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We examined the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the processing of a false belief task using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Twenty adults performed a false belief task adapted for MEG. Regions of interest were selected based on source analyses on the contrast between false and true belief, and MEG source time-course reconstructions were generated and analyzed to determine the temporal architecture of neural activations specific to false belief reasoning. We found frontal, temporal and parietal regions to activate during false belief processing, confirming prior findings. We also extend previous findings by adding information about the temporal profile of neural activity during theory of mind processing, an area lacking in the literature. We found that increased frontal activity began at 100 ms bilaterally, followed by parietal regions from 200 to 330 ms and temporal regions at 350 ms, at which point frontal activity became lateralized to the right hemisphere.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers work with Autism pupils in two different schoolforms: a traditional elementary school and a language school. The study was based on three questions: 1. How do teachers in elementary school prepare, plan and implement reading and writing instruction to Autism pupils? 2. How do teachers in the language unit prepare, plan and implement their reading and writing instruction to Autism pupils? 3. How do teachers arrange for the Autism pupils to be included in the teaching? I have observed the physical classroom enviroment, the language learning opportunities and the interaction in the classroom looks. I have also done interviews with teachers in both schoolforms. To answer the research questions, six qualitative interwiews with various educators, were made. The results show that the language school, where focus is specifically on language development has a significantly greater awareness of how to ineract. What differentates the various types of schools is especially how the interaction is formed. The teachers in elementary school have more focus on the subject and what is to be learned. The teachers in the language school have a communicative focus. All six educators believe that inclusion of children with Autism is a good thing for everyone, as long as it is done properly and in the right order, so that the child with Autism gets the opportunity to be part of a social group. To achieve this, the work must be structured and clarified.

The capacity to mentally project the self into the future or, what has recently been termed “episodic foresight” is an emerging topic of study in developmental psychology. The aim of this dissertation was to review available research on this topic and explore its development in two groups of children: typically-developing preschoolers and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This dissertation had two main goals. The first goal was to explore whether tasks thought to measure episodic foresight in children are related and whether, as has been hypothesized, they were related to theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF). Study 1 showed that after controlling for age and language ability, episodic foresight tasks were not intercorrelated, nor were they individually related to ToM or EF tasks. Importantly, however, an episodic foresight composite score was related to several EF tasks. Specifically, the results suggested a significant relation between episodic foresight and inhibitory control. The second goal of this dissertation was to explore the development of episodic foresight in children with ASD. Specifically, I tested whether children with ASD would perform more poorly on a series of episodic foresight tasks than a mental-age matched group of typically-developing children. Study 2 revealed significant group differences on several episodic foresight tasks, suggesting that children with ASD showed impairments in thinking about themselves in the future. These results are a timely contribution to the research on episodic foresight and will hopefully aid in the further development of tasks that adequately measure this important cognitive ability in children.

This study assessed the relationship between children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ epistemological development and their evaluations of different teaching methods. Participants were presented with different teaching scenarios in which the domain (scientific or moral), nature (controversial or noncontroversial), and method (lecture or discussion) were varied to determine if this affected participants’ rating of the scenarios. Epistemological development was assessed in three domains: aesthetic, value (moral), and physical truth (science). Ninety-six participants (7–8-, 10–11-, 13–14-year-olds, and college students) were included in the study. In general, it was discovered that older participants (13-14-year-olds and college students) preferred discussion methods, while younger participants (7-8 and 10-11-year-olds) did not discriminate between lectures or discussions. However, all participants took the domain, nature, and method into consideration. Epistemological development was predictive of participants’ preference for teaching methods, but only in the value domain.

To date, there is compelling evidence to show that theory-of-mind development is influenced by different environmental and cognitive factors. However, despite our understanding of the different individual processes that facilitate theory-of-mind acquisition, what remains relatively unclear is how these processes operate together during development. The goal of the present dissertation is to examine mediation (examines the relationship between two different factors and address the question of “why” or “how” one variable predicts or causes an outcome variable) and moderation (examines “when” or “for whom” a variable most strongly predicts or causes an outcome variable) processes that can help explain why and under what conditions environmental and cognitive factors are important for theory-of-mind development. The investigation began by examining the influence of environmental factors on theory-of-mind development. Mediation analyses were used to examine “why” environmental factors such as family (i.e., family risk) and socio-linguistic factors (i.e., parental cognitive talk), may be important for theory-of-mind development. Preliminary results demonstrated possible mediated effects of both family risk and parental cognitive talk on theory of mind. That is, family risk may delay children’s theory-of-mind development by impeding the rate of language acquisition, whereas parental cognitive talk may facilitate more advanced theory-of-mind understanding by encouraging more parent-child reciprocity during conversations. Next, the effects of cognitive factors on theory-of-mind development were explored. Moderation analysis was used to examine under what conditions children’s language abilities and conflict inhibition skills (children’s ability to inhibit a prepotent response while responding with a less salient response) are important for theory-of-mind acquisition. Although there may be limited effects of child language and conflict inhibition on early theory of mind, advanced theory-of-mind understanding such as false belief requires both. However, optimal effects of child language on false-belief understanding occurred when children also had high levels of conflict inhibition ability. These findings suggest that effects of child language on false belief are contingent on children’s conflict inhibition skills. Finally, to investigate how environmental and cognitive factors operate together during theory-of-mind development, moderation analysis was conducted to examine whether delays in language and/or conflict inhibition can be compensated for by more exposure to parental cognitive talk (and vice versa) during theory-of-mind acquisition. Although there was no evidence to suggest compensatory effects, results demonstrated that child language and parental cognitive talk both independently contributed to theory of mind. These findings suggest that environmental (e.g., parental cognitive talk) and cognitive factors (e.g., child language) play distinct roles during theory-of-mind development. Overall, these results demonstrate the value of understanding theory-of-mind development from a bioecological perspective where children are both directly and indirectly influenced by multiple mechanisms during theory-of-mind development.

The ability to represent the mental states of others (i.e., Theory of Mind, ToM) is vital for social interaction. There is limited information on ToM knowledge in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These children have deficient language abilities that cannot be explained by hearing, cognitive, or neurological problems. Furthermore, children with SLI experience difficulty in initiating and maintaining social pretend play. Language, pretend play, and ToM typically develop in concert, which may indicate that they share an underlying capacity for representation. Given that language is deficient in children with SLI, these children may have problems with ToM, which might be related to their social behaviors during pretend play. This study was the first to investigate the association between ToM and pretend play in children with and without SLI. Twenty-two children with SLI and 22 with typical development (TD), between 48-71 months of age, participated in this study. Children engaged in a variety of ToM tasks and participated in two pretend play assessments: a standardized pretend play assessment and a role play activity. Children with SLI scored significantly lower on ToM tasks and engaged less often in some sophisticated forms of pretend play than their age-matched peers with TD. After controlling for language and SES, there were no significant associations between ToM and pretend play in children with and without SLI. When language groups were analyzed individually, different patterns of associations emerged for children with and without SLI. ToM was positively associated with pretend play in children with TD but negatively associated in children with SLI. Moreover, inconsistent patterns of associations were observed for some children with SLI (i.e., poor ToM understanding but sophisticated pretend play or vice versa). This study demonstrated that children with SLI may also have concomitant problems in ToM and pretend play, which may have implications for clinical assessment and intervention. The study contributes to the literature by investigating the link between ToM and different forms of sophisticated pretend play in children with and without SLI. Given the different patterns of partial correlations, future investigation of the relationship between ToM and pretend play relationship is warranted.

This thesis examines the effects of linguistic input on the development of children’s epistemic concepts. It draws upon two fundamental questions in the field of cognitive development: (a) whether distinctions between automatic and controlled forms of cognitive processing are indicative of underlying conceptual differences, and (b) whether language is critical to the process of concept development. To establish the background of the current research, a summary of how these theoretical questions have been addressed in other fields of cognitive psychology is first provided (Chapter 1). These questions are then re- examined within the specific domain of epistemic concept development (Chapter 2). Changes in false-belief processing that occur between infancy and the early preschool years are discussed in relation to two competing theories of false-belief development. A framework to explain how language promotes children’s transition between automatic and controlled forms of processing is then provided. It is suggested that language facilitates change by both reducing the cognitive demands associated with controlled response tasks as well as assisting with the formation of robust epistemic representations. An empirical study that was designed to examine the effects of epistemic language (i.e., verbs and syntax) on children’s automatic and controlled processing of belief is then described (Chapters 3 to 5). Eighty-four children (Mage = 3;5 years), who initially failed elicited measures of false-belief, were trained with visual contexts of true- and false-belief. The critical manipulation across three conditions was the linguistic input presented in conjunction with these contexts. Children heard narrations that contained either (a) the description of an agent’s actions without an epistemic verb, (b) a familiar epistemic verb (thinks) across both contexts, or (c) the familiar epistemic verb in contexts of true-belief and a novel epistemic verb (gorps) in contexts of false-belief. Results demonstrated a significant advantage for children who were trained with epistemic verbs on spontaneous measures of false-belief (i.e., anticipatory gaze). Significant effects of epistemic verb exposure were also demonstrated in novel contexts of belief induction. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theories that make distinct predictions about the role of language in epistemic concept development (Chapter 6).

This study assessed the relationship between children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ epistemological development and their evaluations of different teaching methods. Participants were presented with different teaching scenarios in which the domain (scientific or moral), nature (controversial or noncontroversial), and method (lecture or discussion) were varied to determine if this affected participants’ rating of the scenarios. Epistemological development was assessed in three domains: aesthetic, value (moral), and physical truth (science). Ninety-six participants (7–8-, 10–11-, 13–14-year-olds, and college students) were included in the study. In general, it was discovered that older participants (13-14-year-olds and college students) preferred discussion methods, while younger participants (7-8 and 10-11-year-olds) did not discriminate between lectures or discussions. However, all participants took the domain, nature, and method into consideration. Epistemological development was predictive of participants’ preference for teaching methods, but only in the value domain.

Doctor of Philosophy / This study defines Theory-of-Mind as the ability to experience one’s own mind and understand the minds of others to the extent necessary to make sense of human behaviour and the world. Since the concept of Theory-of-Mind was first applied to people with ASD (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985), lack of Theory-of-Mind has been used to explain their cognitive difficulties (National Research Council, 2003), along with social, communicative and imaginative impairments (Frith, Happé & Siddons, 1994). Previous studies have tended to think of Theory-of-Mind in terms of a simple binary of deficit or credit; to exclude the voices of people with ASD; to emphasise the cognitive aspects of Theory-of-Mind over its affective aspects; and to emphasise understanding the minds of others over experiencing one’s own mind. This study aims to address these issues by investigating Theory-of-Mind as subjectively experienced by students with ASD and objectively understood by their teachers. It is the first attempt in the study of Theory-of-Mind to include the voices of individuals with ASD along with the professional views of their teachers. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, supported by philosophy of mind and special education. A grounded theory approach and a mixed methods research design combine to build and strengthen a theory of Theory-of-Mind. For Theory-of-Mind as subjectively experienced, 20 senior secondary and post secondary school students with ASD from Republic of Korea were interviewed and student-produced documents were reviewed to draw out their inner experiences. The Korean Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Korean Vineland Social Maturity Scale were employed to assess IQ and social competence. For Theory-of-Mind as objectively understood, their teachers’ beliefs regarding their students with ASD were sought through in-depth interviews, a review of teacher-produced documents and administration of a newly developed Teacher Questionnaire. This study reports differences between Theory-of-Mind as subjectively experienced and objectively observed, and variations within the components of Theory-of-Mind. The role of imagination in Theory-of-Mind and the relationships between Theory-of-Mind components, IQ and social competence are discussed. As a result, a Theory-of-Mind continuum model and Theory-of-Mind Typology is proposed.