scholarly journals The development of false-belief understanding in Japanese children: Delay and difference?

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 290-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Naito ◽  
Kayo Koyama
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Action ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Japanese Children ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Situational Cues ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Full Development ◽  
Transfer Tasks

Three experiments investigated the development of Japanese children’s false-belief understanding. In Experiment 1, children’s mastery of two standard false-belief tasks was considerably later and slower than typically reported, with the full development between 6 and 7 years. Experiments 2 and 3 tested Japanese 6-to 8-year-olds on interpersonal transfer tasks where a relocated item was a person who changed locations with and without their own intention. Children’s judgments on the main character’s belief about this person’s whereabouts were not influenced by the protagonists’ different mental states included in the tasks; children’s justifications referred not to the people’s belief or desire but primarily to their behaviors and social rules. Results suggest that Japanese children show not only a delay in false-belief understanding but a cultural difference in reasoning about human action as attributing it to behavioral and situational cues, rather than to individuals’ mental states.

scholarly journals The Effects Of Adult Ageing And Culture On Theory Of Mind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
louise phillips ◽  
Louisa Lawrie ◽  
Alexandre Schaefer ◽  
Min Hooi Yong
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
Generational Changes ◽  
False Belief Reasoning

Older adults tend to have poorer mental state understanding (Theory of Mind, ToM) than their younger counterparts, including in both Western and Asian cultures. The current study aimed to directly investigate whether there are any cultural differences in the pattern of age effects on ToM tasks. Given evidence of cultural differences in the development of ToM across childhood, we predicted that older Asian adults would find the mental state tasks particularly resource-demanding. We used two ToM tests which made differing demands on updating multiple mental states (the false belief task) and applying social rules to mental state processing (the faux pas task). We also looked at the role of education, socioeconomic status, individualism versus collectivism and working memory (WM). A total of 298 participants from UK and Malaysia completed faux pas, false belief, and WM tasks. Results showed that interacting effects of age and culture were evident in faux pas detection, some aspects of false belief reasoning, and WM tasks, with older Malaysian participants performing poorly compared to the other groups. We also found that WM fully mediated age differences in ToM in the Malaysian sample. High levels of individualism were associated with poorer faux pas detection, but education and socioeconomic status did not explain additional variance in the ToM tasks. This pattern of results may reflect generational changes in the familiarity and cognitive load of explicit mental state attribution, along with cultural differences in the pace and nature of cognitive ageing.

False-Belief Understanding, 4E Cognition, and Predictive Processing

2018 ◽  
pp. 492-512
Author(s):  
Leon De Bruin
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
The Past ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
4E Cognition

Mindreading accounts of social cognition have been increasingly challenged over the past couple of decades. Proponents of 4E cognition have argued that social cognition is not (primarily) about reading another agent’s mental states in order to predict or explain his or her behavior. A large part of their criticism has focused on the empirical findings on false-belief understanding, questioning both the philosophical interpretation of these findings and the experimental designs that give rise to them. In this chapter I will (1) discuss the empirical findings on false-belief understanding in light of the criticism leveled by proponents of 4E cognition, and (2) propose an alternative interpretation of these findings, one that is inspired by the predictive processing paradigm, and investigate to what extent this interpretation is compatible with the main insights of 4E cognition.

Learning words from speakers with false beliefs

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA PAPAFRAGOU ◽  
SARAH FAIRCHILD ◽  
MATTHEW L. COHEN ◽  
CARLYN FRIEDBERG
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Epistemic State ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Learning Contexts ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Reading Abilities

AbstractDuring communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we study young children's ability to successfully acquire a word from a speaker with a false belief; we also assess the same children's success on a traditional false belief attribution task. We show that the ability to consult the epistemic state of a speaker during word learning develops between the ages of three and five. We also show that false belief understanding in word-learning contexts proceeds similarly to standard belief-attribution contexts when the tasks are equated. Our data offer evidence for the development of mind-reading abilities during language acquisition.

Synchrony in the onset of mental state understanding across cultures? A study among children in Samoa

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Mayer ◽  
Birgit E. Träuble
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Large Sample ◽  
Location Task ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Continuous Survey ◽  
Suitable Object

The development of false belief understanding in Samoa was investigated in two studies testing more than 300 children. Children’s understanding was assessed with a change of location task. The results of study 1 suggest that Samoan children improve gradually and slowly, with no succeeding majority before 8 years of age. One third of the 10–13-year-olds still failed. Study 2 used a different translation among 55 children from 4–8 years of age and supports the former results. These findings speak for the cultural variability of theory of mind development and provide the first cross-cultural continuous survey on false belief understanding of children older than 5 years of age with a large sample in a place where mental states are no suitable object for conjecture.

scholarly journals On the Relationship between Theory of Mind and Syntax in Clinical and Non-Clinical Populations: State of the Art and Implications for Research

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Fontana ◽  
Mauro Adenzato ◽  
Jacopo S. Penso ◽  
Ivan Enrici ◽  
Rita B. Ardito
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Neuropsychological Disorders ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
The Relationship

Background:Over the years, different explanations have been given on the relationship between syntax and Theory of Mind,i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others and predict, describe, and explain behavior based on such mental states. In the present study, we focus on the relationship between false-belief understanding as a crucial aspect of Theory of Mind, and on the ability to master the syntax of complementation,i.e., the ability to produce and comprehend sentences in a recursive way.Objective:Our purpose is to test two main hypotheses on the relationship between false-belief understanding and the ability to master the syntax of complementation: the dependence and the independence of false-belief understanding on syntactic complementation.Method:We analyze studies on children with typical development, deaf children with deaf signing or hearing parents, children with specific language impairment, children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, longitudinal and training studies, and studies on adults with neuropsychological disorders.Conclusion:Strengths and weaknesses of the two hypotheses are discussed and limitations of the current state of knowledge are presented. A lifespan approach taking into account both the emergence and maintenance of false-belief understanding and using both implicit and explicit false-belief tasks is proposed to face the issue discussed.

Pragmatic Language Performance of Children Adopted Internationally

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-514
Author(s):  
Deborah A. Hwa-Froelich ◽  
Hisako Matsuo
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Pragmatic Language ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Emotion Identification ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Quasi Experimental ◽  
Pragmatic Communication ◽  
Eastern European Countries

Purpose Pragmatic language is important for social communication across all settings. Children adopted internationally (CAI) may be at risk of poorer pragmatic language because of adverse early care, delayed adopted language development, and less ability to inhibit. The purpose of this study was to compare pragmatic language performance of CAI from Asian and Eastern European countries with a nonadopted group of children who were of the same age and from similar socioeconomic backgrounds as well as explore the relationship among emotion identification, false belief understanding, and inhibition variables with pragmatic language performance. Method Using a quasi-experimental design, 35 four-year-old CAI (20 Asian, 15 Eastern European) and 33 children who were not adopted were included in this study. The children's pragmatic language, general language, and social communication (emotion identification of facial expressions, false belief understanding, inhibition) were measured. Comparisons by region of origin and adoption experience were completed. We conducted split-half correlation analyses and entered significant correlation variables into simple and backward regression models. Results Pragmatic language performance differed by adoption experience. The adopted and nonadopted groups demonstrated different correlation patterns. Language performance explained most of the pragmatic language variance. Discussion Because CAI perform less well than their nonadopted peers on pragmatic communication measures and different variables are related to their pragmatic performance, speech-language pathologists may need to adapt assessment and intervention practices for this population.

Predictions of Actions and Their Justifications in False-Belief Tasks: The Role of Executive Function

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 500-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Putko ◽  
Agata Złotogórska
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Executive Function ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Current Location ◽  
False Belief Tasks ◽  
Development Of Language

Abstract The main objective of this study was to examine whether children’s ability to justify their action predictions in terms of mental states is related, in a similar way as the ability to predict actions, to such aspects of executive function (EF) as executive control and working memory. An additional objective was to check whether the frequency of different types of justifications made by children in false-belief tasks is associated with aforementioned aspects of EF, as well as language. The study included 59 children aged 3-4 years. The ability to predict actions and to justify these predictions was measured with false-belief tasks. Luria’s hand-game was used to assess executive control, and the Counting and Labelling dual-task was used to assess working memory capacity. Language development was controlled using an embedded syntax test. It was found that executive control was a significant predictor of the children’s ability to justify their action predictions in terms of mental states, even when age and language were taken into account. Results also indicated a relationship between the type of justification in the false-belief task and language development. With the development of language children gradually cease to justify their action predictions in terms of current location, and they tend to construct irrelevant justifications before they begin to refer to beliefs. Data suggest that executive control, in contrast to language, is a factor which affects the development of the children’s ability to justify their action predictions only in its later phase, during a shift from irrelevant to correct justifications.

Minimal Event-Causal Libertarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Free Action ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Action

This chapter explains the differences between agency reductionism and nonreductionism, explains the varieties of libertarianism, and sets out the main contours of minimal event-causal libertarianism, highlighting just how minimal this theory is. Crucial to understanding how minimal event-causal libertarianism differs from other event-causal libertarian theories is understanding the location and role of indeterminism in human action, the kinds of mental states essential to causing free action, the nature of nondeterministic causation, and how the theory is constructed from compatibilist accounts. The chapter argues that libertarians must face up to both the problem of luck and the problem of enhanced control when determining the best theoretical location of indeterminism.

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