Background: Disparities in health perspectives between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations are major concerns in many of the world's well-developed nations. Indigenous populations are largely less healthy, more prone to chronic diseases, and have an earlier overall mortality than non-Indigenous populations. Low levels of physical activity (PA) contribute to the high levels of disease in Indigenous Australians.Method: Qualitative analysis of structured one-on-one interviews discussing PA in a regional setting. Participants were 12 Indigenous Australian adults, and 12 non-Indigenous Australian adults matched on age, sex, and basketball division.Results: Most participants reported engaging in regular exercise; however, the Indigenous group reported more barriers to PA. These factors included cost, time management and environmental constraints. The physical facilitators identified by our Indigenous sample included social support, intrinsic motivation and role modelling. Conclusion:Findings describe individual and external factors that promote or constraint PA as reported by Indigenous Australian adults. Results indicate that Indigenous people face specific barriers to PA when compared to a non-Indigenous sample. Implications for public health:This study is the first to compare the perspective of Indigenous Australians to a matched group of non-Indigenous Australians and provides useful knowledge to develop public health programs based on culturally sensitive data.

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Functioning (EF) are two pillars of human social cognition often studied in conjunction, but rarely considered together beyond childhood. Adults routinely undertake ToM activities of higher levels, such as those that require reasoning recursively through other individuals’ presumed reasoning about others (e.g., she believes that he believes that this is difficult to grasp). Yet, the possibility of links between EF and these special kinds of representations, termed second-order ToM, has been much less studied empirically (Corballis, 2014; Dennett, 1987; Dunbar, 2011; Kinderman et al., 1998; Miller et al., 1970; Perner & Wimmer, 1985). The objective of the current pre-registered report is to provide a meta-analytic review of the extant literature linking second-order ToM and EF in school-age children and adults. Studies reporting on the relation between EF and second-order ToM were located through systematic search of published and non-published research databases. A final set of 32 studies were meta-analyzed, providing 83 effect sizes and a pooled N of over 2584 child and adult participants. The developmental literature provided evidence of moderate second-order ToM-EF linkage in children (r= .25), which resisted statistical adjustment for age, and did not differ on the basis of children’s cultural background. In contrast, the adult findings were weaker (r= .09), and only accounted for a very small percentage of the meta-analyzed literature. Important methodological gaps were identified, highlighting the need for more research on the links between second-order ToM and EF.

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Cognitive developmental changes in belief understanding, particularly how and when children come to first appreciate false beliefs, occupy the bulk of research on human mindreading. Given apparently conflicting evidence from direct and indirect false‐belief tasks, there is much debate over whether there is a major conceptual breakthrough in belief reasoning sometime around children's 4th birthday and whether infants should be credited with abstract belief understanding. Focusing on who has belief concepts and when they have them, however, is only part of the developmental story. The contradiction could also reflect how the mature belief reasoning that children grow into involves two kinds of mindreading solutions: a flexible cognitive system for making sophisticated but effortful ascriptions about others' beliefs and an efficient cognitive system for tracking others' beliefs in an efficient but limited manner.

<p><b>Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Functioning (EF) are two pillars of human social cognition often studied in conjunction, but rarely considered together beyond childhood. Adults routinely undertake ToM activities of higher levels, such as those that require reasoning recursively through other individuals’ presumed reasoning about others (e.g., she believes that he believes that this is difficult to grasp). The possibility of links between EF and these special kinds of representations, termed second-order ToM, is explored for the first time in the work presented herein, and documented in two ways. First, the research plan and hypotheses at the basis of this dissertation were informed in large part by a meta-analytic review of the extant literature linking EF to second-order ToM (Study 1). We employed multilevel modelling techniques to estimate the pooled effect size of over 80 correlation coefficients, extracted from both school-age children and adult samples (N = 2584). While the developmental literature provided evidence of second-order ToM-EF linkage in children, the adult findings were weaker and more difficult to interpret for a variety of methodological reasons. Hence, in Studies 2 and 3, we introduced a new age-adapted methodological paradigm, and conducted an extensive mapping of the adult capacity for second-order ToM reasoning in relation to EF. Across the two studies, we found that individual differences in both working memory and cognitive flexibility correlated with second-order ToM performance, irrespective of variance accounted for by factors </b></p><p>such as verbal ability (Study 2) and non-verbal ability (Study 3). In Study 3 we explored the relation between second-order ToM and EF with greater specificity. We replicated the findings of Study 2 and found that the manipulation component of working memory (but not the storage component) and the task-switching component of cognitive flexibility (but not the set-shifting component) were central to the relation. The broader theoretical implications of our findings were then discussed, along with suggestions for potential ways forward in the study of the relation between second-order ToM and EF in adulthood.</p>