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

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.

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The Effects Of Adult Ageing And Culture On Theory Of Mind

10.31219/osf.io/g9fxr ◽

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.

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Mothers’ and Teachers’ Mental-State Discourse With Preschoolers During Storybook Reading

Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology ◽

10.1891/1945-8959.13.1.103 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 103-119 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Margalit Ziv ◽

Marie-Lyne Smadja ◽

Dorit Aram

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Mental State ◽

Mental States ◽

False Belief ◽

Pivotal Role ◽

Storybook Reading ◽

Mental Causality ◽

Points Of View

Mothers and teachers play a pivotal role in promoting preschool children’s theory of mind. This study explored and compared mothers’ and teachers’ mental-state discourse during storybook reading with children, focusing on their use of mental terms and references to three mental-state aspects: false belief, mental causality, and different points of view. Participants were 60 mothers and their children, and 60 teachers and 300 preschoolers. Mothers read the book to one child and teachers read the same book to groups of 5 children. The book involved a central false-belief theme. Main findings revealed that mothers and teachers elaborated on book-related mental states. However, teachers’ discourse included more mental terms and more references to mental causality and different people’s perspectives. The findings suggest that reading books with rich mental-state contents encourages rich discourse on mental-state elements. Parents and teachers should be guided in how to use their unique knowledge and relationships with children to enrich their mediation of books’ mental-state aspects and discuss them with children.

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Influence of exposure to children’s movies on television on theory-of- mind acquisition in preschoolers

International journal of health & medical sciences ◽

10.31295/ijhms.v4n1.650 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Devi Rusli ◽

Dian Novita Ariani ◽

Nurmina Nurmina ◽

Rinaldi Rinaldi

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Mental State ◽

Mental States ◽

False Belief

Recently cases of harness which is conducted by children indicated that decrease capability of children understanding against other's mental states Children’s ability to grasp other’s mental states (theory of mind) is important in the context of socialization. Previous research has not investigated the duration in measuring the exposure of narrative media (children's movies on television), which is one of the impacts on the acquisition of ToM. The movie on television represents the relations between children and their mental state. This study aims to investigate the influence of exposure to children’s movies on television towards children's ToM acquisition among preschoolers. ToM was assessed using a ToM scale by Wellman and Liu, and exposure to children’s movies on television was measured with a questionnaire. The study has been conducted to 85 preschoolers ages 3–5 years old/36-71 months ((M = 4.88 SD = 0,683), with the involvement of their parents to fill the questionnaires. The result of this study shows that exposure to children's movies on television does not significantly influence children’s ToM. The strong relations between the two is considered false belief (FB) since the result of the study shows that.

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False belief understanding: Children catch it from classmates of different ages

International Journal of Behavioral Development ◽

10.1177/0165025409104525 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 33 (4) ◽

pp. 331-336 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Yifang Wang ◽

Yanjie Su

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Young Children ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

False Belief ◽

Location Task ◽

False Belief Understanding ◽

The Social ◽

Different Ages ◽

Larger Sample ◽

Better Than

Two experiments were conducted to compare the false belief understanding of children who have no siblings, but have classmates of different ages in kindergarten. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds completed two unexpected location tasks. We found that 4-year-olds with classmates of different ages performed significantly better than those with classmates of the same age. This result was replicated in a larger sample in Experiment 2 in which the children were asked to complete an unexpected location task and an unexpected content task. The findings suggested that the presence of minds with varied ages stimulates the social cognitive understanding of young children, particularly for 4-year-olds. The findings of the present study give a particularly clear view of the effect of classmates of different ages on young children's theory of mind development, extending findings in other research on the advantage of having siblings.

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

The Open Psychology Journal ◽

10.2174/1874350101811010095 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 95-104 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

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.

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Exploring ‘theory of mind’ in people with schizophrenia

Psychological Medicine ◽

10.1017/s0033291700035601 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 26 (3) ◽

pp. 521-530 ◽

Cited By ~ 477

Author(s):

Christopher D. Frith ◽

Rhiannon Corcoran

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Mental State ◽

Mental States ◽

False Belief ◽

Positive Symptoms ◽

Memory Impairments ◽

Schizophrenic Patients ◽

Action Sequencing ◽

With Memory ◽

Normal Controls

SynopsisMentalizing ability was studied in 46 symptomatic schizophrenic patients and 44 non-symptomatic controls. Subjects heard six stories and simultaneously were shown simple cartoon pictures depicting the action sequencing occurring in the stories. All the stories involved false belief or deception, so that it was necessary to infer the mental states of the characters in order to understand their behaviour. After each story, subjects were asked one memory/reality question (concerning an event in the story) and one question that depended on the ability to infer the mental state of one of the characters. Patients with paranoid delusions were impaired on the questions concerning mental states. Patients with behavioural signs (i.e. negative features or incoherence) were also impaired on the mental state questions, but this difficulty was associated with memory impairments. Patients with symptoms of passivity (e.g. delusions of control) and patients in remission did not differ from normal controls. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that certain of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia reflect an impairment in the ability to infer the mental states of others.

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Individual differences in false belief understanding are stable from 3 to 6 years of age and predict children’s mental state talk with school friends

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology ◽

10.1016/j.jecp.2010.07.012 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 108 (1) ◽

pp. 96-112 ◽

Cited By ~ 30

Author(s):

Claire Hughes ◽

Rosie Ensor ◽

Alex Marks

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Mental State ◽

False Belief ◽

False Belief Understanding ◽

Mental State Talk

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Do children understand desires before they understand beliefs? A comparison of 3-year-olds’ grasp of incompatible desires, competitive games and false beliefs

10.31234/osf.io/krjup ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Marina Proft ◽

Cornelia Hoss ◽

Katharina Manfredini Paredes ◽

hannes rakoczy

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Propositional Attitudes ◽

False Belief ◽

False Beliefs ◽

False Belief Understanding ◽

Active Choice ◽

The Asymmetry ◽

Competitive Games ◽

Cognitive Attitudes

A long-standing dispute in theory of mind research concerns the development of understanding different kinds of propositional attitudes. The asymmetry view suggests that children understand conative attitudes (e.g., desires) before they understand cognitive attitudes (e.g., beliefs). The symmetry view suggests that notions of cognitive and conative attitudes develop simultaneously. Relevant studies to date have produced inconsistent results, yet with different methods and dependent measures. To test between the two accounts more systematically, we thus combined different forms of desire tasks (incompatible desires and competition) with different forms of measurement (verbal ascription and active choice) in a single design. Additionally, children’s performance in the desire tasks was compared to their false-belief understanding. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were better at ascribing desires than at ascribing beliefs for both desire tasks whereas they had difficulties actively choosing the more desired option in the competition task. The present findings thus favor the asymmetry theory.

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Mind, child’s theory of

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-w048-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alan M. Leslie

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Mind ◽

Empirical Study ◽

Mental State ◽

Neurodevelopmental Disorder ◽

Inductive Reasoning ◽

Experimental Studies ◽

Mental States ◽

Direct Access ◽

Other Minds ◽

Preschool Period

Knowledge of other minds poses a variety of unusual problems due to the peculiarly private nature of mental states. Some current views, impressed by the contrast between the apparently direct access we have to our own mental states and the inaccessibility of others’ mental states, argue that we understand the mental states of others by imagining that they are our own by ‘simulation’. Other current views propose that we infer both our own mental states and the mental states of others by employing a set of conjectures arrived at through general inductive reasoning over experience: a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Experimental studies, by contrast, suggest that we possess an ‘instinct’ for comprehending the informational mental states of other minds. Children develop mental state concepts uniformly and rapidly in the preschool period when general reasoning powers are limited. For example, children can reason effectively about other people’s beliefs before they can reliably calculate that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In the empirical study of the ‘theory of mind’ instinct there have been three major discoveries so far: first, that normally developing 2-year-olds are able to recognize the informational state of pretending; second, that normally developing children can, by the age of 4 years, solve a variety of false belief problems; and lastly, that this instinct is specifically impaired in children with the neurodevelopmental disorder known as ‘autism’.

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