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Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models exposed to large quantities of human language display sensitivity to the implied knowledge states of characters in written passages. In pre-registered analyses, we present a linguistic version of the False Belief Task to both human participants and a large language model, GPT-3. Both are sensitive to others' beliefs, but while the language model significantly exceeds chance behavior, it does not perform as well as the humans nor does it explain the full extent of their behavior-despite being exposed to more language than a human would in a lifetime. This suggests that while statistical learning from language exposure may in part explain how humans develop the ability to reason about the mental states of others, other mechanisms are also responsible.

Several theories of belief processing assume that processing another's false belief requires overcoming an egocentric bias toward one's current knowledge. The current evidence in support of this claim, however, is limited. In order to investigate the presence of egocentric bias in adult belief processing, computer mouse tracking was used across three experiments to measure attraction toward response options reflecting one's current knowledge while reporting a false belief. Participants viewed scenarios in which an agent either had a true belief or a false belief about the location of a set of keys. Participants used a mouse to answer reality questions "where are the keys currently hidden?" and belief questions "where does she think the keys are?" Mouse-tracking measures indexing attraction toward response options during decision making were measured, along with time taken to make a response and accuracy. Experiment 1 found no evidence, in any measures, that participants showed a bias toward their own knowledge when reporting another's false belief. Experiment 2 investigated whether differences in event timings between true belief and false belief scenarios in Experiment 1 masked an egocentric bias. Experiment 3 investigated whether the lack of egocentric bias could be explained by participants prioritizing encoding the other's beliefs. Neither follow-up experiment found evidence supporting the presence of an egocentric bias. Overall, contrary to many theories of belief processing, our results suggest that adults are readily able to process other people's beliefs without having to overcome a default bias toward their own knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We examine the long-standing claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding. Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, United Kingdom, examined the use of a scale model comparing performances on a "copy" task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement ability, and the false belief task. Consistent with previous studies, younger children performed well in scale model trials when objects were unique (e.g., one cupboard) but poorly at distinguishing objects using spatial layout (one of three identical chairs). Performance was specifically associated with Copy task but not False Belief performance. Emphasizing the representational relation between the model and the room was ineffective. We find no evidence for understanding relational correspondence as a general component of representational understanding. Public Significance Statement: This study compares performance on a classic hiding game, using a room and its scale model, with preschool children's abstract spatial ability and understanding of mental representation. We found performance on the classic Model Room task only related to spatial abilities, potentially important in later science and mathematics education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical to advanced social intelligence is the ability to take into consideration the thoughts and feelings of others, a skill referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM) or mindreading.  In this article, we present a critical review of the comparative methodology and utility of the nonverbal FBT along with a description of an attempted FBT replication conducted with a bottlenose dolphin prior to the implementation of the more successful approaches used currently. Attempting to replicate Tschudin’s (2001, 2006) methodology with dolphins highlighted several flaws that may explain the failures of socially complex mammals to display competency: (1) reliance on a containment invisible displacement procedure that is difficult for non-human animals and especially dolphins to follow, (2) a complex procedure which demands extensive training time, (3) a long trial duration with several moving parts which taxes the animal’s memory and attention, and (4) a restricted number of two-choice FBT test trials, which limits statistical power given the small pool of trained animals. Although recent research paradigms for primates have corrected for some of these flaws, it is critical that comparative psychologists address these limitations for other species or taxa to be tested validly.  Future research in ToM understanding through a false belief approach should move toward more ecologically valid designs and appropriate implicit measures that facilitate comparative approaches that can be replicated.

I argue that both language acquisition and cultural and social factors contribute to the formation of schemata that facilitate false belief reasoning. While the proposal for an active role of language acquisition in this sense has been partially advanced by several voices in the mentalizing debate, I argue that other accounts addressing this issue present some shortcomings. Specifically, I analyze the existing proposals distinguishing between "structure-oriented" views (with the most relevant representative in de Villiers and de Villiers in Complements enable representation of the contents of false beliefs: the evolution of a theory of theory of mind. Language Acquisition, Foster-Cohen, 2009; de Villiers in Int Rev Gen Linguistics 117(11):1858–1878, 2007; de Villiers in Why language matters for theory of mind. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 186–219, 2005), that stress the role of language as a set of rules providing syntactic input and providing a representational format, and "cultural/social-oriented views", that stress the role of social interaction (among others Nelson in Why language matters for theory of mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005; Hutto in Folk psychological narratives: the sociocultural basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008b). Starting from the analysis of these views, I defend my own account of the role of language acquisition in aiding false belief reasoning. I argue that language acquisition plays a pivotal role in the formation of schemata used by pre-schoolers to pass the false belief task. I propose a specific learning mechanism for exploiting linguistic information that taps into specific cognitive abilities, thus making a very concrete suggestion about the role of linguistic input in specific cultural contexts for the development of false belief skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate whether people can implicitly learn regularities in a social context, we developed a new implicit sequence learning task combining elements from classic false belief and serial reaction time tasks. Participants learned that protagonists were offered flowers at four locations. The protagonists' beliefs concerning the flowers were true or false, depending on their orientation, respectively, toward the scene (so that the flowers could be seen) or away from it. Unbeknown to the participants, there was a fixed belief-related sequence involving three dimensions (identity of the two protagonists, true-false belief orientation held by the protagonists, and flower location as believed by the protagonists). Participants had to indicate as fast as possible where the flowers were located (Experiment 1), or how many flowers were given (Experiment 2) according to the protagonists. Experiment 1 combined perceptual and motor processes (as both the belief-related sequence and motor responses referred to location), whereas Experiment 2 unconfounded the sequence and motor responses, allowing to investigate pure perceptual implicit learning. For reasons of comparison, two non-social conditions were created in Experiment 2 by replacing the protagonists with two non-social objects—colored cameras or shapes. Results revealed significant implicit sequence learning of all belief-related dimensions in Experiment 1, and of true-false belief orientation in Experiment 2, even without a motor confound. Importantly, there were faster reaction times and stronger sequence learning effects in the social than in the non-social conditions. The present findings demonstrate for the first time that people are able to implicitly learn belief-related sequences.

Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call 'joint attention to mental content' (JAM) plays a key role. JAM is the ability to focus together in conversation on the content of our mental states, such as beliefs and reasons. In such conversations it can be made clear that our attitudes to beliefs or reasons may conflict—that what I think is true, you might think is false, or that what I think is a good reason for believing something, you might think is a bad reason. We argue that through JAM, children discover that mental contents can be evaluated under various attitudes, and that this discovery transforms their mind-reading and reasoning abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate whether people can implicitly learn regularities in a social context, we developed a new implicit sequence learning task combining elements from classic false belief and serial reaction time tasks. Participants learned that protagonists were offered flowers at four locations. The protagonists' beliefs concerning the flowers were true or false, depending on their orientation, respectively, toward the scene (so that the flowers could be seen) or away from it. Unbeknown to the participants, there was a fixed belief-related sequence involving three dimensions (identity of the two protagonists, true-false belief orientation held by the protagonists, and flower location as believed by the protagonists). Participants had to indicate as fast as possible where the flowers were located (Experiment 1), or how many flowers were given (Experiment 2) according to the protagonists. Experiment 1 combined perceptual and motor processes (as both the belief-related sequence and motor responses referred to location), whereas Experiment 2 unconfounded the sequence and motor responses, allowing to investigate pure perceptual implicit learning. For reasons of comparison, two non-social conditions were created in Experiment 2 by replacing the protagonists with two non-social objects—colored cameras or shapes. Results revealed significant implicit sequence learning of all belief-related dimensions in Experiment 1, and of true-false belief orientation in Experiment 2, even without a motor confound. Importantly, there were faster reaction times and stronger sequence learning effects in the social than in the non-social conditions. The present findings demonstrate for the first time that people are able to implicitly learn belief-related sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensionality (or opacity) is a core property of mental representations and sometimes understanding opacity is claimed to be a part of children’s theory of mind (evidenced with the false belief task). Children, however, pass the false belief task and the intensionality tasks at different ages (typically 4 vs. 5;1–6;11 years). According to two dominant interpretations, the two tests either require different conceptual resources or vary only in their executive or linguistic load. In two experiments, involving 120 children aged 3–6 (Experiment 1) and 75 children aged 4–6 (Experiment 2), we tested two variants of the executive load hypothesis: The differential linguistic complexity of the two tests, and the dual-name problem of the intensionality task. The former was addressed by standardizing and minimizing the linguistic demands of both tasks (contrasted with the typical narrative intensionality task), and the latter by introducing the dual-name problem into the false belief task as well, so that it was present in both tasks. We found that (1) two structurally different intensionality tasks shared more variance with each other than with the structurally similar false belief task, and that (2) introducing a dual label problem into the false belief task did not reduce the developmental gap. Our results speak against interpreting the difference between the time children pass the two tests entirely in terms of performative issues, and support the conceptual enrichment hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical relevance of these results, suggesting that they are best explained by fine-grained increments within the concept of belief, rather than a radical conceptual change. We conclude that understanding opacity of minds – which emerges between age 5 and 6 – is an important step toward a more advanced form of ToM.

Introduction: Theory of mind is one of the most important aspects of cognitive faculty. The theory of mind is impaired in individuals who suffer from mental disorders like autistic children. The ‘autistic-like’ behaviors also have been reported in the congenitally blind children. This study was conducted to examine the presence or absence of theory of mind and its function in congenitally blind children. Materials and methods: A number of 20 individuals containing 10 bilingual congenitally blind children from Baghcheban elementary school of Ilam city as a case group and 10 sighted ones as a control group were selected. Three kinds of false belief cognitive tests appropriate for the congenitally blind children were designed. The collected data were analyzed using one sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, independent t-test along with Levenn test and one-way and two-way Analysis of Variance. Results: Considering the performance of congenitally blind children in false belief tasks, the blindness just had effect on the story narration task (P0.05). Conclusion: The findings showed only the story narration task was affected by blindness, because this task was more dependent on visual sense. Therefore, blindness results in delay in evolution of theory of mind. To fix this delay, the congenitally blind children should be exposed to further tactile and olfactory inputs.

How can we solve the paradox of false-belief understanding: if infants pass the implicit false belief task (FBT) by nonverbal behavioural responses why do they nonetheless typically fail the explicit FBT till they are 4 years old? Starting with the divide between situational and cognitive accounts of the development of false-belief understanding, we argue that we need to consider both situational and internal cognitive factors together and describe their interaction to adequately explain the development of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. We then argue that a further challenge is raised for existing accounts by helping behaviour versions of the FBT. We argue that the common two-stage accounts are inadequate: we need to allow for three central stages in a continuous development. Furthermore, drawing on Perner et al.'s (Cognition 145: 77–88, 2015) and Perner and Leahy's (Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2): 491–508, 2016) recent mental files account, we provide a new account of the development of these three stages of ToM ability by describing the changes of the structure and organisation of mental files including the systematic triggering role of types of situations. Thereby we aim to establish a situational mental file (SMF) account as a new and adequate solution to the paradox of false-belief understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensionality (or opacity) is a core property of mental representations and sometimes understanding opacity is claimed to be a part of children's theory of mind (evidenced with the false belief task). Children, however, pass the false belief task and the intensionality tasks at different ages (typically 4 vs. 5;1–6;11 years). According to two dominant interpretations, the two tests either require different conceptual resources or vary only in their executive or linguistic load. In two experiments, involving 120 children aged 3–6 (Experiment 1) and 75 children aged 4–6 (Experiment 2), we tested two variants of the executive load hypothesis: The differential linguistic complexity of the two tests, and the dual-name problem of the intensionality task. The former was addressed by standardizing and minimizing the linguistic demands of both tasks (contrasted with the typical narrative intensionality task), and the latter by introducing the dual-name problem into the false belief task as well, so that it was present in both tasks. We found that (1) two structurally different intensionality tasks shared more variance with each other than with the structurally similar false belief task, and that (2) introducing a dual label problem into the false belief task did not reduce the developmental gap. Our results speak against interpreting the difference between the time children pass the two tests entirely in terms of performative issues, and support the conceptual enrichment hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical relevance of these results, suggesting that they are best explained by fine-grained increments within the concept of belief, rather than a radical conceptual change. We conclude that understanding opacity of minds – which emerges between age 5 and 6 – is an important step toward a more advanced form of ToM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding other people have beliefs different from ours or different from reality is critical to social interaction. Previous studies suggest that healthy adults possess an implicit mentalising system, but alternative explanations for data from reaction time false belief tasks have also been given. In this study, we combined signal detection theory (SDT) with a false belief task. As application of SDT allows us to separate perceptual sensitivity from criteria, we are able to investigate how another person's beliefs change the participant's perception of near-threshold stimuli. Participants (n = 55) watched four different videos in which an actor saw (or did not see) a Gabor cube hidden (or not hidden) behind an occluder. At the end of each video, the occluder vanished revealing a cube either with or without Gabor pattern, and participants needed to report whether they saw the Gabor pattern or not. A pre-registered analysis with classical statistics weakly suggests an effect of the actor's belief on participant's perceptions. An exploratory Bayesian analysis supports the idea that when the actor believed the cube was present, participants made slower and more liberal judgements. Although these data are not definitive, these current results indicate the value of new measures for understanding implicit false belief processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Active participation in child–adult interaction facilities false belief understanding in 3.5-year-olds. • Evoking " we mode " and the joint trickery motive encourage active participation in the FBT. • The ability to pass the interactive FBT explains performance on the standard change of content FBT. • The ability to pass the interactive FBT increases between 3 and 3.5 years of age. Abstract From the interaction theory perspective, we aimed to verify whether the interactive context in which theory of mind is measured can allow children younger than 4 years to pass the verbal false belief task (FBT). Therefore, an interactive FBT (iFBT) was devised, in which children were actively engaged in the story, and was used to test 210 children twice: first when they were 3 years old and again when they were 3.5 years old. Most 3-year-olds were unable to pass the iFBT (28% passed), but a half year later their performance was enhanced and they passed at a rate above chance level (59% passed). In addition, among 3.5-year-olds, passing the iFBT increases the chance of passing the standard FBT by four times. We conclude that the interactive mode of the FBT facilitates false belief understanding in children under 4 years of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether there are gender differences in understanding the emotions evaluated by the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC). The TEC provides a global index of emotion comprehension in children 3-11 years of age, which is the sum of the nine components that constitute emotion comprehension: (1) recognition of facial expressions, (2) understanding of external causes of emotions, (3) understanding of desire-based emotions, (4) understanding of belief-based emotions, (5) understanding of the influence of a reminder on present emotional states, (6) understanding of the possibility to regulate emotional states, (7) understanding of the possibility of hiding emotional states, (8) understanding of mixed emotions, and (9) understanding of moral emotions. We used the answers to the TEC given by 172 English girls and 181 boys from 3 to 8 years of age. First, the nine components into which the TEC is subdivided were analysed for differential item functioning (DIF), taking gender as the grouping variable. To evaluate DIF, the Mantel-Haenszel method and logistic regression analysis were used applying the Educational Testing Service DIF classification criteria. The results show that the TEC did not display gender DIF. Second, when absence of DIF had been corroborated, it was analysed for differences between boys and girls in the total TEC score and its components controlling for age. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of independence between gender and level of comprehension in 8 of the 9 components of the TEC. Several hypotheses are discussed that could explain the differences found between boys and girls in the belief component. Given that the Belief component is basically a false belief task, the differences found seem to support findings in the literature indicating that girls perform better on this task [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]