Does Eye Gaze Indicate Implicit Knowledge of False Belief? Charting Transitions in Knowledge

Ruffman, Ted; Garnham, Wendy; Import, Arlina; Connolly, Daniel

doi:10.1006/jecp.2001.2633

Cited by 170 publications

(155 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Young infants, for example, track the beliefs of others (Kovács et al 2010;Onishi and Baillargeon 2005) without necessarily being able to make correct explicit belief inferences (Ruffman et al 2001). During adulthood, implicit and explicit mentalizing processes seem to coexist mediating distinct features of social cognition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Rosenblau

Kliemann

Heekeren

et al. 2014

J Autism Dev Disord

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been proposed to show greater impairments in implicit than explicit mentalizing. To test this proposition, we developed two comparable naturalistic tasks for a performance-based approximation of implicit and explicit mentalizing in 28 individuals with ASD and 23 matched typically developed (TD) participants. Although both tasks were sensitive to the social impairments of individuals with ASD, implicit mentalizing was not more dysfunctional than explicit mentalizing. In TD participants, performance on the tasks did not correlate with each other, whereas in individuals with ASD they were highly correlated. These findings suggest that implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are separable in typical development. In contrast, in individuals with ASD implicit and explicit mentalizing processes are similarly impaired and closely linked suggesting a lack of developmental specification of these processes in ASD.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Rosenblau

Kliemann

Heekeren

et al. 2014

J Autism Dev Disord

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“…A stronger case for gradualism might be made on the basis of within-task discrepancies (Clements & Perner 1994;Garnham & Perner 2001Garnham & Ruffman 2001Ruffman et al 2001b). For instance, we found that children who passed an eyegaze measure of a false belief task (looking correctly when anticipating a story character's return), but gave an incorrect verbal prediction, could be split into two groups (Ruffman et al 2001a). The younger such children showed complete confidence in their verbal answer, betting all counters (used to indicate the character's predicted location of return) on the location consistent with their verbal answer.…”

Section: Ted Ruffmanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

2004

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Abstract:Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991;. It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction.Keywords: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein et al. 1998;Symons & Clark 2000), mothers' education (Cutting & Dunn 1999), and socioeconomic circumstances (Holmes et al. 1996).Furthermore, a number of studies have found correlations between language and social understanding (e.g., Cutting & Dunn 1999; de Villers 2000; Happé 1995;Jenkins & Astington 1996). In longitudinal studies, forms of family talk about mental states have been found to be related to later success on false belief tests (e.g., Brown et al. 1996;Dunn et al. 1991a;Ruffman et al. 2002). In addition, mothers who think of their children in mentalistic terms ("mindmindedness"), and therefore, presumably talk to their children about the psychological world, have children who are more advanced in understanding beliefs than are other children (Meins & Fernyhough 1999;Meins et al. 1998). Similar correlations between family interaction and the development of children's understanding of emotions have also been reported (e.g., Dunn et al. 1991b;Hooven et al. 1995;Kuebli et al. 1995;Steele et al. 1999). In a longitudinal study, Astington and Jenkins (1999) found that earlier language abilities predict later false belief performance but earlier false belief competence does not predict later language abilities, supporting the conclusion that language is important in social cognitive development.Another source of evidence that social interaction is important for the development of a mentalistic understanding comes from research with deaf children. A number o...

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“…eye-tracking FB tasks without a test question; e.g. Clements & Perner, 1994;Ruffman et al, 2001;Rubio-Fernández, 2015b) would in principle be a good test case for the hypothesis that bilingualism may help Theory of Mind development.…”

Section: Could Bilingualism Help Theory Of Mind Development?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Having said that, it seems safe to assume that implicit FB tasks are less dependent on EF than standard FB tasks because early eye-tracking studies have shown that 3 year olds are able to correctly anticipate the behaviour of a mistaken character in a FB narrative, while giving the incorrect response to the test question (Clements & Perner, 1994;Ruffman et al, 2001;cf. Rubio-Fernández, 2015b).…”

Section: Could Bilingualism Help Theory Of Mind Development?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a recent study using continuous eye-tracking during the processing of an indirect FB question ('Let's see where Martin comes out for his ball'), Rubio-Fernández (2015b) observed that 3-year-old children were able to correctly anticipate the protagonist's return (see also Clements & Perner, 1994;Ruffman et al, 2001), but the mention of the target object in the question had a disrupting effect on the 3 year olds, but not on the 5-year-old children in the control group. Future eyetracking studies should monitor children's eye movements during the processing of standard and 'look first' questions in FB and TB narratives that control for the relative salience of the two responses, as this will give us a better understanding of the effect of the 'look first' question in 3 year olds' FB reasoning.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

Rubio-Fernández

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the SallyAnne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals' better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the falsebelief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals' better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals' performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

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Does Eye Gaze Indicate Implicit Knowledge of False Belief? Charting Transitions in Knowledge

Cited by 170 publications

References 33 publications

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

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