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.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of theory-of-mind are associated with variation in children’s everyday social cognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 579-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora E Mukerji ◽  
Sarah Hope Lincoln ◽  
David Dodell-Feder ◽  
Charles A Nelson ◽  
Christine I Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Cognitive Behavior ◽  
School Age ◽  
Temporoparietal Junction ◽  
False Belief Reasoning

ABSTRACT Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to reason about others’ mental states, is central to healthy social development. Neural mechanisms supporting ToM may contribute to individual differences in children’s social cognitive behavior. Employing a false belief functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm, we identified patterns of neural activity and connectivity elicited by ToM reasoning in school-age children (N = 32, ages 9–13). Next, we tested relations between these neural ToM correlates and children’s everyday social cognition. Several key nodes of the neural ToM network showed greater activity when reasoning about false beliefs (ToM condition) vs non-mentalistic false content (control condition), including the bilateral temporoparietal junction (RTPJ and LTPJ), precuneus (PC) and right superior temporal sulcus. In addition, children demonstrated task-modulated changes in connectivity among these regions to support ToM relative to the control condition. ToM-related activity in the PC was negatively associated with variation in multiple aspects of children’s social cognitive behavior. Together, these findings elucidate how nodes of the ToM network act and interact to support false belief reasoning in school-age children and suggest that neural ToM mechanisms are linked to variation in everyday social cognition.

scholarly journals No evidence found for anticipatory looking responses to specific satiety in adult humans.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crosby ◽  
Edward Legg ◽  
Nicola Clayton ◽  
Ljerka Ostojic
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Minimal System ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
Adult Humans ◽  
Response Measures ◽  
Small Sample Sizes ◽  
Anticipatory Looking

Recent research has uncovered a developmental paradox within theory of mind. While spontaneous response measures indicate sensitivity to false beliefs in infants before their first birthday, tasks involving elicited response measures of false belief are only passed consistently from 4 years of age. In adults, it has been suggested that these spontaneous responses may result from a minimal theory of mind system, which allows rapid and automatic attribution of mental states to others.It has been proposed that the limitations of the minimal system in adults may resemble the limitations demonstrated by non-human animals in tasks thought to involve mental state attribution. Here we have adapted the specific satiety paradigm used with Eurasian jays to investigate adult humans’ anticipatory looking responses based on another individual’s specific satiety.Although no clear evidence was found for spontaneous desire attribution in this study, it is difficult to draw conclusions from these results given the small sample sizes available and the current replication failures of studies demonstrating spontaneous responses to false belief.

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

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
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.

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

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.

scholarly journals Theory of mind tested by implicit false belief: A simple and full‐fledged mental state attribution

FEBS Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Egawa ◽  
Keisuke Kawasaki ◽  
Taketsugu Hayashi ◽  
Ryota Akikawa ◽  
Toshiyuki Someya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental State ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Mental State Attribution

Exploring ‘theory of mind’ in people with schizophrenia

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-530 ◽  
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.

Dehumanization and Mentalizing Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.J. Kasperbauer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phenomenal States

This chapter applies the psychological account from chapter 3 on how we rank human beings above other animals, to the particular case of using mental states to assign animals moral status. Experiments on the psychology of mental state attribution are discussed, focusing on their implications for human moral psychology. The chapter argues that attributions of phenomenal states, like emotions, drive our assignments of moral status. It also describes how this is significantly impacted by the process of dehumanization. Psychological research on anthropocentrism and using animals as food and as companions is discussed in order to illuminate the relationship between dehumanization and mental state attribution.

Mind, child’s theory of

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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