Background: Social cognitive deficits are considered to be central to the interpersonal problems experienced by individuals with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, but existing research evidence regarding mentalising ability and emotion recognition ability is difficult to interpret and inconclusive. Higher levels of mental health problems are experienced in Asperger Syndrome than in the general population, including depression, general anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. Clinical accounts have described symptoms of psychosis in individuals with autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome, and a number of research studies have reported elevated levels of delusional beliefs in this population. Investigations of social cognition in psychosis have highlighted a number of impairments in abilities such as mentalising and emotion recognition, as well as data-gathering and attribution biases that may be related to delusional beliefs. Similarly, a number of factors, including theory of mind difficulties, self-consciousness and anxiety, have been associated with delusional beliefs in individuals with Asperger syndrome, but there is a lack of agreement in the existing research. A preliminary model of delusional beliefs in Asperger syndrome has previously been proposed, which needs to be tested further and potentially refined. The current study aimed to further investigate social cognitive mechanisms in individuals with Asperger syndrome and to explore potential links with the development of paranoia. Method: Participants with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome were recruited through a number of voluntary organisations and completed screening measures, the Autism Spectrum Quotient and the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, to ensure their suitability for the study. Participants in the control group were recruited through the university and local community resources and were matched group-wise with the Asperger syndrome group for age, sex and IQ scores. The study compared the Asperger syndrome group (N=30) with the control group (N= 30) with regard to their performance on four experimental tasks and their responses on a number of self-report questionnaires that were delivered as an online survey. The experimental tasks included two theory of mind measures, one designed to assess mental state decoding ability (The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test) and one designed to assess mental state reasoning ability (the Hinting Task). The recognition of emotions was evaluated through the Facial Expression Recognition Task. The Beads Task was administered to assess data-gathering style and specifically to test for Jumping to Conclusions biases. The self-report questionnaires were employed to measure levels of depression, general anxiety, social anxiety, self-consciousness and paranoid thoughts. Results: The Asperger syndrome group performed less well than the control group on tasks measuring mental state decoding ability, mental state reasoning ability and the recognition of emotion in facial expressions. Additionally, those with Asperger syndrome tended to make decisions on the basis of less evidence and half of the group demonstrated a Jumping to Conclusions bias. Higher levels of depression, general anxiety, social anxiety and paranoid thoughts were reported in the AS group and levels of depression and general anxiety were found to be associated with levels of paranoid thoughts. Discussion: The results are considered in relation to previous research and revisions are proposed for the existing model of delusional beliefs in Asperger syndrome. A critical analysis of the current study is presented, implications for clinical practice are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.

The aim of this study is to use a cognitive approach to analyse two novels that are considered to be part of the British literary canon: Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and Emma (1816) by Jane Austen. The study aims to utilise close reading and thematic analysis of human emotion. The themes are as follows: the fear of losing a loved one, morals and values in relation to love and marriage, and feelings of disgust, aversion, antipathy and shame. Quotations from each novel are analysed with the theoretical framework of “theory of mind” and placed within the emotional frame of the thematic analysis. The aim of this is to provide possible scaffolding for learners of English as a foreign language, in an attempt to make canonised literature more easily accessible. Scaffolding may be needed for Swedish EFL learners to overcome the language barrier presented in literature from the 19th century. Further benefits of emotional scaffolding conform to requests of the Swedish Agency of Education and the Curriculum’s demands that education be conducted in such a way as to promote empathy, compassion and understanding for fellow humans. The analysis shows that strong emotional connection in the novels provide ample opportunity to analyse readers’ possible empathetic response, thus resulting in the opportunity for these responses to serve as scaffolding as well as an opportunity to improve empathetic ability.

Anxiety and socio-emotional functioning were examined in a single case study of a girl with autism. The objective was to determine the effect of visualization on the experience of anxiety during social interaction, and three target situations that triggers anxiety responses were therefore selected. The ATEC checklist, personal observations and adapted behavior during the specified target behaviors, measured reduced levels of anxiety. The results and conclusions indicate that visualization, as intervention, may be successful in promoting the social and emotional functioning of a child with autism by reducing the high levels of anxiety associated with social interaction. Additionally, increased levels in general functioning, as indicated by the ATEC checklist, and of functioning in different developmental areas were observed. / Dissertation (MEd (Educational Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a diverse disorder, and the heterogenous range of possible presentations hinders our understanding of its aetiology. Recently there has been a surge of genome wide association studies for ASD, while historically psychological theories were relied on to explain the emergence of ASD. These fields continue to provide insights into ASD, but they tend to operate in parallel – genetic studies often lack comprehensive psychological phenotyping and theoretical backing, and psychological studies tend to lack genetic explanations. I propose that moving forward, genotype-phenotype studies should have a strong foundation in both fields and should focus on genes and theories with realworld implications for ASD diagnostics and/or interventions. This approach can be supported by focusing on established, well supported psychological theories, and selected ASD candidate genes that could be implicated in these theories, and ideally the genetic mechanism implicated should be one that can be targeted by existing medications. I therefore selected two prominent psychological theories, the Social Motivation Theory for ASD (Panksepp, 1979) and the ToM Theory for ASD (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), and selected an ASD candidate gene that was likely implicated in each of these theories, namely the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) and the serotonin transporter promoter length polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) respectively. For the first study of this protocol, I assessed the possible relationships between social motivation, OPRM1, and the ASD phenotype. For the second study, I assessed possible relationships between ToM deficits, 5-HTTLPR, and the ASD phenotype. These two studies shared a sample of 153 male children 4-16 years old; 51 boys per group (i.e. non-verbal ASD; verbal ASD; neurotypical). All ASD children completed ADOS2 assessment for ASD phenotyping. For the Social Motivation Study, attachment was used as a proxy to assess level of social motivation in all participants, and 76 of the 102 children with ASD provided DNA for OPRM1 genotyping. Comparisons across all three groups showed that the ASD samples had significantly lower social motivation than the neurotypical sample, with the non-verbal ASD group displaying the most severely reduced level of social motivation. Reduced social motivation was associated with ASD-related deficits in the non-verbal ASD sample but not the verbal ASD sample. Finally, I was unable to statistically assess the role of OPRM1 as hypothesized, due to an unprecedentedly high rate of the OPRM1 G allele, which indicated atypical mu-opioid processes. This clearly implicated OPRM1 in ASD and is the first study to show this so convincingly. Overall, this study's findings led me to suggest that Panksepp's (1979) theory could be updated to include a threshold effect such that more severely reduced social motivation in ASD is associated with little-to-no language acquisition, while those with less severely reduced social motivation are able to develop language and this protects against associations between social motivation and ASD-related deficits in childhood. For the Theory of Mind Study, the verbal ASD sample and neurotypical sample completed a developmental ToM Battery (i.e. University of Cape Town Theory of Mind Battery) and WASI assessment to establish verbal intelligence quotient (VIQ) scores, and 70 of the children with ASD were successfully genotyped for 5-HTTLPR. This study found that verbal male children with ASD tended to be one developmental stage behind age-matched neurotypical peers on ToM tasks. ToM deficits were associated with greater impairment in overall ASD severity and in symptoms from the social communication and interaction domain. For the non-verbal ASD sample, the 5-HTTLPR short allele, which is implicated in atypical serotonergic transmission, was associated with greater impairment overall and in the restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests symptom domain. No associations between 5-HTTLPR and ToM, or with ASD-related symptoms, was found for the verbal ASD group. This again suggested that language acquisition is an important consideration in genotypephenotype studies in male children with ASD.

Theory of Mind (ToM), a social cognitive skill defined as one's ability to attribute mental states to self and others, is considered key for a successful navigation of one's social world. Extensive research has elucidated the early developmental trajectory, predictors, correlates, and outcomes of ToM in the first five years of a child's life. By contrast, although ToM continues to develop beyond age five, and children increasingly begin to function in more complex and interconnected social ecologies, very little is known about ToM in middle childhood. The present study examines ToM development in middle childhood, using a new measure that is age appropriate, innovative, and embedded in the flow of a naturalistic social interaction. Drawing from rich behavioral and report data collected from children, parents, and teachers in a longitudinal study from toddlerhood to middle childhood, interpersonal factors (the child's relationships with the mother, father, and peers), and intrapersonal factors (temperament characteristic of effortful control) are systematically examined to predict individual differences in children's performance in the new ToM measure at age 10. Associations between children's ToM and their broadly ranging, concurrently assessed clinical symptoms are also examined. As a preliminary venture, using a small sample of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their caregivers, the present study also seeks to establish preliminary criterion validity for the new measure of ToM.

The evolutionary success of our species is bound to our sociality—the tendency to engage in and benefit from social interactions. On a conceptual level, this sociality has been parsed into two facets, namely the proclivity to like and seek social interactions (social motivation) as well as the cognitive abilities needed to coordinate with others socially (social cognition). While numerous studies have assessed social motivation and social cognition in young children, our current understanding of both facets is still far from conclusive. First, the exact ontogeny of social motivation and cognition remains largely unclear. Second, the degree to which either facet of sociality is shaped by cultural input remains poorly understood. Finally, interindividual variation in social motivation and cognition has yet to be examined, without which we can neither understand the construct validity of either facet, nor their potential interplay. In this dissertation, I present three studies addressing these issues by focusing on developmental, cross-cultural, and interindividual variation in three phenomena previously linked to sociality: Overimitation and collaboration as indicators of social motivation, as well as Theory of Mind as a proxy for social cognition. In the first study I assessed whether children’s overimitation would be shaped by age, culture, and the social presence of an adult model. I found that children across three diverse populations showed more overimitation with age and selectively in the presence of the model. I also documented cross-cultural variation in children’s overimitation. On an individual level, children’s overimitation did not predict their tendency to reengage a co-player in a collaborative activity. In study 2, I found children’s overimitation to vary systematically between two populations utilizing a procedure with reduced cognitive task demands. Here, age did not predict children’s overimitation and variation across populations was only observed in how much, but not whether, children would overimitate. In study 3, I documented systematic variation in children’s social motivation for collaboration as well as their Theory of Mind across three populations and across the age range tested. On an individual level, indicators of social motivation were ontogenetically linked and predicted children’s Theory of Mind. In the general discussion, I propose an integrative model of social motivation and cognition to embed and expand the current findings. Accordingly, the interplay of socialization goals and practices, social motivation, and social cognition builds the foundation for children’s social learning within social interactions.

Human social interaction crucially depends on the ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to other individuals. This ability is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), and understanding that other people can have false beliefs about the world is considered to be a critical test of ToM. In childhood, a developmental breakthrough is achieved around the age of 4 years, when children start explicitly reasoning about others’ false beliefs. The cognitive and neural developments that lead to this milestone of human cognition, however, are currently unknown. Moreover, recently, novel im- plicit paradigms have shown that, already before the age of 2 years, infants display correct expectations of the actions of an agent with a false belief. The processes that underlie these expectations and their relation to the later-developing explicit false belief reasoning, however, are unclear. The current thesis addresses these open issues in three studies. The first study investigates the developmental trajectory and robustness of an implicit false belief task longitudinally from the age of 2 to 4 years. We find that children only perform above chance by the age of 4 years, but not at 2 and 3 years. This indicates that early success on implicit false belief tasks is fragile. The second study examines the correlation of implicit and explicit false belief tasks with each other and with co-developing cognitive abilities. This shows a dissociation of implicit and explicit false belief tasks in that performance on the two task types does not correlate, and that explicit false belief tasks correlate with syntactic and executive functions, whereas implicit false be- lief tasks do not. Finally, the third study shows that the maturation of white matter in brain regions that support false belief reasoning in adultsand of their dorsal connectivity to the inferior frontal gyrus, suggested to support hierarchical processing, is associated with the emergence of explicit false belief reasoning in 3- and 4-year-old children. These associations are independent of implicit false belief-related action anticipation and of developments in other cognitive domains. Taken together, our results speak for a dissociation of the processes underlying implicit and explicit false belief tasks. We suggest that the developmental breakthrough in explicit false belief reasoning around the age of 4 years might result from improved belief processing, emerging hierarchical processing abilities, and the maturation of the connection between the relevant brain regions. Furthermore, I speculate on processes that might underlie early success on implicit false belief tasks in infancy.:Acknowledgements iii Summary xi Deutsche Zusammenfassung xvii 1 General Introduction 1.1 Theory of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Precursors of ToM in Infancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1.2 False Belief Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.1.3 Relation between Implicit and Explicit False Belief Tasks . . . . . . . 8 1.1.4 Theoretical Accounts of the Emergence of ToM . . . 14 1.2 Relation to Other Cognitive Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 1.2.1 Executive Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1.2.2 Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 1.2.3 Correlations with Implicit False Belief Tasks . . . . . 29 1.3 Neural Basis of ToM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.3.1 Neural Basis of ToM in Adults . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.3.2 Neural Basis of ToM in Development . . . . . . . . . 35 1.3.3 Structural Brain Development in Early Childhood . . 36 1.4 Research Questions and Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2 Study 1: Longitudinal evidence for 4-year-olds’ but not 2- and 3-year-olds’ false belief-related action anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . .45 3 Study 2: Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children . . . . . . . . . . . .73 4 Study 3: White matter maturation is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood . . . . . . . . . . . .91 5 General Discussion 5.1 Is there a continuity from early-developing to later explicit false belief abilities? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 5.2 What is the relation of implicit and explicit false belief tasks to other cognitive domains? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 5.3 What is the neural basis of the emergence of ToM? And what does this tell us about the underlying cognitive processes? . . . . 114 5.4 What processes underlie implicit false belief tasks?. . . . . 118 5.5 Future Research and Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 5.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 References . . . . . . . 128 A Supplements Study 1 . . . . . . . 161 B Supplements Study 2 . . . . . . . 163 C Supplements Study 3 . . . . . . . .181 Abbreviations . . . . . . . . 187 List of Figures . . . . . . . . 191 List of Tables . . . . . . . . 193

Individuals endowed with a ‘Theory of Mind’ (‘ToM’) understand themselves and others as agents whose actions are driven by unobservabl e psychological states. How and when human infants come to such an understa nding has been extensively resear ched in the visual domain. In my dissertation, I addressed three gaps in the extant literature about what great apes’ know about others' visual perceptions and perceptual beliefs. In study 1, I investigated orangutans’ understanding of visual attenti on and others’ visual perspectives in a competitive situation. Overall, the results suggest that orangutans have a limited understanding of others’ perspectives, relying mainly on cues from facial and bodily orientation and egocentric ruleswhen making perspective judgements. In study 2, I explored whether apes and 20 month old human infants requesting a desired object from a human experimenter would use communicative means to direct visual attention towards the object. While infants used pointing to alter the experimenter’s focus of attention, we found no evidence that apes’ employ their point gestures in this way. In study 3, I examined chimpanzees’ and 5.5 year old human children’s understanding of perceptual beliefs. By designing two novel false belief tasks which required reduced executive functioning, I attempted to find out whether chimpanzees’ historical failure in explicit false belief tasks was due to their lack of inhibitory control Neither the chimpanzees nor the 5.5 year-olds succeeded in the novel tasks.

The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate the degree of compatibility of two fields: phenomenology and computational cognitive science. The former field proposes to explicate all structures of conscious experience in terms of conscious experience. The latter proposes to explicate all structures of consciousness partly in terms of unconscious causal factors. These endeavors have been seen as mutually exclusive. I put forward the thesis that the original formulation of phenomenology may be seen to have a computational theory of mind in the background. To this end, I show in the first chapter that the founder of phenomenology articulated, prior to founding phenomenology, a computational theory of mind in terms of its two modern theses: (1) syntactic representations, and (2) their causal generation and interaction. Insofar as I am able to provide sufficient evidence for this thesis, I am theoretically licensed to proceed to trace its influence on the founding of phenomenology proper. On the above textual basis, I proceed in the second chapter to discuss Husserl's methodology in the founding work of phenomenology - the Logical Investigations. I there show how my compatibility thesis may be true; indeed, I demonstrate that formal evidence is the causal product of what Husserl calls “unsere Denkmaschine” – a thought-machine that manipulates syntactic symbols. The third chapter discusses several arguments against (Humean) associationism, and by extension against (Churchlandian) connectionism, and show that they demand in their stead computationalism, both on account of the nature of the explananda as well as for the sake of theoretical completeness. In the fourth chapter, I discuss, with a view to deepening my interpretation, the much-celebrated property (since Chomsky) of productivity. This leads to a discussion of the methodological relation between “universal grammar,” as it appears directly in the 4th Logical Investigation, and the computational theory of mind. In the fifth chapter, I discuss how Husserl’s descriptive treatment of the propositional attitudes (as act-matters & act-qualities), nominalization, and categorial intuition may be supplemented on the explanatory side by a language of thought.

This study was an exploration of adults with long-term hearing loss (LTHL) and how it may relate to social intelligence (SI) proficiency. The outcome of this study was intended to illuminate a gap in the literature, namely, the manner in which those with long-term LTHL were able to understand social situations and communicate with others when auditory comprehension was limited. A quantitative nonexperimental method was used that provided the Tromso Social Intelligence Scale (TSIS) to a group of 66 adults with LTHL who were diagnosed with hearing loss as children, as well as a group of 70 adults with no discernable hearing loss (NDHL). The TSIS was used to determine if those with LTHL would have scored higher on the total scale score and the subscales of social information processing and social awareness, than would those with NDHL. The results of the study were determined by an independent t test. There was no significant difference in the total scale and subscale scores between LTHL and NDHL for this relatively small samples study. These findings could aid the hearing loss community at large through a focus on SI skills to improve confidence and communication for those with LTHL. One social change benefit of this study demonstrates that SI for people with LTHL is comparable to people with NDHL. Such a finding suggests that while people with LTHL did not rate higher in SI, they also are not impaired in social situations because of their hearing loss.