Development of Theory of Mind from Ages Four to Eight

The study comprised two experiments that engaged one hundred eighteen children, divided into three age groups (4-, 6-, & 8-year-olds) in competitive games with an adult designed to explore advances in children’s theory of mind (TOM) beyond false-belief mastery. The game paradigms were designed so that children with an understanding of RAI (the understanding that a social partner may be observing one’s behavior to gain insight into one’s intentions and that one can observe the partner’s behavior to gain similar insight – a proposed later development of TOM) would be more effective competitors than children who lacked such awareness. It was hypothesized that the skills required to successfully complete these games are not present in the average preschooler, but show significant development from ages 4 to 8. Success in Experiment 1 required children to inhibit information or provide misinformation. Such abilities are considered in deception studies to be indicative of a recursive awareness of intentionality. Age trends were evident for all dependent variables, including success at the task, strategic behaviors, and interview data. Four-year-olds were non-strategic and rarely successful, six-year-olds showed increased flexibility in their strategic behavior and were more successful, and eight-year-olds were significantly more flexible and subtle in their strategies, more successful at the task, and more likely to verbalize a recursive awareness of intention than the younger age groups. Success in Experiment 2 required children use the behavioral cues of their opponent to guide their choices during the game. Such ability indicates awareness of the informative potential of nonverbal signals to infer the hidden intentions of a partner. Age trends emerged in children’s ability to detect signals that reveal information about their partner’s intentions. Eight-year-olds demonstrated significantly more awareness of the informative value of behavioral cues given by social partners than 4- and 6-year-olds and were significantly more successful at the task. Findings from both experiments suggest that there are aspects of TOM that continue to develop across middle childhood

Gaze, goals and growing up: Effects on imitative grasping

Developmental differences in the use of social-attention cues to imitation were examined among children aged 3- and 6-years old (n = 58) and adults (n = 29). In each of 20 trials, participants watched a model grasp two objects simultaneously and move them together. On every trial, the model directed her gaze towards only one of the objects. Some object pairs were related and had a clear functional goal outcome (e.g., flower, vase), while others were functionally unrelated (e.g., cardboard square, ladybug). Owing to attentional effects of eye gaze, it was expected that all participants would more faithfully imitate the grasp on the gazed-at object than the object not gazed at. Children were expected to imitate less accurately on trials with functionally-related objects than those without, due to goal-hierarchy effects. Results support effects of eye gaze on motor contagion. Children’s grasping accuracy on functionally-related and functionally-unrelated trials was similar but they were more likely to only use one hand on trials where the object pairs were functionally related. Implications for theories of imitation are discussed

The ability of typically developing 2–3 year olds to infer the control mechanism for eye-gaze technology and the impact of causal language instruction

Purpose: Little is known about how children learn to control eye-gaze technology, and clinicians lack information to guide decision-making. This paper examines whether typically developing 2–3 year olds can infer for themselves the causal mechanisms by which eye-gaze technology is controlled, whether a teaching intervention based on causal language improves performance and how their performance compares to the same task accessed via a touchscreen. Methods and materials: Typically developing children’s (n = 9, Mean Age 28.7 months) performance on a cause and effect game presented on eye-gaze and touchscreen devices was compared. The game was presented first with no specific instruction on how to control the devices. This was followed by a subsequent presentation with explicit instruction about how the access methods worked, using a causal language approach. A final presentation examined whether children had retained any learning. Results: Performance in the eye-gaze condition without instruction (42.5% successful trials) was significantly below performance in the corresponding touchscreen condition (75%). However, when causal language instruction was added, performance with both access methods rose to comparable levels (90.7% eye-gaze and 94.6% touchscreen success). Performance gains were not retained post-intervention. Conclusions: Although 2–3 years in the study could make use of eye-gaze technology with support, this study found no evidence that these children could infer the causal mechanisms of control independently or intuitively. The lack of spatial contiguity and the comparative lack of feedback from eye-gaze devices are discussed as possible contributory factors.</p

Best friends: children use mutual gaze to identify friendships in others

This study examined children’s ability to use mutual eye gaze as a cue to friendships in others. In Experiment 1, following a discussion about friendship, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were shown animations in which three cartoon children looked at one another, and were told that one target character had a best friend. Although all age groups accurately detected the mutual gaze between the target and another character, only 5- and 6-year-olds used this cue to infer friendship. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with 5- and 6-year-olds when the target character was not explicitly identified. Finally, in Experiment 3, where the attribution of friendship could only be based on synchronized mutual gaze, 6-year-olds made this attribution, while 4- and 5-year-olds did not. Children occasionally referred to mutual eye gaze when asked to justify their responses in Experiments 2 and 3, but it was only by the age of 6 that reference to these cues correlated with the use of mutual gaze in judgements of affiliation. Although younger children detected mutual gaze, it was not until 6 years of age that children reliably detected and justified mutual gaze as a cue to friendship

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The Psychology of Epistemic Judgment

Human social intelligence includes a remarkable power to evaluate what people know and believe, and to assess the quality of well- or ill-formed beliefs. Epistemic evaluations emerge in a great variety of contexts, from moments of deliberate private reflection on tough theoretical questions, to casual social observations about what other people know and think. We seem to be able to draw systematic lines between knowledge and mere belief, to distinguish justified and unjustified beliefs, and to recognize some beliefs as delusional or irrational. This article outlines the main types of epistemic evaluations, and examines how our capacities to perform these evaluations develop, how they function at maturity, and how they are deployed in the vital task of sorting out when to believe what others say

When seeing is more than looking:Intentional gaze modulates object desirability

Objects in the environment have a perceived value that can be changed through social influence. A subtle way to influence object evaluation is through eye gaze: Objects looked at by others are perceived as more likable than objects that are not looked at. In 3 experiments, we directly tested the hypothesis that this liking effect depends on the processing of the intentional relation between other's eye gaze and the object being looked at. To this end, we used a novel paradigm in which participants observed a face looking left or right behind an opaque barrier. Under all tested conditions, we found a gaze cueing effect on attention: Looked-at objects were categorized faster than looked-away objects. In contrast, observed gaze only led to a boost in affective evaluation for the target object when observers had the impression that the face could see the object behind the barrier, but not when observers had the impression that the face could not see the object. These findings indicate that observers make a sophisticated use of social gaze cues in the affective evaluation of objects: Objects looked at by others are liked more than objects looked away but only when others can see the objects

Pragmatic word learning in monolingual and bilingually exposed children

Humans are highly adaptable to a variety of challenging situations, as shown for example by increased echolocation abilities in the visually impaired (Schenkman & Nilsson, 2010). Multilingual input and interactions arguably create a particularly demanding environment, with added complexity and variation in the linguistic signal, a higher risk of communication failures and an increased amount of word forms to acquire. Despite this, and a lesser ability to rely on mutual exclusivity, bilingual children are able to quickly acquire a similar, and often greater vocabulary than their monolingual peers (De Houwer, Bornstein, & Putnick, 2014; Umbel, Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1992). A range of studies investigating attention to socio-pragmatic speaker cues found increased reliance on speaker cues in bilinguals (Colunga, Brojde, & Ahmed, 2012; Yow & Markman, 2011a, 2015). However, since these studies involved ignoring another conflicting cue, the results could have been related to inhibitory skills or to better attention to speaker generally, rather than to pragmatic inference per se, which relies on reasoning about communicative intentions. In five separate studies, we investigated the ability of a first (n=270, range=4;1- 6;2, mean age=5;3) and second (n=120, range=4;0-5;11, mean age=5;5) sample of monolingual and bilingually exposed children to use pragmatic cues to learn the meaning of a novel word in five different tasks where success could not be achieved by ignoring a salient cue. The tasks were: contrastive inference with prosodic stress, inference based on relative frequency of a referent, ostensive teaching of a subordinate category, ostensive teaching of an action word, and use of emotional affect. We found several developmental effects, and bilinguals to be more adult-like and to significantly outperform monolinguals (compared to a baseline control condition) in all tasks which involved reasoning about communicative intentions (or why the cue was provided, i.e., the first four tasks) but not when word referent mapping could be achieved without pragmatic reasoning (directly mapping emotional valence to referent valence, i.e., fifth task). We conclude that this thesis provides evidence for differences in the processing of pragmatic cues by bilingual and monolingual children which are not due solely to better inhibitory skills or to a general sensitivity to social cues such as prosody, eye gaze and pointing, but to performing true pragmatic inference by reasoning about communicative intentions in the context of word learning. In addition, we believe a distinction needs to be made between using social cues and reasoning about intentions, which might help provide insights about separate developmental timelines for exerting different types of pragmatic competence, with early abilities demonstrated by the bilingually exposed, particularly in acquisition contexts