Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the first year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers’ performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers’ performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction

Validation of the StimQ2: A parent-report measure of cognitive stimulation in the home.

Considerable evidence demonstrates the importance of the cognitive home environment in supporting children's language, cognition, and school readiness more broadly. This is particularly important for children from low-income backgrounds, as cognitive stimulation is a key area of resilience that mediates the impact of poverty on child development. Researchers and clinicians have therefore highlighted the need to quantify cognitive stimulation; however existing methodological approaches frequently utilize home visits and/or labor-intensive observations and coding. Here, we examined the reliability and validity of the StimQ2, a parent-report measure of the cognitive home environment that can be delivered efficiently and at low cost. StimQ2 improves upon earlier versions of the instrument by removing outdated items, assessing additional domains of cognitive stimulation and providing new scoring systems. Findings suggest that the StimQ2 is a reliable and valid measure of the cognitive home environment for children from infancy through the preschool period

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Problem-based learning in middle school science

The purpose of this study was to explore how the Problem-Based Learning model could be used in a middle school science classroom to promote inquiry skills. In addition, this study looked for the best modes of implementation suited to the needs of middle school leamers. The study was conducted in a suburban public middle school in Oregon. The study group consisted of five classes of eighth grade integrated science students. A total of 105 students participated in this study, of which 86 were girls and 65 were boys. Data collected for this study included preand post-unit surveys of student attitudes and beliefs about personal problem solving. abilities and how problems presented in school relate to the world around them. Results provided evidence that most students do not have great confidence in or enjoyment in solving problems. After the completion of the Problem-Based Learning model intervention, student confidence in problem solving abilities rose by 16%, with 87% of the responding students indicating they felt their problem solving abilities had improved as a result of the Problem-Based Learning strategy. Additionally, 91% of students indicated that they enjoyed learning through the use of the Problem-Based Learning model

The relationship between mental-state language and false-belief understanding across the lifespan

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until age 4 as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants can succeed on non-elicited-response tasks has led many to conclude that this capacity may be present much earlier than previously thought. Some have argued that this conclusion is inconsistent with well-established associations between social factors (e.g. mental-state language) and preschooler’s performance on elicited-response tasks. If infants understand false beliefs, then why would social input predict preschooler’s performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks? I began to address this question in the current dissertation. I suggest that rather than promoting the emergence of the ability to represent beliefs, social input fosters an individual’s ability to use such representations in appropriate situations. Individuals who frequently hear and use mental-state language may more readily attend to, encode, and retrieve information related to agents’ mental states. Here, I tested three specific predictions that followed from this claim. Experiment 1 showed that parental mental-state talk, which predicts toddlers’ performance on a verbal spontaneous-response false-belief task, also predicts 2.5-year-olds’ performance on a non-verbal spontaneous-response task. These findings suggest that parental talk does not simply predict children’s ability to follow a verbal story, but rather that parental mental-state language relates to children’s false-belief understanding. Moreover, parental mental-state language did not predict children’s physical-reasoning abilities, suggesting that such talk relates to children’s understanding of mental states rather than children’s general cognitive abilities. Experiment 2 replicated the finding that parental use of mental-state language predicts children’s spontaneous-response false-belief performance, extended these findings to a new task, and showed that 3-year-olds’ personal use of mental-state language also predicts their false-belief performance.Building on this finding, Experiment 3 demonstrated that the relationship between personal use of mental-state language and false-belief performance is also present in adulthood: adults who used more mental-state terms when describing individuals were better at quickly and accurately predicting the actions of a mistaken agent. Together, these findings provide evidence that social factors support individuals’ ability to use their false-belief understanding in a variety of different situations across the lifespan

The relationship between mental-state language and false-belief understanding across the lifespan

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until age 4 as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants can succeed on non-elicited-response tasks has led many to conclude that this capacity may be present much earlier than previously thought. Some have argued that this conclusion is inconsistent with well-established associations between social factors (e.g. mental-state language) and preschooler’s performance on elicited-response tasks. If infants understand false beliefs, then why would social input predict preschooler’s performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks? I began to address this question in the current dissertation. I suggest that rather than promoting the emergence of the ability to represent beliefs, social input fosters an individual’s ability to use such representations in appropriate situations. Individuals who frequently hear and use mental-state language may more readily attend to, encode, and retrieve information related to agents’ mental states. Here, I tested three specific predictions that followed from this claim. Experiment 1 showed that parental mental-state talk, which predicts toddlers’ performance on a verbal spontaneous-response false-belief task, also predicts 2.5-year-olds’ performance on a non-verbal spontaneous-response task. These findings suggest that parental talk does not simply predict children’s ability to follow a verbal story, but rather that parental mental-state language relates to children’s false-belief understanding. Moreover, parental mental-state language did not predict children’s physical-reasoning abilities, suggesting that such talk relates to children’s understanding of mental states rather than children’s general cognitive abilities. Experiment 2 replicated the finding that parental use of mental-state language predicts children’s spontaneous-response false-belief performance, extended these findings to a new task, and showed that 3-year-olds’ personal use of mental-state language also predicts their false-belief performance.Building on this finding, Experiment 3 demonstrated that the relationship between personal use of mental-state language and false-belief performance is also present in adulthood: adults who used more mental-state terms when describing individuals were better at quickly and accurately predicting the actions of a mistaken agent. Together, these findings provide evidence that social factors support individuals’ ability to use their false-belief understanding in a variety of different situations across the lifespan

Processing Demands Impact 3-Year-Olds' Performance in a Spontaneous-Response Task: New Evidence for the Processing-Load Account of Early False-Belief Understanding.

Prior to age four, children succeed in non-elicited-response false-belief tasks but fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. To explain this discrepancy, the processing-load account argues that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in infancy, as indicated by early success on non-elicited-response tasks, but that children's ability to demonstrate this capacity depends on the processing demands of the task and children's processing skills. When processing demands exceed young children's processing abilities, such as in standard elicited-response tasks, children fail despite their capacity to represent beliefs. Support for this account comes from recent evidence that reducing processing demands improves young children's performance: when demands are sufficiently reduced, 2.5-year-olds succeed in elicited-response tasks. Here we sought complementary evidence for the processing-load account by examining whether increasing processing demands impeded children's performance in a non-elicited-response task. 3-year-olds were tested in a preferential-looking task in which they heard a change-of-location false-belief story accompanied by a picture book; across children, we manipulated the amount of linguistic ambiguity in the story. The final page of the book showed two images: one that was consistent with the main character's false belief and one that was consistent with reality. When the story was relatively unambiguous, children looked reliably longer at the false-belief-consistent image, successfully demonstrating their false-belief understanding. When the story was ambiguous, however, this undermined children's performance: looking times to the belief-consistent image were correlated with verbal ability, and only children with verbal skills in the upper quartile of the sample demonstrated a significant preference for the belief-consistent image. These results support the processing-load account by demonstrating that regardless of whether a task involves an elicited response, children's performance depends on the processing demands of the task and their processing skills. These findings also have implications for alternative, deflationary accounts of early false-belief understanding