scholarly journals Science Without a Question

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Stephany

Fabian Stephany on the CoRisk-Index, its development during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nexus between implicit and explicit theory.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0241721
Author(s):  
Diane Poulin-Dubois ◽  
Naomi Azar ◽  
Brandon Elkaim ◽  
Kimberly Burnside

An explicit understanding of false belief develops around the age of four years. However, tasks based on spontaneous responses have revealed an implicit understanding of belief and other theory of mind constructs in infants in their second year of life. The few longitudinal studies that have examined conceptual continuity of theory of mind from infancy to early childhood have reported mixed findings. Here we report two longitudinal experiments to investigate the developmental relation between implicit and explicit theory of mind. No link was observed in the first experiment between false belief and intention understanding measured at 14 and 18 months with the violation of expectation paradigm and tasks measuring explicit and implicit false belief at four or five years of age. In the second experiment, infants aged 18 months were tested with a battery of tasks that measured knowledge inference and false belief. They were then tested with the theory of mind scale at five years of age. The parents completed the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). As in the first experiment, there were no associations between early and later forms of theory of mind. We suggest that these findings do not support the view that there is conceptual continuity in theory of mind development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 208 ◽  
pp. 173-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Vargas ◽  
Katherine S.F. Damme ◽  
Christine I. Hooker ◽  
Tina Gupta ◽  
Henry R. Cowan ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Kloo ◽  
Susanne Kristen-Antonow ◽  
Beate Sodian

In a longitudinal study ( N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children’s implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to second-order false belief understanding at 5 years of age. Also, replicating a number of studies, explicit first- and second-order false belief understanding, in contrast to implicit false belief understanding, were related to executive functioning. This indicates that executive functions play a role in standard explicit false belief tasks, but not in implicit false belief understanding. We argue that spontaneous, implicit false belief understanding does not require conscious control, whereas explicit false belief understanding is based on conscious, reflective processing. In sum, we suggest a developmental enrichment account of theory of mind development, with belief processing becoming increasingly reflective and controlled with advancing age.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 172273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Schuwerk ◽  
Beate Priewasser ◽  
Beate Sodian ◽  
Josef Perner

Influential studies showed that 25-month-olds and neurotypical adults take an agent's false belief into account in their anticipatory looking patterns (Southgate et al. 2007 Psychol. Sci. 18 , 587–592 ( doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x ); Senju et al. 2009 Science 325 , 883–885 ( doi:10.1126/science.1176170 )). These findings constitute central pillars of current accounts distinguishing between implicit and explicit Theory of Mind. In our first experiment, which initially included a replication as well as two manipulations, we failed to replicate the original finding in 2- to 3-year-olds ( N  = 48). Therefore, we ran a second experiment with the sole purpose of seeing whether the effect can be found in an independent, tightly controlled, sufficiently powered and preregistered replication study. This replication attempt failed again in a sample of 25-month-olds ( N  = 78), but was successful in a sample of adults ( N  = 115). In all samples, a surprisingly high number of participants did not correctly anticipate the agent's action during the familiarization phase. This led to massive exclusion rates when adhering to the criteria of the original studies and strongly limits the interpretability of findings from the test phase. We discuss both the reliability of our replication attempts as well as the replicability of non-verbal anticipatory looking paradigms of implicit false belief sensitivity, in general.


2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 254-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Gschwendner ◽  
Wilhelm Hofmann ◽  
Manfred Schmitt

In the present study we applied a validation strategy for implicit measures like the IAT, which complements multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses. As the measurement method (implicit vs. explicit) and underlying representation format (associative vs. propositional) are often confounded, the validation of implicit measures has to go beyond MTMM analysis and requires substantive theoretical models. In the present study (N = 133), we employed such a model ( Hofmann, Gschwendner, Nosek, & Schmitt, 2005 ) and investigated two moderator constructs in the realm of anxiety: specificity similarity and content similarity. In the first session, different general and specific anxiety measures were administered, among them an Implicit Association Test (IAT) general anxiety, an IAT-spider anxiety, and an IAT that assesses speech anxiety. In the second session, participants had to deliver a speech and behavioral indicators of speech anxiety were measured. Results showed that (a) implicit and explicit anxiety measures correlated significantly only on the same specification level and if they measured the same content, and (b) specific anxiety measures best predicted concrete anxious behavior. These results are discussed regarding the validation of implicit measures.


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