False Belief Understanding Research Articles

Children's Selective Teaching and Informing: A Meta-Analysis.

Empirical studies on selective teaching and informing indicate that children may vary what they teach depending on whom they are teaching, taking into account how helpful the information is for a given audience. The current meta-analysis quantifies the effect of selective informing and teaching in 2-7-year-olds by examining the relationship between the helpfulness of the information and the frequency of information transmission. Through a systematic search that yielded 1483 results, 28 studies (104 effect sizes, N=2716) met the inclusion criteria. Using robust variance estimation, we found a medium average effect, Hedges' g=0.578, 95% CI (0.331, 0.825), suggesting that children selectively share information based on its perceived helpfulness to the listener. Moderator analyses revealed that age and communicative context were significant factors. Children were more informative in their communication when asked to teach compared to other nonpedagogical prompts. This finding supports and extends natural pedagogy theory-young children not only interpret pedagogical information differently than information acquired through other means, but they are more selective in their informing when teaching. Additionally, we observed a key developmental progression at age 4. Four- to 7-year-olds, but not 2-3-year-olds, selectively shared information that was most helpful for a given learner. This coincides with the development of false-belief understanding, which undergoes significant development at around age 4. Taken together, the present synthesis suggests that young children actively engage in selective social learning from both sides, that of beneficiaries and benefactors of valuable information.

Social reward predicts false belief understanding in Namibian Hai||om children

AbstractSocial motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle‐class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among N = 59 Hai||om children (AgeRange = 2.3–8.0 years) from rural Namibia, an indigenous community where children's social experience with peers and adults differs much from urban middle‐class milieus typically sampled in developmental science research. Children's preference for adult, but not peer faces predicted their false belief performance. Moreover, their false belief performance increased with age, showing mastery of the current false belief task by the preschool years. These results accommodate universalist claims on the link between social motivation and Theory of Mind while suggesting a particular contribution of the social reward responsivity to adult social partners.

Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs.

False belief understanding is always regarded as a milestone of Theory of Mind (ToM), which is an important aspect of social intelligence. Recently, some researchers have suggested the existence of two ToM systems in individuals: one that explicitly guides false belief understanding and another that implicitly directs sensitivity to false beliefs. However, studies on sensitivity to false beliefs have encountered challenges with replicability, and the factors influencing the manifestation of sensitivity to false beliefs remain to be explored. Based on the anticipatory looking task, we investigated whether verbal perceptual prompts could improve children's performance of sensitivity to false beliefs. Fifty-eight children aged 5 to 6 were randomly assigned tasks with or without verbal perceptual prompts, involving verbal descriptions and explanations of the protagonist's perceptual state. The findings showed that verbal perceptual prompts could slightly reduce children's propensity to look at the actual location of the object in false belief situations and increase the likelihood of exhibiting accurate anticipatory looking patterns across false belief and true belief situations. The results suggest that children's sensitivity to false beliefs may be situation-dependent, yet further investigation is needed to determine which situational factors can most effectively trigger robust sensitivity to false beliefs in children. The results enlighten educational practice, indicating that introducing cues in social environments that convey insights into others' mental states, akin to the use of learning scaffolding, is advantageous for the development of children's social cognitive abilities.

Earlier false belief understanding predicts later lie‐telling behavior in preschool children, but not vice versa

AbstractYoung children's lie‐telling behavior is associated with their theory of mind (ToM) development. However, current evidence is primarily based on cross‐sectional studies, with very little longitudinal evidence on the causal relation between the two constructs. The current study provided much‐needed cross‐lagged longitudinal evidence on the association between ToM and lying in young children. Adopting a short‐term longitudinal design, we tested 104 normally developing children's (64 boys, M = 54.0 months) false belief understanding and lie‐telling behaviors three times at 4‐month intervals. Results showed the cross‐lagged model fit the data well. Lie‐telling behaviors exhibited moderate stability across the three time points, while ToM exhibited moderate stability between the first two time points but not between Time 2 and Time 3. Earlier false belief understanding significantly predicted children's later lie‐telling behavior, controlling for family socioeconomic status, child age, gender, only child status, and Time 1 verbal ability and inhibitory control. On the contrary, earlier lie‐telling did not predict later false beliefs understanding. We concluded that earlier false belief understanding predicts later lie‐telling behavior in preschool children, but not vice versa.

Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans

At the core of what defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks. Here we compare human and LLM performance on a comprehensive battery of measurements that aim to measure different theory of mind abilities, from understanding false beliefs to interpreting indirect requests and recognizing irony and faux pas. We tested two families of LLMs (GPT and LLaMA2) repeatedly against these measures and compared their performance with those from a sample of 1,907 human participants. Across the battery of theory of mind tests, we found that GPT-4 models performed at, or even sometimes above, human levels at identifying indirect requests, false beliefs and misdirection, but struggled with detecting faux pas. Faux pas, however, was the only test where LLaMA2 outperformed humans. Follow-up manipulations of the belief likelihood revealed that the superiority of LLaMA2 was illusory, possibly reflecting a bias towards attributing ignorance. By contrast, the poor performance of GPT originated from a hyperconservative approach towards committing to conclusions rather than from a genuine failure of inference. These findings not only demonstrate that LLMs exhibit behaviour that is consistent with the outputs of mentalistic inference in humans but also highlight the importance of systematic testing to ensure a non-superficial comparison between human and artificial intelligences.

Picture book reading improves children's learning understanding.

Mental state reasoning is an integral part of children's teaching and learning understanding. This study investigated whether a picture book reading approach focusing on mental state discourse and contrasting perspectives in a preschool classroom setting would improve children's teaching and learning understanding and school readiness. In total, 104 children from four classrooms aged between 46 and 64 months (53 girls, M = 54.03 months, SD = 3.68) participated in the study. Half of the classrooms were randomly assigned to an experimental group where teachers read picture books rich in mental state discourse and engaged in intensive discussions with children for eight weeks. Children's false belief understanding and teaching and learning understanding were measured before and after the eight-week period. The result revealed that picture book reading improved children's learning understanding with a medium effect size, controlling for demographic variables, children's verbal ability, inhibition, and initial false belief understanding. The experimental group children further demonstrated more advanced school readiness 18 months after the intervention ended in a follow-up study using a teacher questionnaire.

False belief understanding in deaf children: what are the difficulties?

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrate proficiency in verbal-story elicited-response (VS-ER) false-belief tasks, such as the Sally & Ann task, at a similar age as typically developing hearing children. However, they face challenges in non-verbal spontaneous-response (NV-SR) false-belief tasks, measured via looking times, which hearing infants typically pass by around 2 years of age, or earlier. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether these difficulties remain in a non-verbal-story elicited-response (NVS-ER) false-belief task, in which children are offered the opportunity to provide an elicited response to a non-verbal-story task. A total of thirty 4- to 8-year-old children with CI-s and hearing children completed three different kinds of false-belief tasks. The results showed that children with CI-s performed above chance level on the verbal task (i.e., VS-ER task), but not on the two non-verbal tasks, (i.e., NVS-ER and NV-SR tasks). The control group of typically developing hearing children performed above chance on all three kinds of tasks (one-tailed significance level). Our findings highlight the importance of external narrative support for children with CIs in tasks that involve mental perspective-taking, and specifically predicting actions based on false beliefs.

Investigating belief understanding in children in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting

Finding ways to investigate false belief understanding nonverbally is not just important for preverbal children but also is the only way to assess theory of mind (ToM)-like abilities in nonhuman animals. In this preregistered study, we adapted the design from a previous study on pet dogs to investigate false belief understanding in children and to compare it with belief understanding of those previously tested dogs. A total of 32 preschool children (aged 5–6 years) saw the displacement of a reward and obtained nonverbal cueing of the empty container from an adult communicator holding either a true or false belief. In the false belief condition, when the communicator did not know the location of the reward, children picked the baited container, but not the cued container, more often than the empty one. In the true belief condition, when the communicator witnessed the displacement yet still cued the wrong container, children performed randomly. The children’s behavior pattern was at odds with that of the dogs tested in a previous study, which picked the cued container more often when the human communicator held a false belief. In addition to species comparisons, because our task does not require verbal responses or relational sentence understanding, it can also be used in preverbal children. The children in our study behaved in line with the existing ToM literature, whereas most (but not all) dogs from the previously collected sample, although sensitive to differences between the belief conditions, deviated from the children. This difference suggests that using closely matched paradigms and experimental procedures can reveal decisive differences in belief processing between species. It also demonstrates the need for a more comprehensive exploration and direct comparison of the various aspects of false belief processing and ToM in different species to understand the evolution of social cognition.

Social Competence of Adolescents: The Role of Social Cognition and Behavior Control

Social competence during adolescence plays a crucial role in socialization and psychological well-being. Available data suggest that social cognition (theory of mind, ToM) and self-regulation (behavioral control) abilities make a significant contribution to social competence at a young age, but research on their role in adolescence is still limited. The purpose of the research is to study the role of behavior control and ToM in the social competence of adolescents. The study involved 106 6-8-grade students (girls - 51), aged 12-15 years ( Me = 13, SD = 0.87). The BRIEF questionnaire was used to assess their behavior control; ToM was assessed using tasks for understanding high-order false beliefs. For external assessment of the social competence of the participants, a questionnaire for teachers and a sociometric method were used. The groups of the adolescents, divided by the median criterion, were compared using the overall BRIEF regulation index and the total score for false-belief understanding. The most salient differences in the teachers’ and peers’ assessments of the social competence were found between the contrasting groups of the participants, i.e., with high levels of ToM and behavior control and with low levels of these abilities. At the same time, differences in the teachers’ assessments were observed for both positive and negative assessments but, in sociometric indices, only for negative ones. The teachers considered the adolescents with high levels of behavior control to be more socially competent, regardless of their level of social cognition. For the peers, the level of behavioral control mattered only when the ability to assess the mental states of other people was weak. The results of our study show the importance of the role of social cognition and behavioral control in the implementation of socially competent behavior in adolescents. At the same time, the data obtained indicate the heterogeneity of the contribution of these abilities to the social competence of adolescents assessed by peers and teachers.

Growth From Uncertainty: Understanding the Replication ‘Crisis’ in Infant Cognition

AbstractPsychology is a discipline that has a high number of failed replications, which has been characterized as a “crisis” on the assumption that failed replications are indicative of untrustworthy research. This article uses Chang’s concept of epistemic iteration to show how a research program can advance epistemic goals despite many failed replications. It illustrates this by analyzing an ongoing large-scale replication attempt of Southgate et al.’s work exploring infants’ understanding of false beliefs. It concludes that epistemic iteration offers a way of understanding the value of replications—both failed and successful—that contradicts the narrative centered around distrust.

Larger corpus callosum volume is favorable for theory of mind development in healthy children.

While previous research has demonstrated a link between the corpus callosum (CC) and theory of mind (ToM) abilities in individuals with corpus callosum agenesis (ACC), the relationship between CC volume and ToM remains unclear in healthy children. The present study examined whether CC volume influences children's performance on ToM tasks that assess their understanding of pretense, emotion recognition, and false beliefs. Forty children aged 6-12years underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a cognitive test battery. We found that larger mid-anterior and central subsections of the CC significantly correlated with better ToM abilities. We could also demonstrate age- and sex-related effects, as the CC-ToM relationship differed between younger (6-8years) and older (9-12years) children, and between female and male participants. Importantly, the older children drove the association between the CC mid-anterior and central subsection volumes and ToM abilities. This study is the first to demonstrate that CC size is associated with ToM abilities in healthy children, underlining the idea that the CC plays a vital role in their socio-cognitive development. CC subsection volumes may thus not only serve as a measure of heterogeneity in neurodevelopmental populations known to exhibit socio-cognitive deficits, but also in typically developing children.

What contributes to false belief understanding in childhood? A multidimensional approach

False belief understanding (FBU), a core component of Theory of Mind (ToM), refers to the capacity to understand that other individuals act according to their beliefs even when those beliefs are inaccurate. FBU is an important aspect of socio-cognitive development in early childhood. A range of sociodemographic, temperamental, cognitive, and family factors are known to contribute separately to individual differences in FBU; however, these domains are typically studied in silos. This longitudinal study aimed to examine which of these factors are associated with FBU around the time of school entry. We evaluated 102 typically developing children at 2–5.5 years (predictive factors) and then at 4–7.5 years of age (FBU). The findings indicate that cognitive and family factors during the preschool years are associated with FBU at school entry. Specifically, child vocabulary and parent-child interaction quality were significant independent predictors of FBU.

Socio-cognitive correlates of primary school children's deceptive behavior toward peers in competitive settings

Competing for limited resources with peers is common among children from an early age, illustrating their propensity to use deceptive strategies to win. We focused on how primary school-age (6–8 years old) children's strategic deception toward peers is associated with their socio-cognitive development (theory of mind and executive functions). In a novel computerized competitive hide-and-seek game, we manipulated the peer opponents' familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and actions (following vs. not following children's indications), as well as the stimuli likability (liked vs. disliked cards). Our findings demonstrated that children deceived the familiar opponent less than the unfamiliar one, indicating their determination to preserve positive peer interactions. We showed that theory of mind and executive functions significantly predicted children's willingness to deceive. Notably, second-order false belief understanding and visuospatial working memory positively predicted children's use of truths to deceive, whereas inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility efficacy scores were negatively related to their deceptive performance when using the same strategy. Implications for children's competitive behavior toward peers involving lie-telling are discussed.

Individual differences in second-order false-belief understanding and executive abilities: A meta-analytic review of evidence from school-age children and adults

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Functioning (EF) are two pillars of human social cognition often studied in conjunction, but rarely considered together beyond childhood. Adults routinely undertake ToM activities of higher levels, such as those that require reasoning recursively through other individuals’ presumed reasoning about others (e.g., she believes that he believes that this is difficult to grasp). Yet, the possibility of links between EF and these special kinds of representations, termed second-order ToM, has been much less studied empirically. The objective of the current pre-registered report is to provide a meta-analytic review of the extant literature linking second-order ToM and EF in school-age children and adults. Studies reporting on the relation between EF and second-order ToM were located through systematic search of published and non-published research databases. A final set of 32 studies were meta-analyzed, providing 83 effect sizes and a pooled N of over 2584 child and adult participants. The developmental literature provided evidence of moderate second-order ToM-EF linkage in children (r = .25), which resisted statistical adjustment for age, and did not differ on the basis of children’s cultural background. In contrast, the adult findings were weaker (r = .09), and only accounted for a very small percentage of the meta-analyzed literature. Important methodological gaps were identified, highlighting the need for more research on the links between second-order ToM and EF.

Other-Benefiting Lying Behavior in Preschool Children and Its Relation to Theory of Mind and Empathy.

The present study examined children's lies to help others obtain benefits (other-benefiting lying) and its relation to theory of mind (ToM) and empathy among 3-5-year-old preschool children. One hundred nine children were recruited from preschools in China. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was used to measure children's other-benefiting lying behavior, a ToM scale was used to measure children's ToM abilities, and an empathy scale was used to measure children's empathy abilities. Results showed that children tended to tell more lies to help other to get benefits as age increased, and further analyses showed that this other-benefiting lying was related to children's ToM component of false belief understanding and their cognitive empathy performance. These findings provide evidence that cognitive factors play important roles in children's lying to help others.

A new rationalist account of the development of false-belief understanding

A new rationalist account of the development of false-belief understanding

How robust are egocentric and altercentric interference effects in social cognition? a test with explicit and implicit versions of a continuous false belief task.

It has been long assumed that meta-representational theory of mind (ToM) -our ability to ascribe mental states to ourselves and other people- emerges around age four as indicated in performance on explicit verbal false belief tasks. In contrast, newer studies assessing false belief understanding with implicit, non-verbal measures suggest that some form of ToM may be present even in infancy. But these studies now face replication issues, and it remains unclear whether they can provide robust evidence for implicit ToM. One line of research on implicit ToM, however, may remain promising: Studies that tap so-called altercentric biases. Such biases occur when agents in their judgments about the world are influenced (perform slower, more error-prone) in light of another agent's deviating perspective even if that perspective is completely irrelevant to the task; they thus can be seen as indicators of spontaneous and implicit ToM. Altercentric biases are the mirror images of egocentric biases (agents are influenced by their own perspective when evaluating another agent's deviating perspective). In three studies with adults, we aimed to tap both egocentric and altercentric interference effects within the same task format. We used the so-called Sandbox task, a false belief task with continuous locations. In Study 1, we tested an online adaptation of the Sandbox task, which we also used to explore potential cross-cultural differences in these biases. Studies 2 and 3 combined the Sandbox task with mouse-tracking measures. These studies revealed neither egocentric nor altercentric biases. These null results are discussed with regard to the question whether absence of evidence here may present evidence of absence of such spontaneous perspective-taking biases or merely false negatives.

Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False-Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults' Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses.

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief-based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false-belief tasks. English- and German-speaking young 4- and 5-year-olds as well as English- and German-speaking adult controls heard complement-clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., "He thinks that she's not feeling well") turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question ("Why does he not play with her?"), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement-clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say "He thinks…" When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause ("She's not feeling well"). Furthermore, children with better short-term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement-clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false-belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by a that complementizer only had a small effect on the German adults' responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short-term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false-belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically.

The link between the factuality of verb and the theory of mind ability of Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism.

Weak theory of mind (ToM) ability is a core deficit in children with autism. A growing body of work has found that there is a close relation between complement syntax and ToM in autistic children. However, researchers have not yet investigated whether other linguistic components may explain the difficulties in ToM reasoning in autistic children. To determine whether verb factuality (i.e., mental and action verbs) is related to ToM ability, as measured by a false belief understanding (FBU) task after controlling the effect of complement syntax for Mandarin-speaking autistic children. Participants were verbal autistic children, aged 4-7 years. Their IQ performance (verbal, performance and total IQ) and the comprehension of complement syntax were evaluated. A total of 38 children scoring over 9 points in complement syntax test and 90 points in the verbal IQ test were selected to complete verb factuality and FBU task. The χ2 tests and correlation analyses were carried out on two relations: (1) ToM ability and understanding of verb factuality; and (2) ToM ability and comprehension of complement syntax. A total of 11 autistic children completed the action verb factuality task, while 14 completed the mental verb factuality task and 13 completed both tasks. Participants performed well on the verb factuality task, and their ToM performance appeared to be related to their linguistic ability, regardless of the type of verb (i.e., action or mental verb). However, complement syntax scores did not significantly predict the success of the FBU task for the autistic children. The results of this study link weaker ToM ability with the understanding of verb factuality among autistic children aged 4-7 and provide new evidence for the view that the development of language facilitates improvement of ToM skills. The findings shed new light on how language affects or determines social interactions. What is already known on the subject ToM ability is crucial for social interaction. It has been claimed that mental verb factuality (e.g., think, had thought) may play a role in the development of ToM reasoning in typically developing children, but whether there is a link between the mastery of verb factuality and ToM skills in autistic children is still unclear. What this study adds to existing knowledge Correlational analysis revealed links between verbal ToM measured by unexpected location task and factuality test of mental verbs as well as action verbs. More importantly, this study confirmed the extra role of verb factuality in explaining ToM ability after excluding the influence of the complement syntax. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This study suggests that the factuality of verbs could serve as a tool for autistic children to infer the mental states of others. Thus, training on this linguistic structure could be taken into consideration when improving the social skills of autistic children.

Stress affects the prediction of others' behavior.

Predicting behavior of other people is vital for successful social interactions. We tested whether a stress-induced cortisol increase affects healthy young men's prediction of another individual's behavior. Forty-two participants were randomly assigned to a stress or to a control condition. Afterwards, they participated in a modified false-belief task that not only tests false-belief understanding but also the tendency to predict another person's future behavior based on his former behavior. Subjective ratings and salivary cortisol concentrations revealed a successful stress induction. Stress did not affect participants' attribution of false beliefs but it increased the probability to predict that a protagonist would act according to his former behavior. Recognizing that stress fosters the interpretation of others' behavior following their former behavior and not their current goals extends previous research showing that stress fosters our own habitual behavior.