The effect of mindfulness-based interventions on telomere length and telomerase activity: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of mindfulness-based interventions on telomere length and telomerase activit

False belief understanding in children and dogs in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting

Finding ways to investigate false belief understanding nonverbally is not just important for research in preverbal children, but it is the only way to assess theory of mind-like (ToM) abilities in nonhuman animals. In this preregistered study, we adapted the design from a previous study on dogs (Lonardo et al., 2021) to investigate false belief understanding in children and compare them to dogs. Thirty-two preschool-children (aged 5-6 years) saw the displacement of a reward and also obtained nonverbal cueing information 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, but not 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. This behavior pattern is at odds with the one of dogs who followed the cues more often when the human communicator held a false belief. Since our task does not require verbal responses or relational sentence understanding it can also be used in preverbal children as well as to compare ToM-related competences between human and non-human animals, if appropriately adapted. In our study, children behaved in line with existing ToM literature whereas most dogs, but not all, while sensitive to differences between the belief conditions, deviated from children. This difference suggests the need for a more extensive exploration of the evolution of false belief processing and ToM across animals