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Theory of mind is defined as the understanding that mental states predict and explain people's behaviors. It develops around the age of 4 but seems to remain deficient in people with ASD, whereas other forms of naïve understanding remain intact. This study compares children with ASD to neurotypical children on tasks measuring naïve psychology, physics, and biology (biological parts). Results suggest that children with ASD only underperform on an implicit false belief task. Performances in naïve biology and physics were equivalent across the two groups and uncorrelated to performance on the false belief task. This confirms that naïve physics and biological reasoning are intact in children with ASD but that tracking false beliefs is challenging for this population.

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

According to the social motivation theory, orienting toward social elements of the environment should be related to sociocognitive abilities, such as theory of mind (ToM), in both typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder. The objective of the current study was to assess whether social orienting skills predict ToM abilities in preschoolers by using two social orienting tasks (biological motion and face preference) and an implicit false belief task. A total of 38 children, aged 2–4 years, participated in this study. As expected, participants showed a social preference on both tasks measuring social orienting. More importantly, children’s performance on the face preference task predicted their performance on the false belief task, providing the first evidence for a link between social motivation and ToM in preschoolers.

The commentary by Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate raises a number of crucial issues concerning the replicability and validity of measures of false belief in infancy. Although we agree with some of their arguments, we believe that they underestimate the replication crisis in this area. In our response to their commentary, we first analyze the current empirical situation. The upshot is that, given the available evidence, it remains very much an open question whether infants possess a rich theory of mind. We then draw out more general conclusions for future collaborative studies that have the potential to address this open question.

Implicit false belief is often measured through anticipatory looking. While past research stipulates that children and adults have a fully developed implicit false belief understanding, there is a lack of consensus in recent findings. The goal of this study was to examine how adults and children perform on an anticipatory looking task to further our understanding of the variability in results across studies. The implicit false belief task featured a 3-second anticipatory looking period, during which we measured participants’ looking behavior (first look and total looking time at the correct location). We failed to replicate previous findings, with neither group demonstrating an implicit understanding of false belief. However, performance varied depending on the measure examined, thus highlighting the importance of analyzing several variables when assessing false belief with anticipatory looking.

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

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

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

To what extent does the reward value of sexual stimulation in females depend on ovarian hormones? The effects of estradiol benzoate (EB) and progesterone (P) were examined on the acquisition and expression of sexual reward induced by paced copulation and clitoral stimulation (CLS) in ovariectomized (OVX) rats. In experiment 1 we examined the expression of a pacing‐induced conditioned place preference (CPP). Ovariectomized, hormone-primed rats were given experience with paced copulation associated with one side of a CPP apparatus. Changing hormonal status prior to the final CPP test did not alter pacing-induced CPP. However, subsequent partial extinction of CPP was observed only in rats primed with EB + P, a treatment previously shown to induce sexual desire and receptivity. In Experiment 2, significant CLS-induced CPP developed in ovariectomized rats regardless of hormone priming. Our results show that the expression of the sexual reward state induced by paced copulation, and CLS in particular, is independent of hormone priming. We propose that ovarian hormones sensitize sensory and motor pathways necessary for sexual behavior and stimulation to induce reward.