs self-perspective inhibition but may facilitate perspective calculation

Reasoning about what other people see, know, and want is essential for navigating social life. Yet, even neurodevelopmentally healthy adults make perspective-taking errors. Here, we examined how the group membership of perspective-taking targets (ingroup vs. outgroup) affects processes underlying visual perspective-taking. In three experiments using two bases of group identity (university affiliation and minimal groups), interference from one's own differing perspective (i.e., egocentric intrusion) was stronger when responding from an ingroup versus an outgroup member's perspective. Spontaneous perspective calculation, as indexed by interference from another's visual perspective when reporting one's own (i.e., altercentric intrusion), did not differ across target group membership in any of our experiments. Process-dissociation analyses, which aim to isolate automatic processes underlying altercentric-intrusion effects, further revealed negligible effects of target group membership on perspective calculation. Meta-analytically, however, there was suggestive evidence that shared group membership facilitates responding from others' perspectives when self and other perspectives are aligned.

Testing the validity of a continuous false belief task in 3- to 7-year-old children

In two studies, we examined young children's performance on the paper-and-pencil version of the Sandbox task, a continuous measure of false belief, and its relations with other false belief and inhibition tasks. In Study 1, 96 children aged 3 to 7years completed three false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, and Appearance/Reality) and two inhibition tasks (Head-Shoulders-Knees-Toes and Grass/Snow). Results revealed that false belief bias-a measure of egocentrism-on the Sandbox task correlated with age but not with the Unexpected Contents or Appearance/Reality task or with measures of inhibition after controlling for age. In Study 2, 90 3- to 7-year-olds completed five false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, Appearance/Reality, Change of Location, and a second-order false belief task), two inhibition tasks (Simon Says and Grass/Snow), and a receptive vocabulary task (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). Results showed that false belief bias on the Sandbox task correlated negatively with age and with the Change of Location task but not with the other false belief or inhibition tasks after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. The Sandbox task shows promise as an age-sensitive measure of false belief performance during early childhood and shows convergent and discriminant validity.

Promoting Mentalizing in Pupils by Acting on Teachers: Preliminary Italian Evidence of the "Thought in Mind" Project

Mentalization research focuses on different aspects of this topic, highlighting individual differences in mentalizing and proposing programs of intervention for children and adults to increase this ability. The “Thought in Mind Project” (TiM Project) provides training targeted to adults—teachers or parents—to increase their mentalization and, consequently, to obtain mentalization improvement in children. The present research aimed to explore for the first time ever the potential of training for teachers based on the TiM Project, regarding the enhancement of mentalizing of an adult who would have interacted as a teacher with children. For this reason, two teachers – similar for meta-cognitive and meta-emotional skills - and their classes (N = 46) were randomly assigned to the training or control condition. In the first case, the teacher participated in training on the implementation of promotion of mentalizing in everyday school teaching strategies; in the second case the teacher participated in a control activity, similar to training for scheduling and methods, but without promoting the implementation of mentalization (in both conditions two meetings lasting about 3 h at the beginning of the school year and two supervisions during the school year were conducted). The children were tested by tasks assessing several aspects of mentalization (second and third-order false belief understanding, Strange Stories, Reading the mind in the Eyes, Mentalizing Task) both before and after the teacher participate in the TiM or control training (i.e., at the beginning and at the end of the school year). The results showed that, although some measured components of mentalization progressed over time, only the TiM Project training group significantly improved in third order false belief understanding and changed - in a greater way compared to the control group – in two of the three components of the Mentalizing Task. These evidences are promising about the idea that the creation of a mentalizing community promotes the mentalization abilities of its members.

Reprint of: Equal egocentric bias in school-aged children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=76) or typical development (n=113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported.

Outcome Knowledge and False Belief

Virtually every social interaction involves reasoning about the perspectives of others, or ‘theory of mind (ToM).’ Previous research suggests that it is difficult to ignore our current knowledge when reasoning about a more naïve perspective (i.e., the curse of knowledge). In this Mini Review, we discuss the implications of the curse of knowledge for certain aspects of ToM. Particularly, we examine how the curse of knowledge influences key measurements of false belief reasoning. In closing, we touch on the need to develop new measurement tools to discern the mechanisms involved in the curse of knowledge and false belief reasoning, and how they develop across the lifespan.

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

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

Equal egocentric bias in school-aged children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=76) or typical development (n=113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported.

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

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

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

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

Theory of mind and cognitive processes in aging and Alzheimer type dementia: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES

Theory of mind (ToM) performance in aging and dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) has been a growing interest of researchers and recently, theoretical trends in ToM development have led to a focus on determining the cognitive skills involved in ToM performance. The aim of the present review is to answer three main questions: How is ToM assessed in aging and DAT? How does ToM performance evolve in aging and DAT? Do cognitive processes influence ToM performance in aging and DAT?

METHOD

A systematic review was conducted to provide a targeted overview of recent studies relating ToM performance with cognitive processes in aging and DAT.

RESULTS

RESULTS suggest a decrease in ToM performance, more pronounced in complex ToM tasks. Moreover, the review points up the strong involvement of executive functions, especially inhibition, and reasoning skills in ToM task achievement.

CONCLUSION

Current data suggest that the structure of ToM tasks itself could lead to poor performance, especially in populations with reduced cognitive abilities.