What is “theory of mind”? Concepts,cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.     

Phonological,visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span

Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual similarity, semantic similarity, and word length. Older children (6/8-year-olds), but not younger children (4/5-year-olds), demonstrated robust and consistent phonological similarity and word length effects, indicating that they were using phonological coding strategies. This confirmed findings initially reported by Conrad (1971), but subsequently questioned by other authors. However, in contrast to some previous research, little evidence was found for a distinct visual coding stage at 4 years, casting doubt on assumptions that this is a developmental stage that consistently precedes phonological coding. There was some evidence for a dual visual and phonological coding stage prior to exclusive use of phonological coding at around 5–6 years. Evidence for semantic similarity effects was limited, suggesting that semantic coding is not a key method by which young children recall lists of pictures.     

The influence of ongoing task absorption on preschoolers’ prospective memory with peripheral cues

ABSTRACT

Prospective memory (PM) represents the ability to perform a planned action after a certain delay. Substantial increases of PM have been shown across the ages of preschool children. However, previous studies have mostly focused on PM tasks, in which the PM cue was presented centrally (i.e. inside the centre of attention). The current study examined developmental differences between 3-, 4-, and 5-year old preschoolers using PM tasks, in which the PM cue was presented peripherally and investigated the influence of ongoing task absorption on children’s performance on such tasks. Results showed that PM performance increased over preschool age and that it was affected by ongoing task absorption, with significantly better PM performance on a low- versus a high-absorbing ongoing task. Importantly, age differences were only present in the low- but not in the high-absorbing condition, showing that preschoolers’ PM improves when less cognitive resources are absorbed by the ongoing task.     

Better early or late? Examining the influence of age of exposure and language proficiency on executive function in early and late bilinguals

Previous research has shown that early and late bilinguals differ in their language learning experiences and linguistic outcomes. However, evidence of differences between these bilinguals on measures of executive function (EF) has been mixed. As a result, the current study sought to (1) determine whether early and late bilinguals vary from one another and (2) exhibit cognitive advantages in EF relative to monolinguals. One hundred and five participants (42 monolinguals, 40 early bilinguals and 23 late bilinguals) completed the study. Participants' EF skills were assessed using the Auditorily Cued Number Numeral Task. Overall, the results did not reveal clear advantages for the early bilinguals compared to the two other groups. In fact, early bilinguals and monolinguals were equivalent in their performance on the EF task, whereas the late bilinguals were less accurate, relative to the other two groups. The differences in the performance of early and late bilinguals are discussed in terms of the competition model of second-language learning proposed in previous research. Taken together, these findings indicate that individual differences in EF influence the observed differences found in EF across language groups.     

Background context affects word-object mapping

Children encounter new words across variable and noisy contexts. This variability may affect word learning, but the literature includes discrepant findings. The current experiment investigated one source of these discrepant findings: whether contexts with familiar, nameable objects are associated with less robust label learning. Two year olds were exposed to word-object pairings on variable contexts that either included nameable objects or did not. Target selection was more robust when exposure occurred without other nameable objects. The difference was present immediately, but not after a delay. This study provides the evidence that context effects are context-bound.     

Addressing social determinants of health: Supporting ex-offenders’ employment through use of the Systems Theory Framework

There remains a need for counselors well-prepared to work with ex-offenders. As counselors aim to meet ethical obligations toward advocacy, they often seek to address social determinants of health (SDOH) challenges. Those working with ex-offenders should be aware of unique employment challenges ex-offenders may face and possess a baseline knowledge of the justice system for pertinent collaboration. This paper provides an explanation of how the Systems Theory Framework may be used to address ex-offenders’ employment-related needs through addressing SDOH challenges and collaborating with the justice system. Implications for employment counselors, counselor educators, and supervisors and steps for future research conclude.     

Pre-K attendance and social development: The moderating role of kindergarten classroom experiences

Many studies have established that there are important life-long benefits of attending pre-K. At the same time, recent research suggests that pre-K attenders may enter and exit kindergarten exhibiting less optimal social and learning behaviours than their non-attending peers, and little attention has been paid to what factors may contribute to these patterns of development after children enter kindergarten. The current study will address these gaps in knowledge using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2011 to examine the social and learning behaviours of pre-K attenders and nonattenders at kindergarten entry and exit. Moreover, we will determine the extent to which children's social and behavioural skills change at differential rates across the kindergarten year as a function of pre-K attendance and their kindergarten classroom experiences, with a focus on the academic rigour, activity settings and teacher-student relationships.     

The Development of Cognitive Reflection in China

Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive response so as to engage in the reflection necessary to derive a correct response. Here, we examine the emergence of cognitive reflection in a culture that values nonanalytic thinking styles, Chinese culture. We administered a child-friendly version of the cognitive reflection test, the CRT-D, to 130 adults and 111 school-age children in China and compared performance on the CRT-D to several measures of rational thinking (belief bias syllogisms, base rate sensitivity, denominator neglect, and other-side thinking) and normative thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition). The CRT-D was a significant predictor of rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions in both children and adults, as previously found in American samples. Adults’ performance on the CRT-D correlated with their performance on the original CRT, and children's performance on the CRT-D predicted rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions even after adjusting for age. These results demonstrate that cognitive reflection, rational thinking, and normative thinking dispositions converge even in a culture that emphasizes holistic, nonanalytic reasoning.     

A method for measuring dynamic respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in infants and mothers

The measurement of respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) in infants, children and adults is critical to the study of physiological regulation, and more recently, interpersonal physiological covariation, but it has been impeded by methods that limit its resolution to 30 s or longer. Recent analytical developments have suggested methods for studying dynamic RSA in adults, and we have extended this work to the study of infants and mothers. In the current paper, we describe a new analytical strategy for estimating RSA time series for infants and adults. Our new method provides a means for studying physiological synchrony in infant-mother dyads that offers some important advantages relative to existing methods that use inter-beat-intervals (e.g. Feldman, Magori-Cohen, Galili, Singer, & Louzoun, 2011). In the middle sections of this paper, we offer a brief tutorial on calculating RSA continuously with a sliding window and review the empirical evidence for determining the optimal window size. In order to confirm the reliability of our results, we briefly discuss testing synchrony by randomly shuffling the dyads to control for spurious correlations, and also by using a bootstrapping technique for calculating confidence intervals in the cross-correlation function. One important implication that emerges from applying this method is that it is possible to measure both positive and negative physiological synchrony and that these categorical measures are differentially predictive of future outcomes.