Associations among false belief understanding,counterfactual reasoning,and executive function

The primary purposes of the present study were to clarify previous work on the association between counterfactual thinking and false belief performance to determine (1) whether these two variables are related and (2) if so, whether executive function skills mediate the relationship. A total of 92 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds completed false belief, counterfactual, working memory, representational flexibility, and language measures. Counterfactual reasoning accounted for limited unique variance in false belief. Both working memory and representational flexibility partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual and false belief. Children, like adults, also generated various types of counterfactual statements to differing degrees. Results demonstrated the importance of language and executive function for both counterfactual and false belief. Implications are discussed.     

Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge,Ignorance, and False Belief

The author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3–7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.     

Counterfactual thinking and false belief: the role of executive function

The purpose of the current study was to examine further the relationship between counterfactual thinking and false belief (FB) as examined by Guajardo and Turley-Ames (Cognitive Development, 19 (2004) 53-80). More specifically, the current research examined the importance of working memory and inhibitory control in understanding the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB. Participants were 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 76). Counterfactual thinking statements generated accounted for significant variance in FB performance beyond age and language. Working memory and inhibitory control each partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB performance. The maturation of executive functioning skills is important in children’s developing understanding of counterfactual reasoning and FB.     

儿童理解误信念的心理机制假设

儿童心理理论是近20年来发展心理学研究热点,对其研究主要是在误信念实验范式之下进行的。儿童理解误信念的心理机制问题是误信念研究的核心问题之一,研究者从不同的角度出发,采用不同的方法,提出了儿童如何理解误信念的几个重要假设,包括：元表征假设、事实掩盖假设、心理理论机制假设、计算资源假设。此文综述了这些假设,以期借鉴使用。     

3～6岁儿童信念理解能力的发展研究

研究设计了冲突真实信念任务,用于考察儿童对真实信念的理解;并利用区分信念、冲突真实信念和意外地点的错误信念任务,考察儿童理解信念推理基本规则、真实信念和错误信念的发展顺序。97名3~6岁儿童完成了测试。结果显示,3岁儿童能理解信念推理的基本规则,5岁儿童能理解真实信念,6岁儿童能理解错误信念。结果支持了儿童先理解真实信念,后理解错误信念的发展模式;也说明在理解信念以前儿童已能掌握信念推理的基本规则。     

How language does (and does not) relate to theory of mind: A longitudinal study of syntax,semantics, working memory and false belief

Forty‐four children (mean 3.8 years) were given three false belief, a working memory, and four language tasks (each designed to tap a different aspect of syntax or semantics), and were tested again 6 months later. Once the range of scores in the language and false belief tasks were equated, there was a bidirectional relation between language and theory of mind. There was no evidence for syntax playing a unique role in the contribution of language to theory of mind. No one measure of syntax or semantics was more likely than any other to predict later false belief. Nor was false belief related more to one aspect of later language (syntax vs. semantics) than another. Our data, taken with other findings, are consistent with the idea that both syntax and semantics contribute to false belief understanding. Working memory did not mediate the relation between language and theory of mind, nor did it facilitate later false belief.     

The relationship between theory of mind and episodic memory: evidence for the development of autonoetic consciousness

The study investigated a link between theory of mind and episodic memory involving autonoetic consciousness (). Eighty-nine Japanese 4- to 6-year-olds received two versions of a false belief task, a task of aspectuality or knowledge origins, and four memory tests. After controlling for age, most theory of mind abilities showed no interrelations, and own and other's belief understandings in deceptive appearance tasks were solely related to source memory, but not to free recall, temporal ordering, or working memory. Moreover, even when age and verbal intelligence were controlled, the association between representational change and source memory was highly significant in 6-year-olds but not in 4- and 5-year-olds. Results suggest that during development only a particular kind of theory of mind ability is integrated with episodic memory.     

不同维度的执行功能与早期心理理论的关系

采用意外地点任务、意外内容任务和三种不同类型的执行功能任务来探究执行功能与心理理论之间的关系。共60名被试,3岁和4岁被试各30名,男女各半。区分自己心理状态和他人心理状态能力与执行功能的关系主要体现在混合成分执行功能与这一能力的密切联系上;在错误信念发展的早期,执行功能与错误信念理解能力的关系主要集中在“混合成分的执行功能与对自己错误信念理解能力,工作记忆的执行功能与对他人错误信念理解能力”这两对联系上     

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions: Age differences,individual differences,and the effects of counterfactual‐information salience

The present study investigated developmental trends in the effects of the salience of counterfactual alternatives on judgments of others' counterfactual‐thinking‐based emotions. We also examined possible correlates of individual differences in the understanding of these emotions. Thirty‐four adults and 102 children, 5–8 years of age, were presented scenarios in which characters would be expected to experience regret. In one version of each scenario, the regret‐relevant counterfactual alternative was made more salient than was the case with the other version. Adults consistently judged that a character for whom a counterfactual course of events would have resulted in a better outcome would feel worse than a character for whom an alternative course of events would not have resulted in a more positive outcome. The majority of the children's judgments were not affected by the counterfactual alternatives. However, the judgments of the oldest children (the 8‐year‐olds) were significantly more adult‐like in the high‐salience than in the low‐salience condition. Although the three predictors examined in the present study (verbal ability, working memory capacity, second‐order false belief task performance) together accounted for significant variance in performance on the emotions judgment task, no single predictor alone accounted for significant unique variance in performance. The importance of different social cognitive abilities for understanding people's affective responses is discussed.     

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non‐mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3‐ and 4‐year‐olds) were told different versions of classic false‐belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3‐year‐olds, who fail traditional false‐belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3‐year‐olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false‐belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.     

Theory of mind and executive function: working-memory capacity and inhibitory control as predictors of false-belief task performance

This study of the relationship between theory of mind and executive function examined whether on the false-belief task age differences between 3 and 5 ears of age are related to development of working-memory capacity and inhibitory processes. 72 children completed tasks measuring false belief, working memory, and inhibition. Significant age effects were observed for false-belief and working-memory performance, as well as for the false-alarm and perseveration measures of inhibition. A simultaneous multiple linear regression specified the contribution of age, inhibition, and working memory to the prediction of false-belief performance. This model was significant, explaining a total of 36% of the variance. To examine the independent contributions of the working-memory and inhibition variables, after controlling for age, two hierarchical multiple linear regressions were conducted. These multiple regression analyses indicate that working memory and inhibition make small, overlapping contributions to false-belief performance after accounting for age, but that working memory, as measured in this study, is a somewhat better predictor of false-belief understanding than is inhibition.     

Executive function and children's understanding of false belief: how specific is the relation?

The present study examined developmental relations among understanding false belief, understanding “false” photographs, performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS), and performance on a picture–sentence verification task in 69 3–5-year-old children. Results showed that performance on the DCCS predicted performance on false belief questions even after controlling for children's age and verbal ability. However, neither performance on the picture–sentence verification task, nor performance on the “false” photograph task predicted false belief understanding. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of suggestions that understanding false belief reflects a general understanding of representation, propositional negation, and the ability to use higher order rules.     

Lifespan aging and belief reasoning: Influences of executive function and social cue decoding

Older adults often perform poorly on Theory of Mind (ToM) tests that require understanding of others’ beliefs and intentions. The course and specificity of age changes in belief reasoning across the adult lifespan is unclear, as is the cause of the age effects. Cognitive and neuropsychological models predict that two types of processing might influence age differences in belief reasoning: executive functioning and social cue detection. In the current study we assessed 129 adults aged between 18 and 86 on novel measures of ToM (video clips and verbal vignettes), which manipulated whether true or false belief reasoning was required. On both video and verbal tasks, older adults (aged 65–88) had specific impairments in false belief reasoning, but showed no such problem in performing true belief tasks. Middle-aged adults (aged 40–64) generally performed as well as the younger adults (aged 18–39). Difficulties in updating information in working memory (but not inhibitory problems) partially mediated the age differences in false belief reasoning. Also, the ability to decode biological motion, indexing social cue detection, partially mediated age-related variance in the ability to interpret false beliefs. These results indicate that age differences in decoding social cues and updating information in memory may be important influences on the specific problems encountered when reasoning about false beliefs in old age.     

Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Although it is well established that four-year-olds outperform three-year-olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four-year-olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief-desire reasoning.     

A competitive nonverbal false belief task for children and apes

A nonverbal false belief task was administered to children (mean age 5 years) and two great ape species: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Because apes typically perform poorly in cooperative contexts, our task was competitive. Two versions were run: in both, a human competitor witnessed an experimenter hide a reward in one of two containers. When the competitor then left the room (version A) or turned around (version B), the experimenter switched the locations of the containers. The competitor returned and reached with effort, but unsuccessfully, towards the incorrect container. Children displayed an understanding of the competitor's false belief by correctly choosing the other container to find the reward. Apes did not. However, in version A (but not version B), apes looked more often at the unchosen container in false belief trials than in true belief control trials, possibly indicating some implicit or uncertain understanding that needs to be investigated further.     

"Blaming the victim" under memory load

When presented with negative outcomes, people often engage in counterfactual thinking, imagining various ways that events might have been different. This appears to be a spontaneous behavior, with considerable adaptive value. Nevertheless, counterfactual thinking may also engender systematic biases in various judgment tasks, such as allocating blame for a mishap, or deciding on the appropriate compensation to a victim. Thus, counterfactuals sometimes require thought suppression or discounting, potentially resource-demanding tasks. In this study, participants made mock-jury decisions about control and counterfactual versions of simple stories. The judgments of two groups of participants, differing in their respective levels of working memory capacity, were compared. In addition, all participants held memory loads during various stages of the primary task. Lower-span individuals were especially susceptible to bias associated with the counterfactual manipulation, but only when holding memory loads during judgment. The results suggest that counterfactual thoughts arise automatically, and may later require effortful, capacity-demanding suppression.     

Working memory, text comprehension, and propositional reasoning: a new Semantic Anaphora WM test

The aim of this study was to present a new working memory test following the line of work started by García-Madruga et al. (2007) and to examine its relation to reading comprehension and propositional reasoning measures. In that study we designed a new working memory span test--based on Daneman & Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Test (RST)--in which the processing task called for an inferential decision--to resolve a pronominal anaphora based on Morpho-Syntactic cues and had people recall the result of this inference. In the current study, besides the RST and the Morpho-Syntactic Anaphora test, we presented a new Semantic Anaphora measure. In order to check the validity of this new Working Memory (WM) task, we used the same reasoning task used in the previous study as well as a new reading comprehension test. The results show the tight relationship amongst working memory, reading comprehension and reasoning, and confirm the validity of the new WM measure.     

False belief and language comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children

The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code metarepresentation contribute uniquely to the language-false belief relation. In three studies, attempts were made to correlate Cantonese-speaking children's false belief with their general language comprehension and understanding of certain structures that explicitly express metarepresentational knowledge. Results showed that these structures failed to predict false belief after age, nonverbal intelligence, and general language comprehension were considered. In contrast, general language remained predictive of false belief after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, and language structures. The current findings are more consistent with a general language account than a language structure account.     

幼儿看图叙述中心理状态术语的使用与错误信念理解关系的短期跟踪研究

摘 要：为探明汉语儿童看图叙述中心理状态术语的应用及与错误信念理解能力的关系,并追踪二者相互作用的方向,本研究以101名3-5岁儿童为研究对象,纵向探查了前后相隔3个月的儿童看图叙述中心理状态术语使用情况和错误信念能力的发展状况,并从横向和纵向两个时间点分别探讨了心理状态术语的运用与错误信念理解的关系。结果表明：3-5岁儿童错误信念理解能力快速发展;儿童看图叙述中使用较多的愿望术语和情绪术语,信念术语应用相对较少,且认知词汇类型较少。控制了一般语言能力和年龄之后,仅在第一次测验上,情绪术语、信念术语仍然与同期及后期错误信念理解能力存在显著相关。