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An investigation into whether physically embodying another agent's perspective enhances accuracy when reasoning about their false beliefs.

Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that – contrary to widely held opinion – a subject can inferentially come to know some proposition p from an inference which relies...

En este trabajo se da cuenta del funcionamiento de las redes sociales de las personas mayores de 60 años que residen en contextos urbanos y que se encuentran en situación de pobreza o de pobreza extrema. En él se presenta parte de los resultados del proyecto del mismo nombre que ha sido financiado por la Vicerrectoría de investigaciones de la Universidad del Quindío. La muestra para el estudio ha sido constituida por 591 personas mayores de 60 años que están clasificados en los niveles 1 y 2 del Sistema de Selección de Beneficiarios (SISBEN), a quienes se les ha indagado acerca de la percepción que tienen del funcionamiento de sus redes sociales informales tanto familiares como no familiares, así como los apoyos que reciben y que provienen de las redes formales de apoyo. Se evidenció a través de la realización de este trabajo que las redes sociales se afectan debido a las precarias condiciones de vida que los adultos mayores presentan, pero que a pesar de ello las transferencias y los apoyos recíprocos ayudan a cubrir algunas de las necesidades que experimenta este grupo poblacional. Se desvirtúa además la falsa creencia de que los adultos mayores juegan un papel pasivo como receptor de ayudas de parte de las redes sociales, contrario a lo que se piensa se constata la reciprocidad de los intercambios de las personas mayores a pesar de las condiciones de pobreza, llegando a ser en muchos casos un proveedor de ayudas hacia los demás miembros de la red social.

A test of whether true beliefs and related non-mental representations are processed differently from facts, and whether autistic traits modulate any such difference.

Direct replication of Rubio-Fernandez and Geurts' (2013) modified False Belief Task and a Close replication of their comparison between a traditional False Belief Task and their modified version

This is an updated registration of the project that can be found at https://osf.io/te8hq/ - Our earlier registration contained the wrong p value for the cluster-significance threshold (page 11) Our aim is to gain a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying continued reliance on misinformation. To this end we will present subjects with brief fictional news reports that may or may not require their memory to be updated. Reliance on misinformation will be assessed through a decision task involving the clarification of a picture as a 'match' or 'mismatch' for the preceding report.

Testing whether bilingualism and/or the prior embodiment of an agent attenuates the attribution of one's own uncertainty, based on privileged information, to that person.

This project aims to advance our understanding of the construct alexithymia through two research goals: Firstly, identify the factors underlying multi-modally assessed alexithymia (self-report and interview). Secondly, examine the relation between the factors underlying alexithymia and an extensive battery of social cognition (comprised of the recognition of other people's affective mental states, representation of other people's cognitive mental states, visual perspective-taking, and affective distress of social rejection).

A study to investigate the influences of prior embodiment and bilingualism on the ability to take another's mental perspective and limit egocentric biases.

In a previous pre-registration (https://osf.io/agqwv), we asked whether GPT-3, a neural language model, showed sensitivity to implied belief states. We found that it did: in a false belief task paradigm, GPT-3 assigned significantly different probability estimates to different search locations as a function of a character's belief states. In other words, GPT-3 was "sensitive" to false belief information, in the sense that its predictions about upcoming words/locations changed according to previous language in the passage that indicated whether the character knew or didn't know about an object's location change. The goal of the present work is to ask whether, and to what extent, human behavior on this task is explained by GPT-3's output, as opposed to the key experimental manipulation of Condition. The theoretical motivation for this work is to test the hypothesis that human behavior on the false belief task requires some sort of *additional* cognitive resource or information source that cannot be obtained from distributional statistics alone. Thus, GPT-3's output serves as a kind of "baseline" to ask about the *sufficiency* (in principle) of distributional statistics, as captured by GPT-3, in explaining sensitivity to false belief on this task. The hypothesis space is as follows: H0 (null): Human behavior is not sensitive to the false belief manipulation. H1 (baseline): Human sensitivity to false belief does not exceed GPT-3’s sensitivity. In other words, distributional statistics are sufficient to explain human behavior on the task, and Condition does not explain additional variance. H2 (>baseline): Human behavior is sensitive to false belief, above and beyond variance in GPT-3 log-odds. Distributional statistics are *insufficient* to explain human behavior on the task, because Condition explains additional variance.

With the present study, we aim at investigating whether pet dogs (Canis familiaris) understand human false beliefs and whether they adjust their behaviour accordingly. In particular, we are going to address dogs’ ability to distinguish between true and false beliefs of a human experimenter (the “player”) in a novel non-verbal task: a social game with rules established by the human player. In a post-test condition, we will target explicitly dogs’ reaction to the player’s ignorance in the same task. The game is designed to elicit dogs’ ability to take into account the human player’s mental states because the “correct” response that dogs should exhibit to get a reward will depend on the player’s beliefs. Dogs will first learn a go/no-go task during a short training phase. In this, the presence of food in one opaque container (the “go box”) will be associated to the “go” response: dogs have to retrieve the food autonomously from the box within 10 seconds. The presence of food in a second opaque container (the “wait box”) will be associated to the “no-go” response: dogs have to wait for 10 seconds without touching any of the boxes in order to get a different piece of food from the player. If dogs make a mistake (moving when food is in the wait box or not moving for 10 seconds when the food is in the go box), the player will remove both boxes from the dogs’ reach. Once dogs have reached predefined learning criteria (see below), they will be ready for the test phase, in which test trials will be interspersed among training trials to keep up dogs’ motivation and to re-establish the rules of the game. During test trials, dogs will witness for the first time that a second experimenter, “the hider”, transfers the reward from the wait to the go box either in the presence (true belief condition) or in the absence (false belief condition) of the player.

Changing the way children make their response appears to sometimes, but not always, boost their inhibitory control – though interpreting existing findings is hampered by inconsistent methods and results. This study investigated the effects of delaying, and changing, the means of responding. Ninety-six preschoolers (mean age 46 months) completed tasks assessing inhibitory control, counterfactual reasoning, strategic reasoning, and false belief understanding. Children responded either immediately or after a delay, and either by pointing with their finger, or with a hand-held arrow. Delaying boosted performance on all tasks except false belief understanding; arrow-pointing only improved strategic reasoning. It is suggested that delay helps children work out the correct response; it is unlikely to help on tasks where this requirement is absent.

Theory of mind (ToM) is crucial for social interactions. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development. However, it is unclear whether this is the case for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) before and around the second year of life. The present study aimed to investigate false belief understanding (FBU) in DoH children with CIs. The relationships between false belief task (FBT) performance, sentence comprehension, age at implantation, duration of CI use, and Speech Recognition Threshold were explored. A total of 94 children with typical levels of hearing (TH) and 45 DoH children (age range: 3–8), who received their first CI between 6 and 27 months of age, were tested on the FBT and a sentence comprehension test. Results showed that 4- and 5-year-old children with CIs performed significantly worse than their peers with TH on the FBT; 6- to 8-year-old children with CIs performed similarly to age-matched children with TH. Age at implantation and duration of CI use were correlated with sentence comprehension but not with the FBT. The results indicated that FBU was delayed until the age of 6 years in most of children with CIs.

The present study investigates the development of advanced theory of mind (AToM) among typically developing (TD) children, children with mild intellectual disability (MID), and deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) children. The 2-year longitudinal study comprised three waves and included a large sample of children from Poland in middle childhood aged around 7.5-9.5 years (N = 779; M = 7.7, SD = 0.92 at wave 1). The analysis of children's understanding of second-order false belief and the Faux-Pas Recognition Test showed that TD children outperformed children with MID and DHH children on both measures. At 7.5 years, almost 60% of the TD children correctly solved the second-order false belief task; correct performance at 7.5 years in children with MID and DHH children was 27 and 38% respectively. Two years later, correct performance rose to 80% (TD children), 45% (children with MID), and 63% (DHH children). Despite these differences, the speed of AToM development did not differ across the groups. The development of faux-pas recognition followed a non-linear pattern, with TD children showing no further significant development after mid-elementary school. Our findings show differences in AToM development between TD children, children with MID, and DHH children, and they suggest that children's development of AToM may follow different developmental pathways, depending on the aspect of AToM under study.

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six measurement occasions, T1-T6; NT1 = 357; MageT1 = 52,30 weeks; SD = 1,73; 201 (56%) boys, 156 (44%) girls). Using latent trait modelling, a latent mindreading factor was established. Support was found for satisfactory reliability of the scale that ultimately consisted of 31 tasks. The tasks were age-matched, as the information curves for latent factors for each of the six age ranges and the reliability of the composite constructs were mostly acceptable. The validity was also confirmed using correlational analyses, and the continuous development of mindreading was observed over the tested age ranges: from joint attention, through using gestures in communication and visual perspective taking, to false-belief understanding. The proposed scale is suitable for use in the investigation of the general pattern of the development of, and individual differences in, mindreading ability.

Theory of mind skills are critical to understanding and interpreting many illustrations in primary school literature especially those which are used in material for the purpose of learning to read....

To successfully pull a practical joke on someone, children need to understand that their victims do not know what they themselves know, be able to intentionally manipulate others’ beliefs, and maintain a straight face to safeguard the integrity of the joke. This study examined the relationship between children’s developing theory of mind (ToM), inhibitory control, and their ability to pull a practical joke. Ninety-five children between ages 2 and 6 participated in, among other measures, a practical joke task that required them to knowingly give one of the experimenters a gift box containing a rubber insect. Results showed that children’s ability to pull a practical joke was significantly related to their age, false belief understanding (FBU), inhibitory control, and verbal ability. Children with more siblings were more likely to successfully pull a practical joke. Most importantly, inhibitory control was shown to mediate the relation between FBU and practical joking. The findings provide evidence that practical joking as an example of ToM use is effortful.

Three studies test whether people engage in mental state reasoning or theory of mind (ToM) differently across two fundamental social contexts: cooperation and competition. Study 1 examines how children with an emerging understanding of false beliefs deploy ToM across these contexts. We find that young preschool children are better able to plant false beliefs in others' minds in a cooperative versus competitive context; this difference does not emerge for other cognitive capacities tested (e.g., executive functioning, memory). Studies 2a and 2b reveal the same systematic difference in adults' ToM for cooperation and competition, even after accounting for relevant predictors (e.g., preference for a task condition, feelings about deception). Together, these findings provide initial evidence for enhanced ToM for cooperation versus competition in early development and also adulthood.

This study tests the role of verbal mediation during theory of mind processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adolescents with ASD or typical development completed a false belief task while simultaneously performing a verbal or nonverbal load task. There was no group difference in false belief accuracy; however, under verbal load, the ASD group was relatively less efficient, with slower reaction times, in false belief compared to true belief trials. Faster false belief task performance under verbal but not nonverbal load was associated with pragmatic language ability for the ASD group only. Results were consistent with the theory that there are two (implicit, nonverbal and explicit, verbal) processes that support cognitive reasoning about other people’s minds (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009), and that people with ASD rely more on the explicit system. Verbal mediation may be critical for false belief understanding in individuals with ASD, but not typical development.

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other.

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naively the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with (elicited-response) false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail (elicited-response) false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s (verbally ascribed) mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state.

Recent metacognitive research using a partial knowledge task indicates that a firm understanding of 'knowing about knowing' develops surprisingly late, at around 6 years of age. To reveal the mechanisms subserving this development, the partial knowledge task was used in a longitudinal study with 67 children (33 girls) as an outcome measure at 5;9 (years;months). In addition, first- and second-order false belief was assessed at 4;2, 5;0, and 5;9. At 2;6, perspective taking and executive abilities were evaluated. Metacognition at 5;9 was correlated with earlier theory of mind and perspective taking - even when verbal intelligence and executive abilities were partialled out. This highlights the importance of perspective taking for the development of an understanding of one's own mind.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is integral to Industry 4.0 and the evolution of smart factories. To realize this future, material processing industries are embarking on adopting AI technologies into their enterprise and plants; however, like all new technologies, there is always the potential for misuse or the false belief that the outcomes are reliable. The goal of this paper is to provide context for the application of machine learning to materials processing. The general landscapes of data science and materials processing are presented, using the foundry and the metal casting industry as an exemplar. The challenges that exist with typical foundry data are that the data are unbalanced, semi-supervised, heterogeneous, and limited in sample size. Data science methods to address these issues are presented and discussed. The elements of a data science project are outlined and illustrated by a case study using sand cast foundry data. Finally, a prospective view of the application of data science to materials processing and the impact this will have in the field are given.

The aim was to examine theories of bilingual inhibitory control superiority in the visual domain. In an ambiguous figure task, the ability to reverse (switch) interpretations (e.g., duck-rabbit) was examined in 3–5-year-olds bilinguals and monolinguals (N = 67). Bilingualism was no performance predictor in conceptual tasks (Droodle task, false belief task, ambiguous figures production task) that did not pose inhibitory demands. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in the ability to reverse, suggesting superior inhibitory capacity per se. Once reversal was experienced there was no difference in the time it took to reverse or reversal frequency between bilinguals and monolinguals. Bayesian analyses confirmed statistical result patterns. Findings support the established view of bilinguals’ superior domain-general inhibitory control. This might be brought to bear by attending the environment differently.

Significance The ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and beliefs characterizes the complex social interaction among humans. This ability, called Theory of Mind (ToM), has long been argued to develop around 4 y when children start explicitly reasoning about others' beliefs. However, when tested nonverbally, infants already show action expectations congruent with others’ beliefs before the age of 2 y. Do these behaviors reflect different systems for understanding others’ minds—an early and a later developing one—or when does ToM develop? We show that these abilities are supported by the maturation of independent brain networks, suggesting different systems for explicit verbal ToM and early nonverbal action expectations., Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the later-developing verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others’ minds—mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.

Experience of childhood abuse impairs complex social functioning in children; however, much less is known about its effects on basic socio-cognitive processes and even fewer studies have investigated these in adult survivors. Using two behavioral tasks, this study investigated spontaneous theory of mind (ToM) and imitative behavior in 41 women with childhood abuse (CA) and 26 unaffected comparison women (UC). In the spontaneous ToM task, UCs showed a larger ToM index than CAs, indicating more facilitation by knowledge of another’s false belief. In the imitation-inhibition task, CAs experienced less interference than UCs when observing another’s incongruent movements. After controlling for depression, differences in ToM became marginally significant, yet remained highly significant for inhibiting imitative behavior. The findings suggest childhood abuse survivors have altered perspective-taking, and are less influenced by others’ perspectives, potentially due to changes in self-other distinction. Clinical implications regarding therapeutic practice with survivors of childhood abuse are discussed.

Whether I take some action that aims at desired consequence C depends on whether or not I take it to be true that if I so act, I will bring C about and that if I do not, I will fail to. And the action will succeed if and only if my beliefs are true. We argue that two theses follow: (I) To believe a conditional is to be disposed to infer its consequent from the truth of its antecedent, and (II) The conditional is true iff the inference would not make a true belief in the antecedent cause a false belief in the consequent.

Estudios previos han encontrado que el funcionamiento ejecutivo (FE) se relaciona con la teoría de la mente (TdM). Sin embargo, la direccionalidad y fuerza de este vínculo sigue siendo un tema de debate en la literatura actual. El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar las perspectivas de estudio y evidencia empírica sobre la direccionalidad y fuerza del co-desarrollo de la FE y la TdM en niños. La búsqueda bibliográfica se efectuó en Web of Science. Para el análisis se utilizaron Sci2 Tool y Gephi. El análisis de clúster mostró tres perspectivas de estudio enfocadas a la relación entre el rendimiento de las FEs y la TdM en niños con trastorno de déficit de atención e hiperactividad (TDAH) (1), trastorno del espectro autista (TEA) (2) y desarrollo típico (DT) (3). Se encontró un patrón consistente de asociación entre FE y TdM en niños con TEA, TDAH y DT. Los hallazgos longitudinales mostraron que la asociación entre FE temprana y TdM tardía, incluida la comprensión de falsas creencias, es más fuerte que la asociación inversa y tiende a consolidarse con la edad, lo cual indica una direccionalidad FE→TdM, mas no TdM→FE, y no se explica mejor por el efecto de las demandas ejecutivas planteadas en las tareas de TdM. En conjunto, la evidencia apoya los relatos teóricos de la “emergencia” y el “enriquecimiento” al considerar que las FEs en el neurodesarrollo temprano del niño están implicadas ontogénicamente en la adquisición, consolidación y cambio de las capacidades de comprensión de estados psicológicos en los demás Association between executive functions and theory of mind in children: Empirical evidence and theoretical implications. Previous studies have found that executive functioning (EF) is related to theory of mind (ToM). However, the directionality and strength of this link remain a topic of debate in the current literature. The aim of this paper was to analyze the study perspectives and empirical evidence on the directionality and strength of the co-development of EF and ToM in children. The literature search was performed in Web of Science. Sci2 Tool and Gephi were used for the analysis. Cluster analysis showed three study perspectives focused on the relationship between EF performance and ToM in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (1), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (2) and typical development (TD) (3). We found a consistent pattern of association between EF and ToM in children with ASD, ADHD, and TD. Longitudinal findings showed that the association between early EF and late ToM, including false belief comprehension, is stronger than the inverse association and tends to consolidate with age, indicating an EF→ToM, but not ToM→EF directionality, and is not better explained by the effect of executive demands posed in ToM tasks. Taken together, the evidence supports the “emergence” and “enrichment” theoretical accounts in considering that EFs in early child neurodevelopment are ontogenetically implicated in the acquisition, consolidation, and change of psychological state comprehension abilities in others.

Testing the hypothesis that adults simulate others' beliefs.

Communication is based on social interaction, that is, interlocutors sharing attention to the intentions that they communicate about. In this study, we asked whether infants are aware of the fact that for information to be transferred, both interlocutors need to be present and share attention. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm created to test infants’ understanding of others’ false beliefs, we asked whether 18-month-olds (n=84) understood that correcting an agent’s false belief via communication requires that the agent discerns the verbal statement. Participants saw how an agent put a toy into a box and left. An assistant then moved the toy into a cup. The intervention phase varied between three conditions: The agent and the assistant communicated about the actual location of the toy (full-communication), the agent was absent during the assistant’s statement (incomplete-communication) or no communication took place (no-communication). At test, the agent reached into either the box or the cup. When no communication took place, infants expected the agent to search the toy at the original location. Full communication resulted in infants’ expectations that the recipient’s mental states were altered, that is, the infants expected her to search the toy at the actual location. In contrast, incomplete communication did not yield clear expectations. Eighteen-month-olds thus seem to understand that for information to be transferred, it is a precondition that the recipient of the communicative act must be present and share attention during the communicator’s statement. Only then communication can change a recipient’s mental state.

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

This study tests the hypothesis that the posterior cerebellum is involved in social cognition by identifying and automatizing sequences of social actions. We applied a belief serial reaction time task (Belief SRT task), which requires mentalizing about two protagonists' beliefs about how many flowers they receive. The protagonists' beliefs could either be true or false depending on their orientation (true belief: oriented towards and directly observing the flowers; or false belief: oriented away and knowing only prior information about flowers). A Control SRT task was created by replacing protagonists and their beliefs with shapes and colors. Participants were explicitly told that there was a standard sequence related to the two protagonists' belief orientations (Belief SRT task) or the shapes' colors (Control SRT task). Both tasks included a Training phase where the standard sequence was repeated and a Test phase where this standard sequence was interrupted by random sequences. As hypothesized, compared with the Control SRT task, the Belief SRT task recruited the posterior cerebellar Crus II and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) more. Faster response times were correlated with less Crus II activation and with more TPJ activation, suggesting that the Crus II supported automatizing the belief sequence while the TPJ supported inferring the protagonists' beliefs. Also as hypothesized, compared with an implicit version of the Belief SRT task (i.e., participants did not know about the existence of sequences; Ma, Pu, et al., 2021b), the cerebellar Crus I &II was engaged less during initial training and automatic application of the sequence, and the cortical TPJ was activated more in processing random sequences.

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veri...

Belief system is strongly associated with the socio-cultural practices, family orientation, social environment, schooling of people. Some of the false belief and harmful practices are associated with the Chhaupadi system of Nepal. Chhaupadi is a social tradition related to "menstrual taboo" in the western part of Nepal for Hindu women, which prohibits them from participating in normal family activities during a menstruation period, as they are considered "impure". The main aim of this study is to identify the false belief and harmful cultural practices of Chhaupadi system in Nepal. The study was conducted among the girl students of grade 9 and 10 by using the structured questionnaire survey. The study found that there are many false belief system and harmful cultural practices were associated with Chhaupadi system. The menstrual women were not allowed to enter into the kitchen, not allowed to cook food, not allowed to touch the drinking water, not allowed to enter into the religious places and not allowed to participate in the social functions. The false belief system and harmful cultural practices had negatively affected in the health and hygiene and personal and professional growth and development of women and girls, so such belief system and practices should be removed from the society though the series of orientation and wider level of community discussion.

Selon les epicuriens, toutes les impressions des sens sont vraies et la raison trouve en elles son fondement. Nombreux sont ceux, cependant, qui croient que les impressions des sens ne sont pas toutes vraies. Les epicuriens expliquent cette croyance de la facon suivante : la source de cette erreur est souvent la croyance que les impressions des sens peuvent se contredire. Mais cette derniere croyance resulte souvent de ce que les epicuriens tiennent pour notre tendance naturelle, et frequemment utile, a generaliser et a former des opinions par extrapolation a partir des impressions de nos sens.

Theory of mind (ToM) is a tool in the field of social cognition that is employed to judge and predict others’ intentions, motives, and psychological states. At present, studies on the development of ToM in older adults have offered some meaningful insights. However, researchers still lack an overall understanding of the differences of ToM abilities based on different age brackets. Accordingly, the present study utilized a variety of tasks to investigate the development of ToM in the elderly at different ages. The results demonstrated that: (1) The ToM abilities showed a declined tendency with the increasing age. (2) While overall, different types of ToM tasks varied in accordance with each age brackets. In the double emotion task, the development of ToM abilities showed no difference among three groups of people aged 65–74, 75–79, 80–84, while in comparison, the people aged 85–89 had a notable decline in ToM abilities. In the double bluff task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were notably stronger than that of the people aged 85–89, while the other groups did not varied much. In the false belief task, ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were significantly stronger than that of people aged 65–74 and 85–89, while the other groups did not varied much. In the second-order false belief task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 and 75–79 were greatly stronger than that of other two groups that had similar results. In the faux pas task, the ToM abilities of people aged 65–74 were notably stronger than that of other three groups, people aged 75–79 than that of 85–89, while other groups showed no difference. In general, the ToM abilities of the elderly displayed the inner consistency of development, but manifested particularity in different tasks.

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

Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to reason about others’ mental states, is central to healthy social development. Neural mechanisms supporting ToM may contribute to individual differences in children’s social cognitive behavior. Employing a false belief functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm, we identified patterns of neural activity and connectivity elicited by ToM reasoning in school-age children (N = 32, ages 9–13). Next, we tested relations between these neural ToM correlates and children’s everyday social cognition. Several key nodes of the neural ToM network showed greater activity when reasoning about false beliefs (ToM condition) vs non-mentalistic false content (control condition), including the bilateral temporoparietal junction (RTPJ and LTPJ), precuneus (PC) and right superior temporal sulcus. In addition, children demonstrated task-modulated changes in connectivity among these regions to support ToM relative to the control condition. ToM-related activity in the PC was negatively associated with variation in multiple aspects of children’s social cognitive behavior. Together, these findings elucidate how nodes of the ToM network act and interact to support false belief reasoning in school-age children and suggest that neural ToM mechanisms are linked to variation in everyday social cognition.