Age and gender dependent development of Theory of Mind in 6- to 8-years old children

Abstract

The ability to attribute different mental states to distinct individuals, or Theory of Mind (ToM), is widely believed to be developed mostly during preschool years. How different factors such as gender, number of siblings, or coarse personality traits affect this development is not entirely agreed upon. Here, we introduce a computerized version of the scaled ToM suite of tasks introduced by Wellman and Liu (2004), which allows us to meaningfully test ToM development on children 6 to 8-years old. We find that kids this age are still not entirely proficient in all ToM tasks, and continue to show a progression of performance with age. By testing this new age range, too, we are able to observe a significant advantage of girls over boys in ToM performance. Other factors such as number of siblings, birth order, and coarse personality traits show no significant relation with the ToM task results. Finally, we introduce a novel way to quantify the scaling property of the suite involving a sequence of set inclusions on one hand and a comparison between specially tailored sets of logistic models on the other. These measures confirm the validity of the scale in the 6- to 8-years old range.

Beyond Sally's Missing Marble

“…Once children have reached a certain threshold of mental state understanding and they spend more time with peers in middle childhood, connections between siblings and ToM may disappear. Indeed, two recently published studies document null relations between siblings and ToM in 6-to 10-year-olds, as measured through first-and second-order false-belief tasks (Calero, Salles, Semelman, & Sigman, 2013;Miller, 2013). The question is far from resolved, however, and may depend upon sample size as well as the specific ToM measures used.…”

Development of constructivist theory of mind from middle childhood to early adulthood and its relation to social cognition and behavior

“…Thus we tested a mediational model in which prosocial reasoning about conflict mediated the relation between understanding the role of active, interpretative mental processes in everyday cognitive situations and avoiding serious behavior problems in high school. Given past ToM research that has shown that girls outperform boys during early adolescence (Bosacki & Astington, 1999; Calero, Salles, Semelman, & Sigman, 2013), and that ToM relates to school achievement across the early and middle childhood years (Lecce, Caputi, & Pagnin, 2014), we also controlled for sex and academic performance (i.e., Grade Point Average) as factors in the model.…”

Non-linearities in Theory-of-Mind Development

“…Deviations from this normal developmental path have been used in describing ToM difficulties of, for instance, children with autism (Baron-Cohen, 2000; Peterson et al, 2012). Relatively little research has been done on the effect of gender on ToM development, but, some studies have found an advantage for girls (Charman et al, 2002; Calero et al, 2013), including the finding that the association between ToM and prosocial behavior is stronger in girls than in boys (Imuta et al, 2016). …”