Is Language Required to Represent Others’ Mental States? Evidence From Beliefs and Other Representations

An important part of our Theory of Mind—the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states—is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, thereby rendering the belief and either the photo or text false. At the same time, participants performed either a concurrent verbal interference task (rehearsing strings of digits) or a visual interference task (remembering a visual pattern). Results showed that performance on false belief trials did not decline under verbal interference relative to visual interference. We interpret these findings as further support for the view that language does not form an essential part of the process of reasoning online (“in the moment”) about false beliefs.     

Sticking to the Evidence? A Behavioral and Computational Case Study of Micro‐Theory Change in the Domain of Magnetism

Constructing an intuitive theory from data confronts learners with a “chicken‐and‐egg” problem: The laws can only be expressed in terms of the theory's core concepts, but these concepts are only meaningful in terms of the role they play in the theory's laws; how can a learner discover appropriate concepts and laws simultaneously, knowing neither to begin with? We explore how children can solve this chicken‐and‐egg problem in the domain of magnetism, drawing on perspectives from computational modeling and behavioral experiments. We present 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds with two different simplified magnet‐learning tasks. Children appropriately constrain their beliefs to two hypotheses following ambiguous but informative evidence. Following a critical intervention, they learn the correct theory. In the second study, children infer the correct number of categories given no information about the possible causal laws. Children's hypotheses in these tasks are explained as rational inferences within a Bayesian computational framework.     

Interpersonal effects of parents and adolescents on each other’s health behaviours: a dyadic extension of the theory of planned behaviour

Objective: Interpersonal relationships are important predictors of health outcomes and interpersonal influences on behaviours may be key mechanisms underlying such effects. Most health behaviour theories focus on intrapersonal factors and may not adequately account for interpersonal influences. We evaluate a dyadic extension of the Theory of Planned Behaviour by examining whether parent and adolescent characteristics (attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and intentions) are associated with not only their own but also each other’s intentions/behaviours.

Design: Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, we analyse responses from 1717 parent-adolescent dyads from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating study.

Main Outcome Measures: Adolescents/parents completed self-reports of their fruit and vegetable consumption, junk food and sugary drinks consumption, engagement in physical activity, and engagement in screen time sedentary behaviours.

Results: Parent/adolescent characteristics are associated with each other’s health-relevant intentions/behaviours above the effects of individuals’ own characteristics on their own behaviours. Parent/adolescent characteristics covary with each other’s outcomes with similar strength, but parent characteristics more strongly relate to adolescent intentions, whereas adolescent characteristics more strongly relate to parent behaviours.

Conclusions: Parents and adolescents may bidirectionally influence each other’s health intentions/behaviours. This highlights the importance of dyadic models of health behaviour and suggests intervention targets.