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Children with mild intellectual disabilities often exhibit poor social skills owing to intellectual impairments. This makes it essential to enhance their communication abilities. This study provides a novel contribution by systematically investigating the effects of false beliefs and empathy on white lie behavior among children with mild intellectual disabilities, considering both state and trait dimensions. Experiment 1 examined the impact of trait-level false beliefs and trait-level empathy on trait-level white lies. The results demonstrated that trait-level false beliefs and trait-level empathy both significantly promoted white lie behavior. Experiment 2 explored the influence of state-level false beliefs and state-level empathy on state-level white lies and found similar positive effects. By integrating both trait and state perspectives, this research fills a gap in the literature on white lie behavior in children with mild intellectual disabilities and uncovers the mechanisms through which false beliefs and empathy operate in different contexts. These findings offer comprehensive educational and intervention strategies to improve social adaptation in children with mild intellectual disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental‐state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus fail behavioral false‐belief tasks and the extent to which there is continuity versus change in the ToM neural network. To address these questions, we analyzed event‐related spectral power in the electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate how preschoolers' neural activity during passive viewing of false‐belief scenarios related to their explicit behavioral ToM performance. We found that neural activity during passive viewing of false‐belief events (6–9 Hz EEG 'alpha' suppression in right temporoparietal [RTP] electrodes) strongly related to children's explicit ToM. However, children's RTP alpha suppression differed depending on their explicit behavioral ToM performance: Children who did better on a broad battery of standard ToM tasks and who passed explicit behavioral false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression when the character's belief first became false (during the 'location‐change' event); whereas children who did worse on the ToM battery and who failed explicit behavioral false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression only later when they could evaluate the character's behavior in the context of prior events (during the 'active‐search' event). Findings shed light on what differentiates preschoolers who pass versus fail explicit false‐belief tasks and raise questions about how to interpret existing neuroscience data from ToM tasks across infancy to adulthood. Research Highlights: Preschool children's neural activity (EEG 6–9 Hz suppression in right temporoparietal [RTP] electrodes) during passive‐viewing of false‐belief events was related to their explicit behavioral theory‐of‐mind performance.Children who did better on a theory‐of‐mind (ToM) battery and passed explicit false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression when the character's belief first became false.Children who performed worse on the ToM battery and failed explicit false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression later when observing the character's search behavior.Findings reveal change in preschoolers' ToM neural correlates and suggest that the presence of RTP activity does not necessarily indicate 'mature' theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle‐class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among N = 59 Hai||om children (AgeRange = 2.3–8.0 years) from rural Namibia, an indigenous community where children's social experience with peers and adults differs much from urban middle‐class milieus typically sampled in developmental science research. Children's preference for adult, but not peer faces predicted their false belief performance. Moreover, their false belief performance increased with age, showing mastery of the current false belief task by the preschool years. These results accommodate universalist claims on the link between social motivation and Theory of Mind while suggesting a particular contribution of the social reward responsivity to adult social partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf , a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape , or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul's work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track those of Saul's figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analysing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to conduct the Turkish adaptation, validity, and reliability study of the Theory of Mind Inventory-2 (TOMI-2) developed by Hutchins and Prelock (2016) for 3-5-year-old children. The study group consists of 310 mothers with children in the 3-5 age group in Konya city center. Personal Information Form and Theory of Mind Inventory-2 (TOMI-2) were used as data collection tools in the study. After the TOMI-2 was translated into Turkish, the normality assumption was checked with the "Shapiro-Wilk" test. The relationship between two continuous variables was evaluated with the Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Content Validity, Criterion Validity, and Reliability analyses were also used in the study. The findings of the analyses show that the Turkish version of the TOMI-2 is a valid and reliable measurement tool for children aged 3-5, with 60 items in the original form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with mild intellectual disabilities often exhibit poor social skills owing to intellectual impairments. This makes it essential to enhance their communication abilities. This study provides a novel contribution by systematically investigating the effects of false beliefs and empathy on white lie behavior among children with mild intellectual disabilities, considering both state and trait dimensions. Experiment 1 examined the impact of trait-level false beliefs and trait-level empathy on trait-level white lies. The results demonstrated that trait-level false beliefs and trait-level empathy both significantly promoted white lie behavior. Experiment 2 explored the influence of state-level false beliefs and state-level empathy on state-level white lies and found similar positive effects. By integrating both trait and state perspectives, this research fills a gap in the literature on white lie behavior in children with mild intellectual disabilities and uncovers the mechanisms through which false beliefs and empathy operate in different contexts. These findings offer comprehensive educational and intervention strategies to improve social adaptation in children with mild intellectual disabilities.

In rich false memory studies, familial informants often provide information to support researchers in planting vivid memories of events that never occurred. The goal of the current study was to assess how effectively we can retract these false memories via debriefing – i.e., to what extent can we put participants back the way we found them? We aimed to establish (1) what proportion of participants would retain a false memory or false belief following debriefing, and (2) whether richer, more detailed memories would be more difficult to retract. Participants (N = 123) completed a false memory implantation protocol as part of a replication of the "Lost in the Mall" study (Loftus & Pickrell, Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725, 1995). By the end of the protocol, 14% of participants self-reported a memory for the fabricated event, and a further 52% believed it had happened. Participants were then fully debriefed, and memory and belief for the false event were assessed again. In a follow-up assessment 3 days post-debriefing, the false memory rate had dropped to 6% and false belief rates also fell precipitously to 7%. Moreover, virtually all persistent false memories were found to be nonbelieved memories, where participants no longer accepted that the fabricated event had occurred. Richer, more detailed memories were more resistant to correction, but were still mostly retracted. This study provides evidence that participants can be "dehoaxed", and even very convincing false memories can be retracted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiratorial thinking has been with humanity for a long time but has recently grown as a source of societal concern and as a subject of research in the cognitive and social sciences. We propose a three‐tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. At the level of cognitive processes, we identify explanatory coherence and faulty belief updating as critical ideas. At the level of the community of knowledge, we explore how conspiracy communities facilitate false belief by promoting a contagious sense of understanding, and how community norms catalyze the biased assimilation of evidence. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. Rather than treating conspiracy belief as pathological, we take the perspective that is an extreme outcome of common cognitive processes. We propose a three‐tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of mind (ToM) reasoning refers to the process by which we reason about the mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions) of others. Here, we describe an open dataset of responses from children who completed a story booklet task for assessing ToM reasoning (n = 321 3–12-year-old children, including 64 (neurotypical) children assessed longitudinally and 68 autistic children). Children completed one of two versions of the story booklet task (Booklet 1 or 2). Both versions include two-alternative forced choice and free response questions that tap ToM concepts ranging in difficulty from reasoning about desires and beliefs to reasoning about moral blameworthiness and mistaken referents. Booklet 2 additionally includes items that assess understanding of sarcasm, lies, and second-order belief-desire reasoning. Compared to other ToM tasks, the booklet task provides relatively dense sampling of ToM reasoning within each child (Booklet 1: 41 items; Booklet 2: 65 items). Experimental sessions were video recorded and data were coded offline; the open dataset consists of children's accuracy (binary) on each item and, for many children (n = 171), transcriptions of free responses. The dataset also includes children's scores on standardized tests of receptive language and non-verbal IQ, as well as other demographic information. As such, this dataset is a valuable resource for investigating the development of ToM reasoning in early and middle childhood.

An established body of literature indicates that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty understanding figurative language due to a deficit in theory of mind, or the ability to consider the beliefs of other people. Children with ASD tend to similarly fail traditional theory of mind tasks, which assess their ability to represent false beliefs. Our claim is, however, that these tasks involve cognitive processing demands that might mask false belief understanding because they require elicited responses. We examined whether children with ASD demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a spontaneous-response false belief task that measures children’s eye gaze durations. The two child participant groups were composed of 20 males with ASD (aged 3–9 years) and 20 typically developing males (aged 2–5 years) who were individually matched according to verbal mental age. Children with ASD and typically developing children listened to a change-of-location story accompanied by a book with matching and non-matching pictures. The final page showed the character searching for her object in a location that was either consistent or inconsistent with her belief. Both groups of children looked reliably longer at the belief-consistent picture, regardless of whether the character’s belief was true or false, though children with ASD were slower to do so. We suggest that a spontaneous-response assessment technique can potentially reveal figurative language comprehension in children with ASD in future research.

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling individuals to engage in joint action in the mutually aware pursuit of shared goals. SITh theorises that SI evolved as late as 400,000 years ago, when our ancestors (in particular, Homo heidelbergensis) turned to a kind of food procurement that obligatorily required joint coordinated action. SI is, thus, hypothesized to be absent in other extant species, including our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes ("apes"). According to SITh, ape psychology is exclusively driven by individualistic motivations, as opposed to human psychology which is uniquely driven by altruistic motivations. The evolutionary scenario proposed by SITh builds on a series of findings from socio-cognitive research with apes and human children, and on the assumption that abilities expressed early in human development are human universals, unlikely to have been shaped by socio-cultural influences. Drawing on the primatological and developmental literature, we provide a systematic - albeit selective - review of SITh-inconsistent findings concerning psychological and behavioural traits theorised to be constitutive of SI. The findings we review pertain to all three thematic clusters typically addressed in SITh: (i) recursive mind reading; (ii) prosociality; (iii) imitation and cumulative culture. We conclude that such alternative data undermine two core SITh claims: the late evolutionary emergence of SI and the radical divide between ape and human psychology. We also discuss several conceptual and methodological limitations that currently hamper reliable comparative research on SI, in particular those engendered by Western-centric biases in the social sciences, where an overreliance on Western samples has promoted the formulation of Western-centric conceptualisations, operationalisations and methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to understand the mental states of others has sometimes been attributed to a domain‐specific mechanism which privileges the processing of these states over similar but nonmental representations. If correct, then others' beliefs should be processed more efficiently than similar information contained within nonmental states. We tested this by examining whether adults would be faster to process others' false beliefs than equivalent "false" photos. Additionally, we tested whether they would be faster to process others' true beliefs about something than their own (matched) personal knowledge about the same event. Across four experiments, we found a small but reliable effect in favor of the first prediction, but no evidence for the second. Results are consistent with accounts positing specialized processes for (false) mental states. The size of the effect does, however, suggest that alternative explanations such as practice effects cannot be ruled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling individuals to engage in joint action in the mutually aware pursuit of shared goals. SITh theorises that SI evolved as late as 400,000 years ago, when our ancestors (in particular, Homo heidelbergensis) turned to a kind of food procurement that obligatorily required joint coordinated action. SI is, thus, hypothesized to be absent in other extant species, including our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes (“apes”). According to SITh, ape psychology is exclusively driven by individualistic motivations, as opposed to human psychology which is uniquely driven by altruistic motivations. The evolutionary scenario proposed by SITh builds on a series of findings from socio-cognitive research with apes and human children, and on the assumption that abilities expressed early in human development are human universals, unlikely to have been shaped by socio-cultural influences. Drawing on the primatological and developmental literature, we provide a systematic – albeit selective – review of SITh-inconsistent findings concerning psychological and behavioural traits theorised to be constitutive of SI. The findings we review pertain to all three thematic clusters typically addressed in SITh: (i) recursive mind reading; (ii) prosociality; (iii) imitation and cumulative culture. We conclude that such alternative data undermine two core SITh claims: the late evolutionary emergence of SI and the radical divide between ape and human psychology. We also discuss several conceptual and methodological limitations that currently hamper reliable comparative research on SI, in particular those engendered by Western-centric biases in the social sciences, where an overreliance on Western samples has promoted the formulation of Western-centric conceptualisations, operationalisations and methodologies.

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement‐clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief‐based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false‐belief tasks. English‐ and German‐speaking young 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds as well as English‐ and German‐speaking adult controls heard complement‐clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., "He thinks that she's not feeling well") turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question ("Why does he not play with her?"), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say "He thinks..." When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause ("She's not feeling well"). Furthermore, children with better short‐term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false‐belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by a that complementizer only had a small effect on the German adults' responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short‐term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false‐belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preschool children with neurotypical development (ND) trained on sentential complements ("X thinks/says that") improve their Theory of Mind (ToM) performance. Can complementation training also enhance ToM in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)? Thirty-three children with ASD (Mage = 8;11) and 20 younger ND peers (Mage = 4;3) were trained on sentential complements (4–6 weeks, 2–3 times per week, via the DIRE i-Pad App). Pre-training and post-training comparisons show that (1) training boosted both complementation and ToM performance across groups; (2) improvements remained 4–6 weeks after training ended; (3) participants with milder ASD symptoms made most gains. Training on sentential complements thus seems beneficial for addressing ToM difficulties in children with ASD, especially those with milder symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag. Experiment 1 identified a lag effect in 3- and 4-year-olds who had better performance at the false belief task than the belief-based emotion understanding task. To further examine the potential influence of material familiarity on the lag, 27 3-year-old children participated in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds performed slightly better in the belief-based emotion understanding task when familiar materials were replaced by unfamiliar materials. A possible reason for the diminished level of the lag effect was discussed in light of children's emotional arousal. The findings have practical implications for implementing social and emotional learning programmes that foster young children's theory of mind understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study investigates P300 as a component for false belief and false statement processing with and without a communicative context. The purpose is to understand why P300 has been shown to be commonly involved in false belief and lie processing. Methods: Participants were presented with a story in which the protagonist holds a true belief and makes a true statement of it (true belief), holds a false belief and makes a true statement (false belief), or holds a true belief and makes a false statement (false statement) while electroencephalograms were recorded. Results: In Experiment 1, featuring a solitary protagonist, stronger posterior P300 was shown in the false belief condition than the true belief and false statement condition. With the installation of a communicative context by including a second character listening to the protagonist, Experiment 2 showed enhanced frontal P300 in the false statement condition compared to the true belief and false belief condition. A late slow wave was more prominent in the false belief condition than in the other two conditions in Experiment 2. Conclusion: The present results suggest a situation‐dependent nature of P300. The signal captures the discrepancy between belief and reality more readily than that between belief and words under a noncommunicative context. It becomes more sensitive to the discrepancy between belief and words than that between belief and reality in a communicative situation with an audience, which makes any false statement practically a lie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are characterized by hyper sociability, fluency in languages, and advantageous face-processing skills, leading to the proposal of a social module. Previous studies on the mentalizing abilities of people with WS using two-dimensional pictures, including normal-like, delayed, and deviant behaviors, have yielded mixed results. Thus, this study examined the mentalizing ability of people with WS through structured computerized animations of false belief tasks to investigate whether inferences about other people's minds can be improved in this population. Participants were shown animations containing unexpected location and content changes. After viewing each animation, participants had to answer four types of questions relating to character identification, reality, memory, and false belief. Their responses were recorded and analyzed. A comprehension of false belief was observed in 4-year-old healthy children, whereas children with WS showed enhanced comprehension of false belief (until they attained a chronological age [CA] of 5.9 years), suggesting an improvement in the theory of mind resulting from viewing structured computerized animations. This age is earlier than that reported by previous studies for using theory of mind to pass false belief tests (CA 9 years), even challenging the age at which individuals failed to pass the tests (CA 17.11 years). Structured computerized animations enhanced the mentalizing ability of people with WS to a certain extent. Compared to the typically developing controls, people with WS presented with a lower developmental level in processing false belief tasks. This study has educational implications for the development of computerized social skills interventions for people with WS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children appear not to grasp the independence between objective reality and subjective beliefs, as evidenced by their errors on false belief tasks. Whereas decades of research have examined children's developing understanding of the subjectivity of beliefs, however, almost no research has examined the other side of the issue: How do humans come to understand the objectivity of reality, and why is this understanding important? To help address this gap, this article proposes an evolutionary‐developmental account of how the understanding that reality is objective may have emerged in human thinking. Three key steps are highlighted: (i) phylogenetic foundations in great ape competitive mindreading, (ii) ontogenetic foundations in preverbal infant joint attention, and (iii) key experiences of perspectival conflict in linguistic humans. Functionally, the concept of an objective reality facilitated collaborative reasoning and joint decision‐making. To arrive at good joint decisions, individuals needed to recognize that both their own beliefs and others' beliefs could be wrong—with respect to the objective reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Introduction This study investigates P300 as a component for false belief and false statement processing with and without a communicative context. The purpose is to understand why P300 has been shown to be commonly involved in false belief and lie processing. Methods Participants were presented with a story in which the protagonist holds a true belief and makes a true statement of it (true belief), holds a false belief and makes a true statement (false belief), or holds a true belief and makes a false statement (false statement) while electroencephalograms were recorded. Results In Experiment 1, featuring a solitary protagonist, stronger posterior P300 was shown in the false belief condition than the true belief and false statement condition. With the installation of a communicative context by including a second character listening to the protagonist, Experiment 2 showed enhanced frontal P300 in the false statement condition compared to the true belief and false belief condition. A late slow wave was more prominent in the false belief condition than in the other two conditions in Experiment 2. Conclusion The present results suggest a situation‐dependent nature of P300. The signal captures the discrepancy between belief and reality more readily than that between belief and words under a noncommunicative context. It becomes more sensitive to the discrepancy between belief and words than that between belief and reality in a communicative situation with an audience, which makes any false statement practically a lie.

Research focusing on Anglo-European languages indicates that children's acquisition of the subordinate structure of complement-clause constructions and the semantics of mental verbs facilitates their understanding of false belief, and that the two linguistic factors interact. Complement-clause constructions support false-belief development, but only when used with realis mental verbs like 'think' in the matrix clause (de Villiers, Jill. 2007. The interface of language and Theory of Mind. Lingua 117(11). 1858–1878). In Chinese, however, only the semantics of mental verbs seems to play a facilitative role in false-belief development (Cheung, Him, Hsuan-Chih Chen & William Yeung. 2009. Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(2). 141–155). We argue that these cross-linguistic differences can be explained by variations in availability and usage patterns of mental verbs and complement-clause constructions across languages. Unlike English, Mandarin-Chinese has a verb that indicates that a belief might be false: yi3wei2 '(falsely) think'. Our corpus analysis suggests that, unlike English caregivers, Mandarin-Chinese caregivers do not produce frequent, potentially unanalyzed, chunks with mental verbs and first-person subjects, such as 'I think'. In an experiment, we found that the comprehension of complement-clause constructions used with yi3wei2 '(falsely) think', but not with jue2de2 'think', predicted Mandarin children's false-belief understanding between the ages of 4 and 5. In contrast to English, whether mental verbs were used with first- or third-person subjects did not affect their correlation with false-belief understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to have difficulty dealing with complex social situations, which is likely related to their challenges in understanding others’ perspectives, according to the Theory of Mind (ToM). The purpose of this preliminary study was to examine the effect of multiple exemplar training (MET) on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of basic theory-of-mind skills in three Chinese adolescents with ASD by employing a single-case, multiple-probe design. Results suggest that MET was effective in the acquisition and maintenance phases of training for improving all three participants’ target ToM skills and their ToM assessment scores. The participants also demonstrated increased appropriate social interactions and decreased inappropriate social interactions with peers during indoor recess, indicating that MET is effective in helping adolescents with ASD generalize ToM skills to natural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive perspective-taking research has primarily been conducted under the rubric of theory of mind (ToM), with the core skill believed to involve the correct attribution of mental states to oneself and others as a means of explaining and predicting behavior. Relational frame theory (RFT) has provided a behavioral account of performances on true and false belief protocols by appealing to the three perspective-taking (deictic) relations. The current research sought to investigate the relative strength of cognitive perspective-taking abilities within the context of a false belief vignette and related IRAP. Experiment 1 investigated the impact of block order presentation and vignette stimuli order on IRAP performances. That is, across four conditions, rule order presentations (i.e., vignette consistent vs. vignette inconsistent) and vignette stimuli presentation were manipulated. Results indicated that vignette consistent responding was observed to varying degrees across conditions. To decrease this variability across conditions, Experiment 2 presented a vignette before each block of trials but again the IRAP showed only limited sensitivity to the vignette. The current findings and considerations for future research are discussed in terms of a recently published conceptual analysis of false belief by Kavanagh et al. (2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer an elegant new and straightforward paradigm to implant false autobiographical memories. Participants received 20 autobiographical events including a critical false event (i.e., swimsuit falling off) and had to indicate whether they ever experienced these events. After 1 week, participants who did not experience the false event received a second survey suggesting that they actually did experience the false event. Participants had to provide belief and recollection ratings and event-related details. Also, one group of participants was told that the false event happened once (Single group) while the other group was told that the event happened repeatedly (Repeated group). Depending on the memory type (e.g., false belief or false memory), false memory implantation ranged between 9% and 30%. Furthermore, false beliefs were most likely to be elicited in the Single group. This novel paradigm can offer new insights on how false autobiographical memories can be implanted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that complement syntax is closely associated with false belief (FB) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the relationship between different types of complement syntax and FB remains unclear. This study examined the relationship between different types of complement syntax and FB in both ASD and typically developing (TD) children. Thirty Mandarin-speaking ASD and TD children, each matched for language ability, were included. Children completed different types of complement syntax tasks, verbal and nonverbal FB. For the ASD children, results demonstrated that sentential complement syntax independently predicted verbal and nonverbal FB, while phrasal complement syntax only predicted nonverbal FB. For the TD children group, sentential complement syntax only predicted verbal FB. This indicates that as the language demands of the FB task decrease, ASD children can use both types of complement syntax for its prediction. Moreover, the characteristics of ASD children differ from TD children in terms of the relationship between different types of complement syntax and FB. The results of this study support de Villiers’ point of view from the Mandarin perspective and provide evidence for the social-cognitive component of the theory of mind.

Apperly and Butterfill's (2009) hold that there are two cognitive mind-reading systems. System 1(S1) is fast, automatic and inflexible, whereas system 2 (S2) is reflective, flexible and slow. This paper presents and discusses two central assumptions of this theory: the independence of S1 and S2 and the encapsulation of S1. It is argued that findings on longitudinal trajectories in infancy on the false belief test and visual perspective taking undermine the two-system theory in three respects: (1) S1 is not encapsulated, (2) S1 is not entirely automatic processing, and (3) S2 cognitive processes can be fast and efficient. The paper concludes that mindreading operates through different socio-cognitive processes that are gradually and continuously enriched during development, which eliminates the need for a two-system characterization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many psychologists have argued that language acquisitionplays an important role in the development of Theory of Mind(ToM) reasoning in children. Several accounts of thisinteraction exist: some believe that language gives childrenthe ability to express already formed ToM reasoning (e.g. He,Bolz, & Baillargeon, 2011), while others argue that learningspecific grammatical structures engenders new reasoningabilities (e.g. de Villiers & Pyers, 1997). Questions remainabout the mechanism by which this interaction occurs. In thispaper, we show that the Analogical Theory of Mind (AToM;Rabkina et al., 2017) computational model can bootstrapaspects of ToM reasoning from sentential complementtraining, and that its performance matches improvementpatterns of children who are trained using similar stimuli.This provides an implemented algorithmic account ofbootstrapping ToM reasoning from language within a broadermodel of ToM development.

We investigate the relationship between evaluations of knowl-edge and belief in human adult theory of mind, and provideevidence that evaluations of knowledge are made without priorevaluations of belief. Our studies find that (1) people can ac-curately evaluate others’ knowledge before they evaluate theirbeliefs; (2) this pattern cannot be not explained by pragmaticdifferences; (3) it occurs cross-linguistically and unlikely tobe accounted for by differences in word frequency, and (4) italso generalizes to the larger class of factive and non-factiveattitudes (to which knowledge and belief respectively belong).Together, these studies demonstrate that human adults can as-cribe knowledge without first ascribing a belief state. Moregenerally, they lend support to the view that knowledge repre-sentations are a distinctive and basic way in which we makesense of others’ minds.

Understanding that individuals can be mistaken, or hold false beliefs, about the world is an important human ability that plays a vital role in social interactions. When and how does this ability develop? Traditional investigations using elicited-response tasks suggested that false-belief understanding did not emerge until at least age 4. However, more recent studies have shown that children demonstrate false-belief understanding much earlier when tested via other means. In the present article, I summarize recent evidence that a robust, flexible understanding of false belief emerges in infancy and discuss why older children fail elicited-response tasks despite their ability to represent beliefs.

This paper aimed to contribute to answering three questions. First, how robust and reliable are early implicit measures of false belief (FB) understanding? Second, do these measures tap FB understanding rather than simpler processes such as tracking the protagonist's perceptual access? Third, do implicit FB tasks tap an earlier, more basic form of theory of mind (ToM) than standard verbal tasks? We conducted a conceptual replication of Garnham & Perner's task (Garnham and Perner 2001 Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 19, 413–432) simultaneously measuring children's anticipatory looking and interactive behaviours toward an agent with a true or FB (N = 81, M = 40 months). Additionally, we implemented an ignorance condition and a standard FB task. We successfully replicated the original findings: children's looking and interactive behaviour differed according to the agent's true or FB. However, children mostly did not differentiate between FB and ignorance conditions in various measures of anticipation and uncertainty, suggesting the use of simpler conceptual strategies than full-blown ToM. Moreover, implicit measures were all related to each other but largely not related to performance in the standard FB task, except for first look in the FB condition. Overall, our findings suggest that these implicit measures are robust but may not tap the same underlying cognitive capacity as explicit FB tasks.

• Four- to five-year-olds know when their own past belief was incorrect. • We found that 3-year-olds know their own current belief might be incorrect. • Given peer disagreement, they rechecked their evidence. • False belief understanding is present significantly earlier than classic tasks suggest. By 4 or 5 years of age, children understand when their own past beliefs were incorrect, or when others' current beliefs are incorrect. In the current study, we asked whether young children understand when their own current belief might be incorrect. 3- and 5-year old children (N = 77) made a judgment and then experienced a puppet making a judgment about the same situation. Children of both ages rechecked their evidence more often when the puppet disagreed with them than when it agreed with them (and the nature of their rechecking was different in the two conditions as well). These results suggest that already by 3 years of age children understand that they might currently be wrong, and they know that rechecking the evidence can resolve their uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsuccessful replication attempts of paradigms assessing children's implicit tracking of false beliefs have instigated the debate on whether or not children have an implicit understanding of false beliefs before the age of four. A novel multi‐trial anticipatory looking false belief paradigm yielded evidence of implicit false belief reasoning in 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children using a combined score of two false belief conditions (Grosse Wiesmann, C., Friederici, A. D., Singer, T., & Steinbeis, N. [2017]. Developmental Science, 20(5), e12445). The present study is a large‐scale replication attempt of this paradigm. The task was administered three times to the same sample of N = 185 children at 2, 3, and 4 years of age. Using the original stimuli, we did not replicate the original finding of above‐chance belief‐congruent looking in a combined score of two false belief conditions in either of the three age groups. Interestingly, the overall pattern of results was comparable to the original study. Post‐hoc analyses revealed, however, that children performed above chance in one false belief condition (FB1) and below chance in the other false belief condition (FB2), thus yielding mixed evidence of children's false belief‐based action predictions. Similar to the original study, participants' performance did not change with age and was not related to children's general language skills. This study demonstrates the importance of large‐scaled replications and adds to the growing number of research questioning the validity and reliability of anticipatory looking false belief paradigms as a robust measure of children's implicit tracking of beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims Solitary movement plays have been reported to be effective in improving the primary aspects of Theory of Mind (ToM), and the design of interventions based on interpersonal interactions has been emphasized to influence the advanced aspects of ToM. To test this hypothesis, the effect of solitary and group purposeful movement plays on various aspects of ToM in girls aged eight years was compared. Methods In this quasi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test design, 40 girls with a mean age of 8.53 years from two elementary schools in Tehran were selected and randomly assigned to solitary play (n =13), group play (n = 12), and control (n = 15) groups after preliminary evaluations. The Test of Theory of Mind (Ghamrani et al., 2006) was completed immediately before and after an experimental period (eight weeks, 16 sessions of 60 minutes) and one month after the end of the intervention. The 3 (time) × 3 (group) mixed analysis of variance and related post hoc tests at a 95% confidence level were used to analyze the data. Results Recognition of emotions and pretense (ps < 0.001), understanding of false belief (ps

Several theories about Theory of Mind (ToM) have beenproposed. The most well-known of these are Theory Theoryand Simulation Theory, although alternative and hybridtheories do exist. One such theory, proposed by Bach (2011,2014), is based on the Structure-Mapping theory of analogy,which has been shown to play a key role in cognitivedevelopment. There is evidence that children are more likely topass false belief tasks when trained using stories that are easyto compare via structural alignment, as opposed to stories thatare difficult to compare in this way (Hoyos, Horton & Gentner,2015). This paper shows how a computational model based onBach’s account can provide an explanation for the Hoyos et al.training study and proposes directions for future research onhuman subjects.

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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 naïvely 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study is to compare the theory of mind skills among children and adolescents diagnosed with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Materials and Methods: Two groups of patients aged between 12-16 years who were diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder diagnostic criteria were included in the study. A detailed form was used for evaluating sociodemographic characteristics and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (WISC-R) for assessing cognitive functions of patients. In order to evaluate psychopathologies, Schedule For Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia For School-Age Children-present and lifetime version was applied. Theory of mind skills were examined with false belief tests, reading the mind in the eyes task and hinting task. Results: Adolescents with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder group showed poorer performance than adolescents with obsessive compulsive disorder in the first and second level theory of mind tests adolescents with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder group had significantly lower scores of reading the mind in the eyes task than adolescents with obsessive compulsive disorder. Conlusion: Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder had differences in theory of mind skills and that theory of mind skills should be reviewed with new methods in addition to the existing methods for diagnosis and treatment.

Despite considerable interest in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) during early childhood, until recently, there has been little consideration about whether and how ToM skills continue to change into adulthood. Furthermore, the false-belief task, which is believed to capture the underlying mechanisms of ToM, is rarely used in studies of ToM with adults; those tasks that do assess false-belief understanding may be confounded by incidental task demands, such as complex narratives and excessive memory requirements, making it difficult to isolate adults’ true ToM skills, much less to compare them with the skills of children. Here, we adapted a task developed by Valle, Massaro, Castelli, and Marchetti (2015, https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v11i1.829) to assess false-belief understanding in adults. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the reading condition, participants read a story about the unexpected transfer of a ball between three brothers. In the video condition, participants watched a video version of the same story. Finally, in the training condition, participants were first trained on the names of the characters, before watching the video. Although condition did not affect participants’ ability to correctly answer a standard false belief question (“Where does X think Y thinks the ball is?”), participants in the training condition used more mental state language to justify their responses (“Why does X think Y thinks the ball is here?”), and this improved performance was mediated by improved memory for the story details. We conclude that at least some “failures” of ToM use may be due to an inability to understand, recall, or communicate complex information in a ToM task, raising important questions about how best to measure ToM in adults (and children) in the future.

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are characterized by hyper sociability, fluency in languages, and advantageous face-processing skills, leading to the proposal of a social module. Previous studies on the mentalizing abilities of people with WS using two-dimensional pictures, including normal-like, delayed, and deviant behaviors, have yielded mixed results. Thus, this study examined the mentalizing ability of people with WS through structured computerized animations of false belief tasks to investigate whether inferences about other people’s minds can be improved in this population. Participants were shown animations containing unexpected location and content changes. After viewing each animation, participants had to answer four types of questions relating to character identification, reality, memory, and false belief. Their responses were recorded and analyzed. A comprehension of false belief was observed in 4-year-old healthy children, whereas children with WS showed enhanced comprehension of false belief (until they attained a chronological age [CA] of 5.9 years), suggesting an improvement in the theory of mind resulting from viewing structured computerized animations. This age is earlier than that reported by previous studies for using theory of mind to pass false belief tests (CA 9 years), even challenging the age at which individuals failed to pass the tests (CA 17.11 years). Structured computerized animations enhanced the mentalizing ability of people with WS to a certain extent. Compared to the typically developing controls, people with WS presented with a lower developmental level in processing false belief tasks. This study has educational implications for the development of computerized social skills interventions for people with WS.

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.