Longitudinal evidence for 4-year-olds’ but not 2- and 3-year-olds’ false belief-related action anticipation

Self Cite

Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the later-developing verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others’ minds—mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain

Wiesmann

Friederici

Singer

et al. 2020

Self Cite

“…Although it remains unclear which factors impact replicability with human participants, researchers have proposed that several procedural differences between studies may be responsible (24). Of special note, one interesting result from previous replication studies is that, while some researchers found a chance-level effect for FB2 (26), others found a below-chance effect for FB2 (as well as an above-chance effect for FB1) in the DLS results (23,25). One interpretation for this puzzling pattern is that human participants showed a location bias: they may have simply looked at the last location that the object inhabited (before it was finally removed).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In FB2, the actor watched the object be hidden in one location and then was absent when the object was moved to the second and ultimately removed. Although Senju et al used the FB1 design of Southgate et al, we decided to instead use the FB2 design because recent attempts to replicate Southgate et al with human populations found greater difficulty replicating the FB2 design (23)(24)(25)(26). We, thus, thought that the FB2 design would constitute a more stringent test of action anticipation in great apes.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

Kano

Krupenye

Tomonaga

et al. 2019

170

106

Human social life depends on theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. A signature of theory of mind, false belief understanding, requires representing others’ views of the world, even when they conflict with one’s own. After decades of research, it remains controversial whether any nonhuman species possess a theory of mind. One challenge to positive evidence of animal theory of mind, the behavior-rule account, holds that animals solve such tasks by responding to others’ behavioral cues rather than their mental states. We distinguish these hypotheses by implementing a version of the “goggles” test, which asks whether, in the absence of any additional behavioral cues, animals can use their own self-experience of a novel barrier being translucent or opaque to determine whether another agent can see through the same barrier. We incorporated this paradigm into an established anticipatory-looking false-belief test for great apes. In a between-subjects design, apes experienced a novel barrier as either translucent or opaque, although both looked identical from afar. While being eye tracked, all apes then watched a video in which an actor saw an object hidden under 1 of 2 identical boxes. The actor then scuttled behind the novel barrier, at which point the object was relocated and then removed. Only apes who experienced the barrier as opaque visually anticipated that the actor would mistakenly search for the object in its previous location. Great apes, therefore, appeared to attribute differential visual access based specifically on their own past perceptual experience to anticipate an agent’s actions in a false-belief test.

“…… [T]hese findings suggest that executive function figures in coordinating perspectives more generally, not only epistemic ones, and in particular in coordinating others’ and one’s own conflicting perspectives” ( 71 , abstract). It is perhaps relevant that one recent study found that executive function does not correlate with performance in infant false-belief tasks (perhaps because they do not involve any coordinations), but it does correlate with classic false-belief tasks ( 72 ).…”

Section: Evidence For the Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies have followed young children longitudinally from infancy to early childhood and correlated various measures of their early social cognition and interaction with their later false-belief understanding. Given that understanding false beliefs requires as a prerequisite the imagining and tracking of basic mental states, it is not surprising that some studies have found correlations between infants’ ability to track the perceptions and intentions of others, including in infant false-belief tasks, and their ability later, as young children, to understand false beliefs ( 75 ), although, as noted above, others have found no such correlation ( 72 ). However, most important to the current hypothesis, several longitudinal studies have found strong correlations between infants’ skills in joint attention and their later skills in classic false-belief tasks (e.g., 75 – 77 ).…”

Section: Evidence For the Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account

Tomasello

2018

188

131

SignificanceIn coming to understand minds, the greatest challenge for young children is understanding when others have a false belief. Why is that person searching for the toy over there when it is really over here? There is currently much controversy about when children come to this understanding because experiments of different types yield different results. This paper attempts to resolve the controversy by integrating theory and data in a different way. Specifically, the paper argues that young children do not just come to imagine what is in other minds on their own; rather, they come to this understanding through certain types of social and communicative interactions with others that require them to compare their respective perspectives.