A versão infantil do Teste de Ler a Mente nos Olhos (Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version ) de Simon Baron-Cohen, é composto por 28 fotografias da região dos olhos de indivíduos com diferentes expressões e tem como objetivo uma quantificação da habilidade do indivíduo em inferir estados mentais a partir de expressões faciais, sendo usualmente utilizado como um instrumento para avaliação de Teoria da Mente. Neste trabalho foi feito um estudo de validade de uma versão em português do teste, visando maiores esclarecimentos acerca de suas propriedades psicométricas. O teste foi aplicado em uma amostra controle de 434 crianças de dois estados brasileiros, São Paulo e Santa Catarina, cursando o ensino fundamental e em uma amostra clínica de 20 crianças diagnosticadas com Transtornos do Espectro do Autismo. Foram encontrados um índice de consistência interna (alfa de Cronbach) de 0,718 e variância estatisticamente significativa de acordo com o ano escolar. Não foram encontradas diferenças significativas com relação ao sexo e Estado. Não houve diferença estatisticamente significativa nos escores dos grupos controle e clínico. Os resultados foram, portanto, parcialmente favoráveis para validade de construto, mas não foram encontradas evidências de validade critério / The \"Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version\" by Simon Baron-Cohen, consists of 28 photographs of the eye region of people with different expressions and aim a quantification of the individual\'s ability to infer mental states from facial expressions, and is usually used as an instrument for assessing Theory of Mind. This paper is a study of validity of a Portuguese version of the test, seeking further clarification about its psychometric properties. The test was applied to a control group of 434 children from two Brazilian states, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina, in elementary school and a clinical group of 20 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We found an index of internal consistency (Cronbach\'s alpha) of 0.718 and statistically significant variance in accordance with the school year. There were no significant differences with regard to gender and state. There was no statistically significant difference in the scores of clinical and control groups. The results were therefore partially favorable to construct validity, but there was no evidence of criterion validity

A versão infantil do Teste de Ler a Mente nos Olhos (Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version ) de Simon Baron-Cohen, é composto por 28 fotografias da região dos olhos de indivíduos com diferentes expressões e tem como objetivo uma quantificação da habilidade do indivíduo em inferir estados mentais a partir de expressões faciais, sendo usualmente utilizado como um instrumento para avaliação de Teoria da Mente. Neste trabalho foi feito um estudo de validade de uma versão em português do teste, visando maiores esclarecimentos acerca de suas propriedades psicométricas. O teste foi aplicado em uma amostra controle de 434 crianças de dois estados brasileiros, São Paulo e Santa Catarina, cursando o ensino fundamental e em uma amostra clínica de 20 crianças diagnosticadas com Transtornos do Espectro do Autismo. Foram encontrados um índice de consistência interna (alfa de Cronbach) de 0,718 e variância estatisticamente significativa de acordo com o ano escolar. Não foram encontradas diferenças significativas com relação ao sexo e Estado. Não houve diferença estatisticamente significativa nos escores dos grupos controle e clínico. Os resultados foram, portanto, parcialmente favoráveis para validade de construto, mas não foram encontradas evidências de validade critério / The \"Reading the Mind in Eyes Test - Child Version\" by Simon Baron-Cohen, consists of 28 photographs of the eye region of people with different expressions and aim a quantification of the individual\'s ability to infer mental states from facial expressions, and is usually used as an instrument for assessing Theory of Mind. This paper is a study of validity of a Portuguese version of the test, seeking further clarification about its psychometric properties. The test was applied to a control group of 434 children from two Brazilian states, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina, in elementary school and a clinical group of 20 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We found an index of internal consistency (Cronbach\'s alpha) of 0.718 and statistically significant variance in accordance with the school year. There were no significant differences with regard to gender and state. There was no statistically significant difference in the scores of clinical and control groups. The results were therefore partially favorable to construct validity, but there was no evidence of criterion validity

This thesis adopts a cognitive-phenomenological approach to Apollonius’ presentation of psychological imagery, thus eschewing the cultural-determinist assumptions that have tended to dominate Classical scholarship. To achieve this, I analyse relevant theories and results from the cognitive sciences (Theory of Mind, agency, gesture, conceptual metaphor), as well as perceived socio-literary influences from the post-Homeric tradition and the various advances (for example, medical) from contemporary Alexandria. This interdisciplinary methodology is then applied to the Argonautica in three large case studies: Medea and the simile of the sunbeam (3.755-60), Heracles and the simile of the gadfly (1.1286-72), and, finally, the poem’s overall psychological portrayal of Jason. In so doing, I show that Apollonius conforms to cognitive universal patterns of psychological expression, while also deploying and deepening his specific culture’s poetic, folk, and scientific models.

A mental model of the another person’s state of mind including their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, otherwise known as Theory of Mind (ToM), can be created to better predict their behavior and optimize our own decisions. These representations can be explicitly modeled during both the development and presence of stable cooperation via communication outcomes, allowing us to understand the sophistication or depth of mental coordination, involved in an individual’s social perception and reasoning. Almost all current scientific studies of ToM take a spectatorial approach, relying on observation followed by evaluation (e.g., the Sally-Anne Task). However given evidence that social cognition fundamentally shifts during valuationally significant social encounters with others, this study adopts a second-person approach. Each participant’s actions under dynamic uncertainty influence the joint reward probabilities of both, favoring cooperation and coordination. Only Teachers have knowledge of the correct action-reward contingencies, while Learners must ascertain the Teacher’s directive and correctly adjust their actions to obtain the optimal reward. The complexity of cooperative behaviors cannot be captured with simple reinforcement learning models, however a similarity in valuation exists, probing further investigation.

<p><p><em>Bakgrund</em></p><p>Forskning har visat att personer med autism har svårigheter med "theory of mind", förmågan att sätta sig in i andra personers tankar och känslor. Det leder till en annorlunda förståelse av sociala sammanhang. Tankestilen påverkar samspelet med pedagoger och kräver ett anpassat bemötande.</p><p><em>Metod</em></p>Sju halvstrukturerade intervjuer med pedagoger som arbetar i särskolan och undervisar elever med autism. Flertalet pedagoger undervisar i grundsärskolan. Deltagarna uppmuntrades bland annat att beskriva elever med utmanande beteende och berätta om vad de anser är ett bra bemötande. Intervjuerna kretsade mycket kring olika former av kravsituationer.<p><em>Resultat</em></p>Pedagogerna anpassar bemötande och undervisning på en rad sätt för att passa elever med svag "theory of mind". Framför allt anpassas kommunikationen på ett genomtänkt sätt. Pedagogerna skiljer sig i hur de bemöter elever i kravsituationer. Flera pedagoger förespråkar ett bemötande som inte utgår från pedagogens eget sätt att tänka. Studien visar hur pedagogerna trots den utgångspunkten återgår till att förstå utmanande beteende som medvetet och provokativt.<p><em>Diskussion</em></p>Studien diskuterar möjliga samband mellan den pedagogiska miljön och hur pedagoger beskriver och tolkar utmanande beteende. Idén att ostrukturerade och/eller stränga miljöer hänger ihop med en förståelse av eleverna som medvetet "testande" och manipulerande förs fram. Studien utmynnar i ett förslag på ny definition av utmanande beteende, som bygger på omgivningens svårighet att förstå och tolka beteendet.</p>

Bakgrund Forskning har visat att personer med autism har svårigheter med "theory of mind", förmågan att sätta sig in i andra personers tankar och känslor. Det leder till en annorlunda förståelse av sociala sammanhang. Tankestilen påverkar samspelet med pedagoger och kräver ett anpassat bemötande. Metod Sju halvstrukturerade intervjuer med pedagoger som arbetar i särskolan och undervisar elever med autism. Flertalet pedagoger undervisar i grundsärskolan. Deltagarna uppmuntrades bland annat att beskriva elever med utmanande beteende och berätta om vad de anser är ett bra bemötande. Intervjuerna kretsade mycket kring olika former av kravsituationer.Resultat Pedagogerna anpassar bemötande och undervisning på en rad sätt för att passa elever med svag "theory of mind". Framför allt anpassas kommunikationen på ett genomtänkt sätt. Pedagogerna skiljer sig i hur de bemöter elever i kravsituationer. Flera pedagoger förespråkar ett bemötande som inte utgår från pedagogens eget sätt att tänka. Studien visar hur pedagogerna trots den utgångspunkten återgår till att förstå utmanande beteende som medvetet och provokativt.Diskussion Studien diskuterar möjliga samband mellan den pedagogiska miljön och hur pedagoger beskriver och tolkar utmanande beteende. Idén att ostrukturerade och/eller stränga miljöer hänger ihop med en förståelse av eleverna som medvetet "testande" och manipulerande förs fram. Studien utmynnar i ett förslag på ny definition av utmanande beteende, som bygger på omgivningens svårighet att förstå och tolka beteendet.

When evaluating a situation that results in harm, it is critical to consider how a person’s prior intention may have been causally responsible for the action that resulted in the harmful outcome. This thesis examined children’s developing understanding of intentional causation in reasoning about harmful outcomes, and the relation between this understanding and mental-state reasoning. Four-, 6-, and 8-year-old children, and adults, were told eight stories in which characters’ actions resulted in harmful outcomes. Story types differed in how the actions that resulted in harm were causally linked to their prior intentions such that: (1) characters wanted to, intended to, and did perform a harmful act; (2) they wanted and intended to perform a harmful act, but instead, accidentally brought about the harmful outcome; (3) they wanted and intended to perform a harmful act, then changed their mind, but accidentally brought about the harmful outcome; (4) they did not want or intend to harm, but accidentally brought about a harmful outcome. Participants were asked to judge the characters’ intentions, make punishment judgments, and justify their responses. Additionally, children were given first- and second-order false-belief tasks, commonly used to assess mental-state reasoning. The results indicated that intention judgment accuracy improved with age. However, all age groups had difficulty evaluating the intention in the deviant causal chain scenario (Searle, 1983), in which the causal link between intention and action was broken but a harmful intention was maintained. Further, the results showed a developmental pattern in children’s punishment judgments based on their understanding of intentional causation, although the adults’ performance did not follow the same pattern. Also, younger children referred to the characters’ intentions less frequently in their justifications of their punishment judgments. The results also revealed a relation between belief-state reasoning and intentional-causation reasoning in scenarios that did not involve, or no longer involved, an intention to harm. Further, reasoning about intentional causation was related to higher-level understanding of mental states. The implications of these findings in clarifying and adding to previous research on the development of understanding of intentional causation and intentions in moral reasoning are discussed.

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).

An individual`s eyes provide a wealth of information during social interactions. The present research investigates the social adjustment implications of one gaze behaviour, specifically, shared attention, which is the tendency to follow an interlocutor`s directed gaze to attend to the same object or location. Recent clinical research suggested that gaze control reflects the capacity to differentiate self from other at the attentional level, since patient populations with poor gaze control abilities (i.e., schizophrenic patients) were also found to exhibit difficulty in differentiating between the self and another agent. Four studies were conducted to examine whether flexible gaze following behavior, specifically the ability to inhibit gaze-following, when the situation warrants, would be positively linked with two markers of adaptive social functioning: sociocognitive abilities and self-close other(s) differentiation. Based on previous research that gaze cues linked to upright (but not inverted) faces trigger reflexive gaze following mechanisms, an upright face condition was used to assess social cueing mechanisms and an inverted face condition, as a control for non-social cueing mechanisms in a gaze control task with realistic (Study 2) and schematic faces (Studies 1, 3, and 4). Studies 1-4 showed that more flexible gaze following behavior predicted superior sociocognitive abilities, as indexed by higher capacity to infer the mental states of others in both young and older adults (Studies 1-3), as well as in clinical populations (i.e., Parkinson’s Disease [PD] patients, Study 4). Studies 2-4 further revealed that poorer gaze control predicted decreased self-close other differentiation in both younger and older adults. In Study 2, poorer gaze control performance characterized young adults from enmeshed family systems, which allow limited private space and emotional autonomy. In Studies 3 and 4, poorer gaze control predicted decreased cognitive-affective differentiation from one’s spouse and lower marital quality in healthy elderly couples (Study 3) and elderly couples, where one spouse had PD (Study 4). The present findings argue for the existence of a unified sociocognitive network, perpetually shaped by one’s interpersonal history, and which encompasses perceptual mechanisms, specialized for face and gaze processing and higher-order cognitive mechanisms, specialized for processing the meaning (s) of social environments.

Prior research has demonstrated that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on tasks requiring set shifting – that is, the ability to shift between different ways of thinking about an object or situation. For example, bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual controls on false-belief tasks and on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task. The present study aimed (a) to examine whether the bilingual advantage in false-belief and DCCS tasks can be replicated when accounting for languages/cultures and socio-economic status and (b) to determine whether inhibitory control, metarepresentation, and/or working memory underlie the advantage, if any exists. Three language groups (24 English monolingual, 24 French monolingual, and 24 English-French bilingual preschoolers) were tested on the following tasks: false-belief (FB) tasks, the DCCS task, an inhibitory control task (Stroop task), a metarepresentation task (Identity Statements task), a working memory task (Backward Word Span), and receptive language proficiency tests. Socio-economic status was measured through a parental questionnaire containing questions about parental income and education. Results showed that the three language groups were equivalent on socio-economic measures. Despite having significantly lower language proficiency scores, bilinguals’ raw scores on FB and DCCS tasks did not differ from monolinguals’ raw scores. After statistically controlling for language proficiency and age, bilinguals had significantly higher FB scores, but did not differ from monolinguals on DCCS scores. Analyses were then performed to determine whether inhibitory control, metarepresentation, and/or working memory help bilinguals “do more” in FB “with less” language proficiency. Working memory emerged as the likely candidate that compensates for the negative effect of bilingual children’s low language proficiency on FB performance because, after controlling for age and language proficiency, it was the only cognitive ability that fulfilled both criteria: (a) its measure correlated significantly with FB and (b) there was a bilingual advantage over both monolingual groups in the measure. A mediation analysis confirmed that the working memory measure significantly mediates the relation between bilingual status and FB while controlling for age and language proficiency. Both components of the working memory measure – that is, understanding of task instructions and maintenance/manipulation capacity – mediate this relation.