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Understanding the perspectives of others is a critical skill. Theory of mind (ToM) is an essential ability for social competence and communication, and it is necessary for understanding behaviors that differ from our own (Premack and Woodruff, 1978). Although all individuals possess a ToM to varying degrees, bilinguals are especially adept to perspective-taking. Research has reported that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in ToM tasks (e.g., Goetz, 2003; Rubio-Fernandez & Glucksberg, 2012). However, the mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear. Studying individual differences in ToM performance between bilinguals and monolinguals can help explain these mechanisms. Yet this promising area of research faces an important challenge: the lack of psychometric research on ToM measurement. Recent research suggests that tests that measure the ToM construct might not be as reliable as previously thought (Warnell & Redcay, 2019). This hinders the interpretation of experimental and correlational findings and puts into question the validity of the ToM construct. This dissertation addresses these two questions empirically to improve our understanding of what constitutes ToM. Study 1 examines the structure of ToM, crystallized intelligence (Gc), and fluid intelligence (Gf) to understand (a) whether ToM constitutes a construct separate from other cognitive abilities and (b) to explore whether tasks of ToM present adequate construct validity. For this, three confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were conducted. The results demonstrated that a model with three latent factors (ToM, Gf and Gc) did not adequately fit the data and was not significantly different from a model with only two latent factors (ToM-Gf and Gc). In addition, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) showed that two of the ToM tasks loaded onto a Gf factor whereas one of the tasks loaded onto a third factor by itself. Finally, an exploratory network analysis (NMA) was conducted to observe relationships among the tasks. The results showed that the ToM tasks were no more related to each other than to some tasks of Gf and Gc, and that ToM tasks did not form a consistent cluster. Overall, the results of Study 1 suggest that ToM tasks are likely not measuring a monolithic ToM construct. Study 2 examines individual differences in metalinguistic awareness, executive function, and bilingualism as predictors of ToM. The results showed that all variables significantly predicted ToM, but bilingualism was not a significant moderator of ToM. Overall, the findings suggest that in this sample there was no difference in the processes used to predict ToM based on being bilingual or monolingual. Implications for measurement and individual differences in ToM are discussed.

Sarah the chimpanzee was the primary participant in David Premack's language studies initiated at University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967. The first author was an undergraduate assistant training Sarah from 1967 to 1969. This article describes some of the early work with Sarah and our recent search for her. Sarah's whereabouts during the intervening years, and subsequent reunion with her in 2016 at Chimp Haven, a chimpanzee sanctuary in Louisiana, are described. It was found that despite her illness, Sarah engaged with the first author and demonstrated that she remembered him and the mechanics of the communication procedure that served as the foundation for testing Sarah's cognitive reasoning abilities as they pertained to language. There was no evidence she remembered any of the 5 symbolic nouns that were presented during a matching-to-sample procedure. The authors expressed their gratitude to the staff at Chimp Haven for the excellent care of Sarah.

This chapter examines young children’s growing awareness and understanding of their own, and other people’s, minds. As J. W. Astington suggests: The understanding of minds that children acquire in the preschool years underlies their social interactions with family and friends and provides the foundation for their cognitive activities in school. H. M. Wellman suggests that, along with language, theory of mind is ‘a distinctively human core capacity’ that shapes human thought and learning. D. Premack and G. Woodruff’s paper instigated considerable discussion, including how having a theory of mind might be demonstrated. The chapter focuses on self-regulation, particularly cognitive self-regulation, and metacognition. J. H. Flavell suggests that the development of metacognition, for example, is ‘one of the really central and significant cognitive-developmental hallmarks of the early childhood period’. C. M. Roebers suggests that executive function (EF) and metacognition both play a central role in models of self-regulation. The deaf children performed significantly less well on EF tasks.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with the aid of token training can achieve analogical reasoning, or the ability to understand relations-between-relations (e.g., Premack, 1976; Thompson, Oden, & Boysen, 1997). However, extraordinarily few numbers of old- and new-world monkeys have demonstrated this ability in variants of relational matching to sample tasks. Moreover, the rarity of replications leaves open the question of whether the results are normative for other captive colonies of the same species. In experiment one we attempted to replicate whether old world rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) might demonstrate the same level of proficiency on a spatial above/below relational matching task as reported for old world baboons (Papio papio). None of the rhesus monkeys attained above chance performances over 10,000 training trials. In experiment two we attempted to replicate results demonstrating that new-world capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) match above/below relations. The capuchin monkeys performed above chance only in the absence of 'Clever Hans' controls for cuing of the correct choice by the experimenters. These failures to replicate previously reported results demonstrate that some, but definitely not all monkeys can judge the equivalence of abstract 'relations between relations' and warrant further investigations into the behavioral and cognitive characteristics that underlie these similarities and differences within population and between individuals of different primate species.

Play develops skill across all developmental domains in early childhood: cognitive/academic, communication/language, social-emotional, physical, and adaptive. Children with ASD often refrain from engaging in any type of play, or they may prefer play that is highly repetitious, sensory-based and of a ?cause/effect? type. Encouraging a child with ASD to engage in novel types of play can be challenging, especially if the child has limited play skills in his repertoire. However, it is critically important that we discover ways to increase play skills of children with ASD. This article will discuss strategies for teaching and encouraging novel play for children with ASD. Strategies to consider are visual supports, such as video modeling, or social narratives, and reinforcement-based strategies: the Premack Principle or utilizing an existing area of interest.

International audience; Reasoning by analogy is one of the most complex and highly adaptive cognitive processes in abstract thinking. For humans, analogical reasoning entails the judgment and conceptual mapping of relations-between-relations and is facilitated by language (Gentner in Cogn Sci 7:155-170, 1983; Premack in Thought without language, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986). Recent evidence, however, shows that monkeys like ``language-trained'' apes exhibit similar capacity to match relations-between-relations (Fagot and Thompson in Psychol Sci 22:1304-1309, 2011; Flemming et al. in J Exp Psychol: Anim Behav Process 37:353-360, 2011; Truppa et al. in Plos One 6(8):e23809, 2011). Whether this behavior is driven by the abstraction of categorical relations or alternatively by direct perception of variability (entropy) is crucial to the debate as to whether nonhuman animals are capable of analogical reasoning. In the current study, we presented baboons (Papio papio) and humans (Homo sapiens) with a computerized same/different relational-matching task that in principle could be solved by either strategy. Both baboons and humans produced markedly similar patterns of responding. Both species responded different when the perceptual variability of a stimulus array fell exactly between or even closer to that of a same display. Overall, these results demonstrate that categorical abstraction trumped perceptual properties and, like humans, Old World monkeys can solve the analogical matching task by judging the categorical abstract equivalence of same/different relations-between-relations.

Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) abilities for visual inferential reasoning by exclusion were tested in two experiments. The first replicated the Grey parrot study of Mikolasch, Kotrschal, and Schloegl (2011, African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus) use inference by exclusion to find hidden food. Biology Letters, 7, 875-877), which in turn replicated that of Premack and Premck (1994, Levels of causal understanding in chimpanzees and children. Cognition, 50, 347-362) with apes, to learn if our subjects could succeed on this task. Here parrots watched an experimenter hide two equally desirable foods under two separate opaque cups, surreptitiously remove and then, in view of the birds, pocket/eat one of the foods, leaving birds to find the still baited cup. The experiment contained controls for various alternative explanations for the birds' behavior, but birds might still have avoided a cup from which something had been removed rather than specifically tracking the eaten food. Thus, in the second experiment, some trials were run with one food slightly more preferred than the other, during which two items of each type were hidden and only one of the items were removed from one cup. Sessions also included Experiment 1-type trials to see if birds tracked when and when not to use exclusion. Thus, birds would be rewarded for attending closely to all the experimental aspects needed to infer how to receive their preferred treat. Three of four birds succeeded fully.

Since Premack and Woodruf (1978), the study of mindreading abilities in nonhumans, especially primates, has been thoroughly investigated. But attempts to understand the evolution of this aspect of human intelligence have mainly focused on comparisons between apes and human infants, while relatively little is known about the abilities of monkeys. This lack of data on monkeys seems mainly due to the hypothesis of a cognitive "gap" between apes and monkeys. However, in recent years monkeys have been featuring more prominently in the landscape of social cognition research, and some of these systematic studies appear promising. This paper reviews i) current knowledge about monkeys' socio-cognitive abilities, especially regarding gaze processing, attention and intention reading, and perspective-taking, ii) alternative hypotheses regarding the underlying mechanisms of such complex behaviors, and iii) potential new perspectives and future directions for studying ToM in monkeys.

Research concerning animal cognition explores the abilities and capacity of animals to perceive, think and conceive. As an extension of this, researchers have tried to ascertain the concept of animal minds. The field has been a matter of great debate as it has brought into question the uniqueness of the human mind. This dissertation will review the various areas of research that have contributed to our understanding of animal minds, with a specific focus on non-human primates. The term ‘theory of mind’ was originally proposed by Premack and Woodruff in 1978. The ability entails a recognition and understanding of another’s mental states. Recently, this term has included the cognition of seeing. Throughout this article, the important distinction between theory of mind capabilities and complex behavioural analysis is emphasized. It is important to consider how various primates represent entities in their environment, including their own image. In particular reference to this latter point, self-recognition could act as a first step towards understanding others. With this ability, other individuals may then be understood and manipulated through deception, imitation and teaching. In addition to deception, pretend play and external representation are proposed as another dimension of understanding false representations. Decisions about the evolutionary point at which theory of mind may have developed will depend on interpretations of the evidence for these abilities in non-human primates and whether indeed theory of mind is underlying them. Since the conception of the term ‘theory of mind’, the issue may have evolved beyond whether or not there is theory of mind in non-human primates to a more sophisticated appreciation that the concept of mind has many facets and some of these may exist in non-human primates while others may not.

Among long-standing issues in animal cognition is which (nonhuman) animal species have the cognitive ability to learn abstract concepts (e.g., Premack, 1978). The hallmark of abstract concepts is that they transcend specific features of the training stimuli because they are based upon relationships (i.e., relational learning). In a seminal paper that was instrumental in the modern resurgence of animal cognition, David Premack said “…unlike the primate, the behavior of the pigeon is predominantly controlled by absolute rather than relational factors…” (1978, p. 432). Premack’s claim that item-specific learning (i.e., absolute factors) by pigeons has been the accepted explanation for why pigeons, at that time, had failed to learn abstract concepts (e.g., Cumming, Berryman, & Cohen, 1965; Farthing & Opuda, 1974; Santi 1978). Nevertheless, evidence began to emerge that if a large number of training stimuli (e.g., 152 color cartoons) were used, pigeons actually could learn a matching-to-sample (MTS) abstract concept (Wright, Cook, Rivera, Sands, & Delius, 1988). A somewhat more advantageous procedure than MTS for testing abstract-concept learning is the same/different procedure because the matching and non-matching stimuli are presented on separate trials. Details of currently used S/D procedures used to test pigeon abstract-concept learning vary widely including the numbers of stimuli used in training and testing (e.g., Blaisdell & Cook, 2005; Cook, Kelly, & Katz, 2003; Santiago & Wright, 1984; Wasserman, Hugart, & Kirkpatrick-Steger, 1995; Young & Wasserman, 1997). In consideration of the evidence that some species only accurately transfer their performance to novel stimuli following training with a substantial number of training stimuli, we have regularly made the number of training stimuli a parameter in our experiments. In a series of experiments with rhesus monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and pigeons, we began training with a small set of 8 stimuli and then progressively expanded (doubled) the training set followed by transfer tests with novel stimuli (Katz & Wright, 2006; Katz, Wright, & Bachevalier, 2002; Wright, Rivera, Katz, & Bachevalier, 2003). This regime allowed us to assess whether or not the degree of concept learning would depend on the number of training exemplars and whether or not transfer would eventually reach the level of baseline performance with the training stimuli. We anticipated that large numbers of training stimuli might be necessary to achieve a level of transfer equivalent to baseline performance, and therefore used picture stimuli. We selected pictures so that the training and testing pictures would be distinctive from one another and the transfer stimuli were only tested once, by definition of their being novel. In these experiments when the training set was expanded sufficiently (256 items for pigeons, 128 for monkeys), transfer became equivalent to baseline performance which remained above 80% correct. We termed this full abstract-concept learning because the baseline performance sets an upper limit. This result was the first time that pigeons had shown full concept learning in an S/D task, but pigeons required more training exemplars (i.e., stimulus pairs of same or different) than rhesus or capuchin monkeys. We characterized this species difference as a quantitative difference in contrast to the ability to fully learn the S/D abstract concept which we characterized as a qualitative similarity. The purpose of the experiments of this article was to explore whether or not training pigeons with somewhat larger initial sets of stimuli might produce better transfer than those trained initially with an 8-item set in the prior study. Training with the smaller 8-item set might produce carryover effects that would interfere with generalized relational learning which would in turn be necessary for good performance with the large training sets. To this end, we trained different groups of pigeons with larger initial training sets and compared their transfer to groups trained initially with smaller training sets. Such comparisons, of course, would depend upon pigeons being able to learn the S/D task with large training sets. With these considerations, the first group of pigeons was trained on an intermediate set size of 32 pictures.

This study investigated the ability of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos to make inferences by exclusion using the procedure pioneered by Premack and Premack (Cognition 50:347-362, 1994) with chimpanzees. Thirty apes were presented with two different food items (banana vs. grape) on a platform and covered with identical containers. One of the items was removed from the container and placed between the two containers so that subjects could see it. After discarding this item, subjects could select between the two containers. In Experiment 1, apes preferentially selected the container that held the item that the experimenter had not discarded, especially if subjects saw the experimenter remove the item from the container (but without seeing the container empty). Experiment 3 in which the food was removed from one of the containers behind a barrier confirmed these results. In contrast, subjects performed at chance levels when a stimulus (colored plastic chip: Exp. 1; food item: Exp. 2 and Exp. 3) designated the item that had been removed. These results indicated that apes made inferences, not just learned to use a discriminative cue to avoid the empty container. Apes perceived and treated the item discarded by the experimenter as if it were the very one that had been hidden under the container. Results suggested a positive relationship between age and inferential ability independent of memory ability but no species differences.

Some evolutionary cognitive and developmental psychologists propose that the human mind consists of domain-specific modules. These are characterized as self-contained “mini-computers” that process information of a certain kind. Although, according to my reading, much of the extant human brain research does not necessarily support the module view (Greenwald, 1997), still module theories continue to occupy center stage in cognitive developmental and comparative psychology. One would think that neuroscience, as a study of the behavior beneath the skin, would simply replace cognitive psychology. But, perhaps I missed the value of the psychological construct. In their book, the Premacks set out to provide a synthesis of evidence from various fields in order to identify what they characterize as “original intelligence.” Their synthesis is derived from their reading of findings in comparative psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and other “life sciences.” All of the evidence and theory from psychology from which they draw their evidence comes from the cognitive perspective including their own contributions to that research. For them, original intelligence includes certain phylogenetic and ontogenetic contributions that they identify as expectancies, capabilities that are present or not present in certain species including humans. These capabilities include inherited expectancies, derived from natural selection; and expectancies derived from experience and its interaction with inherited expectancies. Infants have inherited expectancies not only about how physical bodies “act,” but also about psychological and biological objects, about language, number, spatial navigation, and music. Indeed, infants have inherited expectancies in all the domains into which human problem solving can be divided. These expectancies are an integral part of the infant's modules. (p. 17)

We suspect that people have an everyday theory of mind because they explain and frequently talk about the behaviour of others and themselves in terms of beliefs and desires. Having a theory of mind means that we believe that other people have minds like ours and that we understand the behaviour of these others in terms of the contents of their minds: their knowledge, beliefs and desires. But how can we demonstrate experimentally that people are using their theory of mind to predict the behaviour of others. This problem is particularly acute in the case of animals or young human children when they do not have language. Dennett (1978) discussing Premack & Woodruff's (1978) seminal paper ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’, suggested that the use of false beliefs to explain behaviour would provide convincing evidence. When their belief is true (i.e. corresponds to the actual state of the world) we can explain peoples' behaviour on the basis of the state of the world without needing to know about their beliefs. This ambiguity does not arise when the belief is false. The first experiment to use this approach was published by Wimmer & Perner (1983). They showed that at around 4 years of age a child knows that Maxi will look for his chocolates where Maxi believes them to be, even though the child knows that this belief is false because he has seen Maxi's mother moving the chocolates. In the English-speaking world the task involving Maxi and the chocolates has become the Sally-Anne task (see this issue, Lee et al. 2004).

Contents: Part I:Perspectives. R.R. Hoffman, D.S. Palermo, Introduction. D.L. Horton, Retrospections on the Study of Memory and Cognition. U. Neisser, Direct Perception and Other Forms of Knowing. Part II:Speech Perception. A.M. Liberman, I.G. Mattingly, Modularity and the Effects of Experience. M. Studdert-Kennedy, A Note on Linguistic Nativism. R.L. Diehl, K.R. Kluender, M.A. Walsh, E.M. Parker, Auditory Enhancement in Speech Perception and Phonology. Part III:Language Comprehension. N.F. Johnson, Holistic Models of Word Recognition. C. Clifton, Jr., Syntactic Modularity in Sentence Comprehension. D.J. Foss, S.R. Speer, Global and Local Context Effects in Sentence Processing. P.B. Gough, The Complexity of Reading. Part IV:Cognition and Motivation. W.N. Dember, Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion: Ideology Revisited. R.R. Hoffman, J.E. Waggoner D.S. Palermo, Metaphor and Context in the Language of Emotion. H. Ross, Fog Cat Fog. Part V:The Development of Knowledge and Problem Solving Skills. W.F. Brewer, A. Samarapungavan, Children's Theories vs. Scientific Theories: Differences in Reasoning or Differences in Knowledge? J.B. Pittenger, Cognitive Physics and Event Perception: Two Approaches to the Assessment of People's Knowledge of Physics. J.G. Greeno, Mathematical Cognition: Accomplishments and Challenges in Research. J. Franks, J. Bransford, K. Brailey, S. Purdon, Understanding Memory Access. Part VI:Pedagogy. D. Premack, The Aesthetic Basis of Pedagogy. J.A. Becker, Pragmatic Skills and the Acquisition of Linguistic Competence. J.J. Jenkins, Educating for Applications: Possibilities and Paradoxes. Part VII:Perception and Motor Skills. R.N. Kraft, Light and Mind: Understanding the Structure of Film. C. Carello, M.T. Turvey, Ecological Units of Analysis and Baseball's "Illusions." P.N. Kugler, R.E. Shaw, K.J. Vicente, J. Kinsella-Shaw, The Role of Attractors in the Self-Organization of Intentional Systems. H.L. Pick, Jr., K.S. Rosengren, Perception and Representation in the Development of Mobility. Part VIII:Applications of Cognitive Psychology. P.H. Brooks, J. Van Hanneghan, An Eventful Approach to Studying Mental Retardation. L.S. Mark, M.J. Dainoff, R. Moritz, D. Vogele, An Ecological Framework for Ergonomic Research and Design. R. Warren, Methodological Problems in Applied Cognition and Perception Research: Theoretical Implications.

We argue that Premack and Premack's criticism of our demonstration (Gergely et al., 1995) of interpreting goal-directed action in one year-olds in terms of the principle of rationality are ill-founded, and their suggested alternative test for goal-attribution is open to lower level interpretations. We show that the alterative model they propose for our data in terms of 'appropriate' change of means action is but a somewhat imprecise restatement of our account of the infant's naive theory of rational action. Finally, we elaborate and clarify our model of the teleological stance in infancy which we suggest is an as yet nonmentalistic precursor of the young child's later emerging causal theory of mind.

In their article, "Does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'?," Baron-Cohen et al. [1985] proposed a novel paradigm to explain social impairment in children diagnosed as autistic (AD). Much research has been undertaken since their article went to print. The purpose of this commentary is to gauge whether Theory of Mind (ToM)-or lack thereof-is a valid model for explaining abnormal social behavior in children with AD. ToM is defined as "the ability to impute mental states to oneself and to others" and "the ability to make inferences about what other people believe to be the case." The source for their model was provided by an article published earlier by Premack and Woodruff, "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?" Later research in chimpanzees did not support a ToM in primates. From the outset, ToM as a neurocognitive model of autism has had many shortcomings-methodological, logical, and empirical. Other ToM assumptions, for example, its universality in all children in all cultures and socioeconomic conditions, are not supported by data. The age at which a ToM emerges, or events that presage a ToM, are too often not corroborated. Recent studies of mirror neurons, their location and interconnections in brain, their relationship to social behavior and language, and the effect of lesions there on speech, language and social behavior, strongly suggests that a neurobiological as opposed to neurocognitive model of autism is a more parsimonious explanation for the social and behavioral phenotypes observed in autism.

Analogical reasoning is a corner stone of human cognition, but the phylogenetic origins of this skill are still unknown. Recent animal studies have suggested that only apes can solve the 2- by 2-item relational matching (RMTS) analogy problem, with potential benefits of language- (Premack, 1983) or token-training procedures (Thompson, Oden, & Boysen, 1997). In this study, 6 baboons were initially trained in an RMTS task in which the same and different relations were exemplified by compound stimuli made of 2 adjacent patches of colors. Learning occurred in this task with a first set of colors and transferred to probe trials with new colors (Experiment 1). Manipulation of the size of the sample or comparison stimuli (Experiment 2) showed that the performance was not merely controlled by the surface of the color patches, suggesting cognitive flexibility. Performance collapsed to chance level when a gap was introduced between the 2 elemental features composing the same or different displays (Experiment 3). Nevertheless, this effect of gap size was abolished by training (Experiment 4). It is suggested that monkeys share the ability to judge relations between relations with humans and apes, even in the absence of language or token training. However, this ability has been previously masked by a local mode of processing that hinders the processing of the stimuli as pairs rather than as independent objects.

Background: Traits and mental states are considered to be inter-related parts of theory of mind.Attribution research demonstrates the influential role played by traits in social cognition. However,there has been little investigation into how individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) under-stand traits. Method: The ability of individuals with ASD to infer traits from descriptions of behaviorwas investigated by asking participants to read trait-implying sentences and then to choose one of twowords that best related to the sentence. Results: In Experiment 1, individuals with ASD performedsimilarly to matched controls in being faster at choosing the trait in comparison to the semanticassociate of one of the words in the sentence. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 provided convergingevidence in suggesting that inferring traits from textual descriptions of behavior occurs with relativelylittle effort. The results of Experiment 3 suggested that making trait inferences took priority overinferring actions or making semantic connections between words. Conclusions: Individuals with ASDinfer traits from descriptions of behavior effortlessly and spontaneously. The possibility of trait inferencebeing a spared socio-cognitive function in autism is discussed. Keywords: Autism, traits, theory ofmind, inferences.Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985) put forth thehighly influential theory of mind hypothesis basedon the finding that children with autism have diffi-culty imputing beliefs. According to Premack andWoodruff (1978), theory of mind, the ability toimpute mental states like beliefs, desires and inten-tions to oneself and to others, deserves to be thoughtof as a ‘nai¨ve’ theory because it is used to explain andmake predictions about behavior, just like anyscientific theory. How we understand and predictothers’ behavior is also the focus of attributionresearch which concentrates on ‘traits’, a charac-teristic of a person that is associated with aparticular type of behavior.Woodruff and Premack (1979), in attempting tostudy intentional communication in chimpanzees,developed a paradigm that required taking intoaccount the behavioral disposition of the ‘sender’ or‘receiver’ of the information as being ‘cooperative’ or‘competitive’. The researchers wanted to knowwhether the chimpanzees were sensitive to thesetraits when evaluating information. More recently,other researchers too have suggested that traits andmental states are inter-related in being part of theoryof mind (Heyman & Gelman, 1999; Rosati et al.,2001; Wellman, 1990). The well-established equa-tion of causal attribution assumes that behavior is ajoint product of disposition and situation. Disposi-tional attribution places the cause of an actionwithin the individual, on some lasting characteristic(trait), whereas situational attribution places thecause outside the individual on transient environ-mental circumstances, including temporary states ofmind (Rosati et al., 2001).From the extensive theory of mind research weknow that people with autism spectrum disorders(ASD) have difficulty using the situational informa-tion to impute mental states to the protagonist,which putatively explains why they make errors inpredicting behavior. Tasks used to test theory ofmind can be considered as a special kind of attri-bution task where only the situation and not thedisposition of the protagonist needs to be consideredfor arriving at the correct answer. To predict Maxi’sbehavior participants need to understand that thesituation constrains Maxi’s knowledge which theninfluences his behavior. What kind of person Maxi is(a forgetful person, for example) is not relevant, andneither is Maxi’s ability to infer that his mother hasmoved the chocolate. Thus, one might argue thatthe task tests only one aspect of cognition which isinvolved in predicting other people’s behavior.Research suggests that in western society there isa tendency to attribute the cause of behavior to theactor’s disposition even when it is possible to providea situational explanation for the action. Thistendency, referred to as Observer’s Bias (Jones &Harris, 1967), Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross,1977) or Correspondence Bias (Gilbert & Malone,1995), illustrates the influential role played by traitsin social cognition. The exploration of trait inferencein those with ASD may also help explain why moreable individuals with ASD perform well on simpletests of theory of mind, but still have significantdifficulties with real-world social interactions. It isprobable that they may take account of situational

For many decades, researchers have tried to get a glimpse into the “folk physies” of animals, that is, their common sense understanding of how the world works, as well as why it works in the way it does (e.g., Kohler 1927). It has been suggested that animals use a variety of cognitive strategies in understanding such things as space, tools, object categories, quantities, and perhaps causality. Significantly later, this focus of research has been complemented with studies on “folk psychology”, that is, what animals understand about the behavior and perhaps mental lives of conspecifics in interactions involving cooperation, competition, communication, and social learning (e.g., Premack and Woodruff 1978). However, in both fields of research, we are far from a common agreement of what animals really understand when they are engaged in adapting or modifying their environment, in their physical or social form, for their own sake. While some researchers believe that many large-brained animals develop an increasing ability to understand causal relationships on accumulating experience (Fujita, this volume; Hauser 2000; Rumbaugh et al. 2000), others warn to over-interpret the animal’s apprehension of cause-effect relations underlying the mainpulation of animate or inanimate objects (Heyes 1998; Povinelli 2000; Tomasello and Call 1997; Visalberghi and Tomasello 1998).

Research interest in children's understanding of the mind goes back as far as Piaget's claim that children are cognitively egocentric (Flavell, 2000). Many years later, research on the understanding of the mind was revived in a paper that sought evidence for a theory of mind, not for children but for chimpanzees (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). The researchers claimed that chimpanzees' ability to predict what a human actor will do to achieve certain goals implies that the animal attributes mental states to the actor. This seminal paper generated a flurry of studies on theory of mind in nonhuman primates. A review of this research based on several different experimental paradigms concluded that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception-goal psychology (i.e., they can perceive what the other's goal is but not understand the mental states associated with the goal), as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief-desire psychology (Call & Tomasello, 2008). Around the same time, research on children's understanding of the mind was revived in a landmark paper by Wimmer and Perner (1983) and by other developmentalists (Bretherton, McNew, & Beegly-Smith. 1981). In line with the research on nonhuman primates, part of the progress that has been made in recent years is a recognition that theory of mind knowledge is acquired in an extended series of developmental milestones and that this development is based on a rich set of socio-cognitive abilities that develop in infancy (Wellman, 2002). The evidence outlined in the sections of this chapter suggests that infants possess a nascent understanding of mental states that older children use in explaining and predicting human behavior. Researchers have learned a great deal about the developmental origins of naive psychology in infancy. Nevertheless, the depth of infants' understanding of human behavior is still a controversial issue. For example, a popular paradigm in naive psychology is violation of expectancy. In false-belief tasks, infants look longer at a scene.in which a protagonist searches for an object in a location she does not know than at a scene in which the protagonist searches for an object in a location where she has previously seen the object disappear. The fact that no active behavioral response is required makes many researchers doubt that an infants' looking pattern reflects a deep level of understanding. Looking pattern may simply reflect the infants' detection that something in the scene is novel (e.g., protagonist looks at a location different than the one infants last saw her look at). Indeed this interpretation may account for the conflicting results in recent studies (e.g., Poulin-Dubois et al., 2007; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian et al., 2007). Poulin-Dubois et al. (2007) recently reported that the ability to distinguish between knowledge and ignorance (true belief) is absent at 14 months of age and still fragile at 18 months in a violation-of-expectancy task depicting videotaped human actors. In contrast, false-belief attribution to a computer animated caterpillar has been reported in 13-month-old infants (Surian et al., 2007). Given that infants have had more experience with humans looking at objects than with a caterpillar's looking behavior, the current evidence for an implicit understanding of advanced mental states such as false belief should be interpreted with caution. As is the case for nonhuman primate research, infants' mind-reading success might be accounted for by a simple behavior-reading explanation. According to some researchers, primates' (and infants') successful performance in theory of mind tasks can be explained by a sophisticated form of behavior reading. Under this view, infants perform well in such tasks because they are adept at calculating the statistical likelihood that some aspects of people's observable features (e.g., gaze) will be linked to future actions (e.g., search at a location). Distinguishing between a mentalistic and rule-based account is very difficult (Povinelli & Vonk, 2004). One way to address this debate would be to design training studies that provide infants with first-person experience of mental states and to use more active behavioral measures. In terms of training, there is some evidence that infants' performance on goal and visual perception attribution tasks is improved if they received training of relevant skills (e.g., wearing a blindfold, reaching with a "sticky mitten": Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007: Sommerville & Woodward, 2004). Furthermore, longitudinal research using more active measures revealed links between goal detection as measured with the violation of expectancy paradigm at 10 months of age and the ability to infer intended goals in an imitation task at 14 months (Olineck & Poulin-Dubois, 2007b). Developmental changes in the scope of infants' concept of intentional agent also will require more attention from researchers. According to some, infants' attributions of intentional behavior are activated whenever infants recognize an object as a psychological agent, based on an evolutionary designed system which is sensitive to certain cues such as self-propulsion, contingent reactivity or equifinal variation of the action (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Johnson, 2000; Leslie, deficient in theory of mind. One may hope that nonverbal theory of mind tasks that reliably predict later theory mind skills will be adapted for use with this population and eventually used for the early detection of autism. In sum, the numerous studies reported here show that by the end of the second year of life, infants have developed ways to predict human actions The review also makes clear that we do not yet fully understand how deep infants' insight into the mind really is. Nonetheless, there appears to be some consensus that infants, like chimpanzees, understand the goals, intentions, perception, and knowledge of others. This provides the foundations for the full-fledged adult-like naive psychology that develops gradually in early childhood.

The ability of 3- to 5-year-old children to deceive a competitor in a hiding game was studied in three experiments in a paradigm similar to the one introduced by Woodruff & Premack (1979) for the study of deception in chimpanzees. The first two experiments showed a significant increase with age in the frequency of deceptive pointing, with children below the age of about 3 1/2 years consistently failing to deceive a competitor even under very conducive conditions. The third experiment showed that two deception tasks (deceptive pointing and telling a lie) were significantly more difficult for 3- to 4-year-old children than parallel ‘sabotage’ tasks (i.e. tasks testing the ability to physically prevent a competitor from gaining a reward). These findings are consistent with previous research on false belief representation in indicating a conceptual deficit in 3-year-old children. They are discussed with regard to recent controversies on the early acquisition of a theory of mind.

Premack and Woodruff (1978) have proposed the term "Theory of Mind" (ToM) to refer to one's ability to infer the beliefs, intentions and thoughts of others in order to explain and predict their behavior. Understanding how ToM operates has been the subject of debate for more than twenty years in cognitive psychology, but has only recently been studied in behavior analysis. Although the concepts of ToM do not lend themselves readily to a functional interpretation, some behavioral researchers working under the rubric of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) have attempted to develop a behavioral interpretation of the types of repertoires that constitute a ToM (McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes, 2004a). Relational Frame Theory is a modern behavioranalytic approach to the study of human language and cognition. At its core, this approach embraces the simple idea that language and cognition involve a number of limited but powerful behavioral processes, that allow individuals to relate stimuli or events in the world in new and untrained ways (as in generative language). A range of behavioral patterns emerge as a result of these relations between stimuli and these patterns are referred to as relational frames (see Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). The simplest form of such relating can be referred to as coordination framing. An example of this type of framing might go as follows: a child could learn that the written word "DOG" is the same as the spoken word "DOG" according to the non-physical characteristics of these two stimuli while their physical form is very different. According to RFT, it is the uniquely human ability to learn to relate objects and events not based on their physical form but on external cues that allows for the generativity of human language. Among the different ways in which two stimuli can be related, Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, and Dymond (2001; see also Barnes-Holmes, McHugh, & Barnes-Holmes, 2004) have underlined the role of a specific class of relational responding termed deictic framing, which is assumed to underpin perspective-taking and, thus to be critically important with respect to the ability to infer the mental states of others. The three deictic frames involved in the acquisition of perspective-taking skills are the frames of I and YOU, HERE and THERE, and NOW and THEN, corresponding to interpersonal, spatial, and temporal dimensions, respectively. According to this view, perspective-taking skills emerge through a history of responding to questions such as > or >. Many phrases during daily discourse include these relational frames, even if substituted words such as the names of places, people and time are frequently used instead of the actual terms of I and YOU, HERE and THERE and NOW and THEN. Following the RFT approach to ToM, McHugh et al. (2004a) have proposed an RFT interpretation of the developmental levels of ToM described by Howlin, Baron-Cohen, and Hadwin (1999). That is, the authors suggested that levels from simple visual perspective-taking to the understanding of false-beliefs involve the ability to respond in accordance with deictic relational frames. Consider the following example of a well known false-belief task (Gopnick & Astington, 1988), in which a participant is asked what is inside a closed candy box. After responding, the candy box is opened and the participant discovers that the candy box did not contain candy but actually contained pencils. Then s/he is asked >. The RFT view of this task is that a correct response coming from the participant is underpinned by relational frames as follows: >. In order to study this interpretation, McHugh et al. …

The Premacks, Ann James and David, were interested in animal cognition and language very early, at least as early as 1954 (personal communication, David Premack, 1954) and started preparatory work with monkeys soon after that time. In 1964,1 the Premacks adopted two young female chimpanzees named Sarah and Gussie. Sarah proved to be an excellent student, but Gussie never learned a single word. The Premacks later worked on language training with several other animals, but none of them were as intelligent as Sarah. A characteristic of the Premacks’ work is that their primary interest was in the cognition of chimpanzees, with language regarded more as a window to the chimpanzee mind than as the center of their attention. David Premack’s discussion2 of the. relative problem-solving abilities of language-trained and non-language-trained chimpanzees makes that clear. He found striking individual differences in intelligence between chimpanzees in each group, whether language-trained or not: “We have...had both gifted and ungifted animals in each group. Sarah is a bright animal by any standards, but so is Jessie, one of the non-language-trained animals. The groups are also comparable at the other end of the continuum, Peony’s negative gifts being well matched by those of Luvy” (p. 125).

Analogy has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive science over the past two decades. Through analogy, novel situations and problems can be understood in terms of familiar ones. Indeed, a case can be made for analogical processing as the very core of cognition. This is the first book to span the full range of disciplines concerned with analogy. Its contributors represent cognitive, developmental, and comparative psychology; neuroscience; artificial intelligence; linguistics; and philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. The first part describes computational models of analogy as well as their relation to computational models of other cognitive processes. The second part addresses the role of analogy in a wide range of cognitive tasks, such as forming complex cognitive structures, conveying emotion, making decisions, and solving problems. The third part looks at the development of analogy in children and the possible use of analogy in nonhuman primates. Contributors: Miriam Bassok, Consuelo B. Boronat, Brian Bowdle, Fintan Costello, Kevin Dunbar, Gilles Fauconnier, Kenneth D. Forbus, Dedre Gentner, Usha Goswami, Brett Gray, Graeme S. Halford, Douglas Hofstadter, Keith J. Holyoak, John E. Hummel, Mark T. Keane, Boicho N. Kokinov, Arthur B. Markman, C. Page Moreau, David L. Oden, Alexander A. Petrov, Steven Phillips, David Premack, Cameron Shelley, Paul Thagard, Roger K.R. Thompson, William H. Wilson, Phillip Wolff.

Introducción. El objetivo del artículo es realizar una revisión bibliográfica y responder a la pregunta ¿existen programas de intervención probados para desarrollar la cognición social en personas con trastornos del espectro autista (TEA)? Se define autismo según Kanner, Asperguer y Wing, este último que formuló la tríada sintomática del autismo. La Teoría de la mente (ToM), que es la capacidad para atribuir estados mentales a otras personas, distintos a los propios, da explicación a los 3 síntomas de Wing. Aportes desde la ToM. Se revisan distintos autores que aportaron en la investigación empírica de la ToM desde Premack y Woodruf (1978) que ocupan el concepto por primera vez, hasta Baron-Cohen (2001) que ha centrado sus investigaciones en estudios de la ToM en niños con autismo. Tratamientos propuestos para desarrollar la cognición social en personas con TEA. Se revisan 5 estudios que proponen diversas intervenciones para desarrollar la ToM en niños con TEA, el último realizado por Stichter y colaboradores el año 2012. Discusión. Se analiza la escasez de estudios con pequeñas poblaciones, lo que dificulta extrapolar los resultados. Se destaca la necesidad de realizar evaluaciones en contextos reales, profundizar los estudios de programas sistematizados que consideren grupo control, muestras representativas y seguimientos prolongados para evaluar la generalización de los aprendizajes. Finalmente se exponen aportes potenciales de la terapia ocupacional a los estudios y programas de tratamiento.

Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives.

Original Intelligence Unlocking the Mystery of Who We Are. David Premack and Ann Premack. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2003. 287 pp. $24.95, £18.99, C$34.95. ISBN 0-07-138142-2. The authors present a theory of mind developed through their critical appraisal of findings from cognitive and comparative psychology and primatology, and they discuss its implications for understanding animal intelligence and educating children.

The investigation of animal cognition is currently an active area of research in comparative psychology. Such cognitive processes as representation of lists (Swartz, Chen, & Terrace, 1991), complex strategies of spatial memory (Cook, Brown, & Riley, 1985), use of numbers (Boysen & Berntson 1989), and acquisition of concepts (D'Amato & Van Sant, 1988; Herrnstein & Loveland, 1964; Oden, Thompson, & Premack, 1990) have been addressed in primate and nonprimate species. One of the most exciting topics relevant to both comparative and developmental psychology has been that of mirror selfrecognition (MSR), with its implications for comparative cognition (see Gallup, 1982, 1991; Gallup & Suarez, 1986; Mitchell, 1993; Parker, 1991; Swartz, 1990). This phenomenon, first demonstrated in chimpanzees by Gallup (1970), involves two empirical observations that have been interpreted as evidence of self-recognition. When first exposed to a mirror, chimpanzees showed socially appropriate behaviors directed toward the mirror, as though the reflection were another conspecific. As mirror exposure continued, the chimpanzees' behavior changed. Social behaviors waned and self-directed or selfreferred behaviors appeared. Self-directed behaviors involve using the mirror to guide movements to areas of the body not visible without the aid of the mirror; self-referred behaviors involve manipulation of the environment while watching the action in the mirror. The appearance of self-directed behaviors was interpreted as indicative of self-recognition on the part of the chimpanzee (Gallup, 1970).

From an evolutionary perspective, some have argued that the conspicuous lack of cerebral asymmetries in nonhuman primates is functionally related to the lack of “language” observed in these species (Annett, 1985; Beaton, 1986; Warren, 1977; Warren, 1980). Recently, with the emergence of “language-using” apes (Gardner & Gardner, 1968; Laidler, 1978; Patterson, 1978; Premack, 1970; Rumbaugh, 1977; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986; Savage-Rumbaugh, McDonald, Sevcik, Hopkins & Rubert, 1986), our developing views on the evolution of language and related cognitive abilities have begun to challenge man’s alleged uniqueness from other apes (Ettlinger, 1984; Menzel, 1974; Rumbaugh, Savage-Rumbaugh & Scanlon, 1982; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986). From a biobehavioral or evolutionary perspective, the relationship between these cognitive processes and their supporting neurological systems is not well understood. The fact that many human studies of laterality employ complex linguistic or spatial stimuli, or utilize linguistic instructions to communicate the task requirements has limited our views of how laterality has evolved, what such linguistic instructions represent neurocognitively, or how laterality can be studied in nonhuman primates. We suggest that important questions regarding the evolution of laterality can be addressed by using nonhuman animals, particularly primates.

Animal language research (ALR) includes a variety of experimental studies of complex learning and cognition by nonhumans in which human language serves as a model for experimental design and data interpretation (for example see Gardner and Gardner, 1975; Herman et al. 1984; Pepperberg 1981; Premack, 1972; Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1978; Schusterman and Krieger 1984; Terrace, 1979). However, the “top-down” approach of adapting terminology from the study of a very complex set of learned skills (linguistics) to considerably less complex performances (ALR) has not been successful in (i) defining the learning abilities required for normal human language performance and (ii) defining the quantitative or qualitative differences (if any) between learning abilities of different animals, including humans (for example, see Thomas, 1980; Macphail, 1987).

Feeding problems occur in children who have normal development, who have failure to thrive, and who have developmental disabilities. This article focuses on the latter two groups. The characteristics and developmental concerns include family characteristics, parent-child interactions, cognitive development, and oral-motor development. The evaluation process for children with feeding problems should include an interdisciplinary approach with a medical, nutritional, occupational therapy, and behavioral evaluation. The behavioral treatments include the Premack principle, time-out plus reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Future research should focus on the parent-child interaction process in both mealtime and nonmealtime situations, along with demonstrating parents' and teachers' ability to implement mealtime treatment protocols.

One of the most central themes in cognitive science concerns the relationship between language and the origin and development of concepts – a enduring topic [1xSee all References][1] that is being addressed increasingly in a surge of books, articles and commentaries (e.g. [2xThinking through language. Bloom, P and Keil, F.C. Mind Lang. 2001; 16: 351–367CrossrefSee all References, 3xSee all References, 4xThe faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?. Hauser, M.D et al. Science. 2002; 298: 1569–1579Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (1732)See all References, 5xSee all References, 6xSee all References, 7xIs language the key to human intelligence?. Premack, D. Science. 2004; 303: 318–320Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (91)See all References]). This issue has often been viewed to be the key to understanding the distinctive conceptual basis of human cognition, with its flexibility and adaptability in reasoning and problem solving. The many interrelated questions that arise are daunting and complex: How much in the way of conceptual understanding occurs in the period of human development – infancy – in which there is not yet overt language? Does language enable us to reason efficiently about the properties of specific areas or domains of knowledge in the physical and mental world? For example, does it enable us to have a theory of mind in building a concept of true and false belief (in providing a syntactic structure that allows us to consider propositions such as ‘Jane believed [falsely] that John put the cookies in the cupboard’)? Does it allow us to navigate in the world and to find objects (in providing us with spatial terms to reason about location)? Does it allow us to carry out numerical computations (in providing us with the capacity to carry out mathematical operations based on recursive relations, parallel to the syntax of language)? Is it language that permits us to entertain propositions about causality, enabling us to have a scientific understanding that goes beyond correlations and superficial appearances, and in turn allowing us to understand causal mechanisms in biology, chemistry and physics?And what about those who are impoverished in language, and those who are abundantly endowed? Are deaf children without early access to a sign language impaired too in their conceptual development? What about children who are bilingual or even trilingual? Are their conceptual systems enriched in the process of knowledge acquisition compared with monolingual children? Moreover, even if language in the form of syntax and semantics does not uniformly provide a structure for conceptualizing the mental and physical world, could it be said that the development of intentional communication – pragmatics – is what bridges the gap between a conceptual understanding that is implicit in early thinking and its actual expression in reasoning and problem solving?Definitive answers to any one of these questions would bring us closer to understanding the essence of human cognition. Indeed, we now have research programs that hold out the prospect of determining what is special about language in adjudicating between accounts of its role in conceptual development within specific domains of knowledge. This work will be featured in TICS during 2004/5 as part of a special series of Review and Opinion articles on language and conceptual development (see Box). These state-of-the-art perspectives will focus on children's conceptual knowledge before and after the acquisition of language, in areas as diverse as number and biology, and will therefore illuminate the issue of how to characterize the relationship between language and conceptual development.

St6mmary.-Previous studies have shown char. compared to separate reward. a reward sticker attached to the underside of the positive stimulus facilitates solution of discrimination problems by preschool children. It is established here that the context of reward also affects the formation of learning set over a series of discrimination problems and that the improvement is characterized by a reduced frequency (from 19% to 7%) of incorrect position-related hypotheses (error factors) and an increased frequency (from 34% to 65%) of object-related hypotheses. The solution of two-choice visual-discrimination problems by preschool children is substantially facilitated by manipulations of the form of the reward context. Children solve problems faster when the outcome is identified by a symbol attached to the underside of the positive stimulus than when a separate token is hidden in a reward well beneath the positive stimulus (Estes, 1976). Estes interpreted this result using an information-processing account of discrimination problem solving. This account holds that the rate of problem solving is influenced by factors affecting encoding and memory. In this case encoding is easier; children in the attached condition learn more quickly chat one object is consistently rewarded and the other object is consistently nonrewarded, while children in the separate conditions are more likely to consider hypotheses relating reward to nonobject-aspects of the experimental situation. The effect of reward context on discrimination and concept selection may then be determined, at least in part, by its influence on the outcome of a competition among codes (Premack, 1983; Miller, 1983). Mechanisms which mediate the influence of reward context are absent from the major theories of discrimination learning and concept formation that have been applied in the comparative psychology of learning (Fisher & Zeaman, 1973; Lovejoy, 1968; Mackintosh, 1972; Spence, 1936; Spiker, 1972; Suther

Among the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the opening of a “dialogue” between human and chimpanzee (Fouts 1973; Gardner & Gardner 1969; Premack & Premack 1972; Rumbaugh, Gill, & Glasersfeld 1973). The relevance of chimpanzee performance to human language evolution is controversial, but may be somewhat easier to assess of the debate is framed in explicitly evolutionary terms so that behavioral reconstruction may follow established biological principles. In this pursuit, several lines of research are implied that may refine, if not resolve, some of the questions being asked.

It is of interest to determine how the presence of language in a neural network changes the cognitive capacity of that system. Disentangling cognition from language is always difficult. One approach is to establish a measurable level of cognitive skills in an organism and then see how it advances or retreats as a function of the independent introduction of language (Premack, 1982). Another is to study language-competent organisms that have fallen into disrepair and to look at changes in normal cognitive function (Goldstein, 1948; Luria, 1969).

Studies claiming support for the Premack Principle in human experimental and applied settings are reviewed in terms of the standard test conditions associated with the Principle and in terms of the Principle's conceptual constrains. Little definitive evidence was found to support the claim that a high probability response will reinforce a lower probability response, nor was the converse contention supported, that a low probability response will act as a punisher for a high probability response. More importantly, among the reports reviewed there was no evidence for the reversibility of the reinforcement relationship.

‘Theory of Mind’ refers to the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and other people (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). This study examined the extent to which ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ belief-attribution processes within the Theory of Mind (ToM) mechanism could be distinguished behaviourally, and whether these separable components differentially related to Executive Functioning (EF) abilities. A computerized false-belief task, utilizing a matched-design to allow direct comparison of self-oriented vs. other-oriented belief-attribution, was used to assess ToM, and a face-image Stroop task was employed to assess EF, within a population of typically-developed adults. Results revealed significantly longer reaction times when attributing beliefs to other people as opposed to recognizing and attributing beliefs to oneself. Intriguingly, results revealed that ‘perspective-shift’ requirements (i.e. changing from adoption of the ‘self’ perspective to the perspective of the ‘other’, or vice versa) across false-belief trials influenced reaction times. Reaction times were significantly longer when the perspective shift was from self-to-other than from other-to-self. It is suggested that the ‘self’ forms the stem of understanding the ‘other’, and is therefore processed regardless of ultimate task demands; in contrast, the ‘other’ perspective is only processed when explicitly required. We conclude that adopting another person’s perspective, even when their belief state is matched to one’s own, requires more cognitive effort than recalling and reflecting on self-oriented belief-states.