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.

Denna explorativa studie ämnar generera en hypotes om ett potentiellt samband mellan ögonrörelsemönster och mentaliseringsyttranden. Frågor som ställs i studien är hur ett sådant samband ser ut och hur det skulle kunna mätas. Ett experiment designas där försöksdeltagarna får uppgiften att berätta en sammanhängande berättelse utifrån en serie bilder, såväl berättelsen som försöksdeltagarens ögonrörelsemönster spelas in. Data analyseras på flera sätt; ögonrörelsemönstret jämförs mellan försöksdeltagarna och mellan stimuli, dessutom utförs en närmare granskning av ögonrörelsemönstrens utseende just innan försöksdeltagaren använder ett mentaliseringsyttrande. Slutsatserna som dras i studien är att det finns ett flertal sätt att undersöka förhållandet mellan ögonrörelsemönster och mentaliseringsyttranden. De analysmetoder som används i studien har inte visat på något samband mellan försöksdeltagarnas ögonrörelsemönster och deras mentaliseringsyttranden varför ingen hypotes har kunnat genereras. Studien visar däremot på att emotioner tycks vara den vanligaste typen av mentaliseringsyttrande vid berättande och bör beaktas enskilt istället för att klumpas ihop med övriga mentaliseringsyttranden. / Jag tänker därför pratar jag - visuell uppmärksamhet i socialt tänkande och i socialt samspel

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to determine differences in the use of mental state references by typically developing 9- and 11-year-old children. Following a priming task that emphasized distinctions between physical and mental acts, children watched an 11-minute textless video and then were asked to generate an oral and a written story that focused on the mental states of the multiple characters. Narratives were transcribed, and all mental state references were classified into motivational, experiential, and belief categories. Specific mental state references were also analyzed to determine levels of semantic complexity. The study attempted to answer: 1) whether 9- and 11-year-old typically developing children differed in their ability to use more complex mental state references and 2) whether this ability varied as a function of the oral versus the written modality.The sample consisted of 26 children, ages 9;0-9;11 (15 females, 11 males), and 24 children, ages 11;00-11;11 (14 females, 10 males). The total sample (N=50) consisted of 32 Caucasian children, 15 African-American children, 2 Hispanic children, and 1 Asian-American. All children were selected from one urban elementary school located in West Central Florida, were from monolingual, English-speaking homes, and were speakers of Standard American English. A statistical analysis was conducted via a 3-way MANOVA, specifically, 2 (age 9 vs. age 11) x 4 (mental state categories) x 2 (oral versus written modality).

Often overlooked in the study of theory of mind (ToM) development, the understanding of motivational states, such as goals and desires, is both an important capacity in its own right and also a likely precursor to more advanced social and cognitive skills. This dissertation explored infants' and toddlers' reasoning about agents' motivational states, linking those representations to the domains of language and prosocial development. Parts I and II of the dissertation asked about toddlers' abilities to use representations of others' motivational states to guide helping behaviors. Part I used a spontaneous helping paradigm with two goal objects, one previously liked and the other disliked. Three- but not 2-year-olds helped appropriately by giving an actor her desired object, reflecting prosocial concern for others' specific desires at age 3. Part II probed the understanding of goals and helping of 14- and 24-month-olds. After establishing that toddlers encode simple reaching actions as goal-directed, a series of 4 experiments using an object-giving paradigm investigated toddlers' abilities to use goal representations to guide helping. The results indicate that 24- but not 14-month-olds used representations of prior goals to inform their helping behaviors; 14-month-olds were capable of using only current goals to guide helping. Part III of the dissertation asked whether there is continuity in the developmental relationship between language and ToM by investigating links between toddlers' understanding of motivational states and their vocabulary size. Experiment 1 found no correlation between the vocabulary size of typically hearing toddlers and their performance on tasks measuring motivational state understanding. Experiment 2 compared the same motivational state understanding of typically hearing toddlers and deaf toddlers with smaller vocabularies, finding no differences in performance between groups. The results of these experiments indicate that the link between language and false belief that is present at age 4 does not extend to motivational state reasoning in the toddler years. Together the findings of this dissertation highlight important limits and boundary conditions on young children's reasoning about motivational states. Further research is needed into the developmental trajectory and mechanisms of theory of mind reasoning. / Psychology

In the current study, children’s understanding of false belief, intention, and their ability to distinguish the appearance of a character from its reality was investigated. Seventy-two three to five years olds were recruited from several preschools in the Silicon Valley in California. During the experiment, children were shown an animated movie in a computer and asked the false belief, intention, and appearance-reality distinction questions. Following the animated movie, children were also asked if they understand 10 mental words that depicted the human mind, such as think, want, believe, etc. The relationship between the children’s knowledge of the human mind and the mental words they understood was explored. Results of the current study revealed that children who were four and half to five performed better than children three and half to four on false belief tasks. Children’s performance on intention and appearance-reality distinction questions did not differ significantly across age. However, girls’ performance was superior to boys’ performance on intention questions. Similarly, girls’ knowledge of overall naïve psychology was also superior to that of boys. Moreover, the order of the naïve psychology concepts that children passed in current study was from intention to appearance-reality distinction and then false belief. Finally, the regression analysis of the data revealed that the mental word vocabulary children processed was closely related to naïve psychology development. More specifically, the number of total mental words that were reported by children or assessed by contextual questions was a significant predictor of naïve psychology knowledge.

The analyses in this dissertation were designed to identify 1) whether there is an age effect among three-, four-, and five-year-old preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 2) whether there is a gender effect among preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 3) whether there is a relationship between false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability in preschool children, and 4) whether there is a relationship between peer acceptance and false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability among preschool children. Participants were 78 (34 male, 44 female) preschool children of mixed ethnicity who were between three to five years of age. All subjects completed four tasks that assessed false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, deception detection ability, and peer acceptance. Results from the four-way repeated measures mixed-model analysis of variance (2 Gender x 3 Age x 2 False-Belief Understanding x 2 Deception) suggest that there is a task effect, age effect, gender effect, and false-belief understanding effect for deception among preschool children. Children received significantly higher scores on the deception detection ability task than they did on the deceptive ability task. This indicates that young children find deception detection to be easier than deceptive ability. In addition, this also provides evidence that deceptive ability and that deception detection are two separate constructs. This is further supported by the principal components analysis, which extracted two separate components for deception intelligence. In addition, three-year-old children perform significantly lower than four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. However, there is not a significant difference between the performances of four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. This supports previous research that four years of age appears to be the critical age for the emergence of Machiavellian Intelligence (Peskin, 1992; Peterson, 2003). Moreover, males perform significantly better on deception tasks than females. Furthermore, there is a significant positive correlation between deception detection ability and peer acceptance. Children who obtain higher deception detection ability scores are ranked as being more liked by their peers.

Studien beskriver aktuell forskning kring hur yngre barn tänker om andra människors tankar och känslor utifrån olika teoretiska perspektiv. Vidare provas ett test som så tidigt som möjligt under barns utveckling möjligen kan belysa förskolebarns förmåga att sätta sig in i någon annans tankar, perspektiv. Inom autismforskningen har begreppet theory of mind använts för att belysa den kognitiva förmåga som krävs för att en person ska kunna sätta sig in i någon annans tankar. Från flera håll har begreppet ifrågasatts eftersom det krävs flera kognitiva komponenter såsom minne och verbal förmåga för att lösa denna typ av uppgifter. Följande studie har genomförts för att undersöka ett test som så renodlat som möjligt försöker belysa förmågan att förstå hur någon annan tänker. Elva barn som utretts för autismspektrumfrågeställning och fått diagnosen autism har fått genomföra testet ”Kicki och Katten” och jämförts med tio typiskt utvecklade barn matchade på mental ålder. Resultatet visar att det inte finns någon skillnad mellan barnen med autism och de typiskt utvecklade barnen och att barn med en mental ålder under fyra år, i båda grupperna, inte klarar av testet Kicki och Katten. Testet Kicki och Katten fungerar inte för att bedöma theory of mind hos yngre barn än fyra år.

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.