Declarative joint attention as a foundation of theory of mind.

Abstract

Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief understanding). Thereby, declarative, but not imperative, point production predicted false-belief understanding at 50 months. Predictive relations, which remained significant beyond the influence of child gender and language abilities, and were unrelated to child temperament and emotion recognition, were not mediated by mirror self-recognition or Level 1 visual perspective taking, which were both related to joint attention. These findings conform to theoretical predictions and provide empirical support for conceptual continuity in the social domain.

Exploring Infant Gesture and Joint Attention as Related Constructs and as Predictors of Later Language

“…Thus, while we found evidence for an overlap between gesture and joint attention skills, we cannot speak directly to our proposal that this is due to the shared foundational skill of understanding others' actions in terms of the psychological relations between people and objects or events. Previous research has shown a strong relation between both gesture skill (Camaioni et al, 2004;Heimann et al, 2006) and joint attention (Carpenter et al, 1998;Sodian & Kristen-Antonow, 2015) and measures of intention understanding. The research presented here expands on these by exposing the congruence between these two sets of skills.…”

Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood

“…The inclusion of a variety of different ToM tasks and other social cognitive and social perceptual measures in future studies will allow for a more precise understanding of the common and distinct correlates of different tasks, including relations with abilities such as basic biological motion perception (Miller & Saygin, 2013;Rice et al, 2016) and joint attention (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2015;Shaw et al, 2017;Sodian & Kristen-Antonow, 2015). As advocated by Schaafsma and colleagues (2015), a more detailed taxonomy of the individual basic level components of ToM assessments (e.g., perspective taking, emotion understanding, gaze following) will allow greater understanding of ToM.…”

Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood

“…That said, if the relation between tasks is small enough to only be detected in very large samples, the coherence of ToM measures may have limited practicality. Future research should also follow children longitudinally, given evidence that early social abilities are predictive of later ToM (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2015;Sodian & Kristen-Antonow, 2015). Contrasting the state of extant theory of mind literature to the executive function literature may be instructive.…”