How can human beings make significant but cognitively taxing inferences about others' beliefs yet also effectively "mind read" in fast-moving social situations? We tested the idea that humans have two mind-reading systems: a flexible system and an efficient system that can make fast calculations because it has natural blind spots to the kinds of input it processes. We showed that the automatic gaze anticipations of 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults displayed a signature blind spot specific to calculating an actor's false belief about object identity-a calculation that required the complex understanding that an object can be interpreted differently depending on one's visual perspective. Participants' deliberate verbal inferences demonstrated significant flexibility in calculations of another person's beliefs. Our results show that quick, efficient mind reading eschews conceptual sophistication.
Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a character's mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct false-belief questions. Gaze was independent of complement mastery. These patterns held when other low-verbal false-belief tasks were considered and the predictive looking task was presented as a time-controlled film. While implicit (gaze) knowledge predicted explicit (verbal) false-belief understanding, complement mastery and cognitive flexibility also supported explicit reasoning. Overall, explicit false-belief understanding is complexly underpinned by implicit knowledge and input from higher-order systems of language and executive control.
Diurnal regulation of transcripts encoding proteins located in mitochondria, plastids, and peroxisomes is important for adaptation of organelle biogenesis and metabolism to meet cellular requirements. We show this regulation is related to diurnal changes in promoter activities and the presence of specific cis-acting regulatory elements in the proximal promoter region [TGGGC(C/T)], previously defined as site II elements, and leads to diurnal changes in organelle protein abundances. These site II elements can act both as activators or repressors of transcription, depending on the night/day period and on the number and arrangement of site II elements in the promoter tested. These elements bind to the TCP family of transcriptions factors in Arabidopsis thaliana, which nearly all display distinct diurnal patterns of cycling transcript abundance. TCP2, TCP3, TCP11, and TCP15 were found to interact with different components of the core circadian clock in both yeast two-hybrid and direct protein-protein interaction assays, and tcp11 and tcp15 mutant plants showed altered transcript profiles for a number of core clock components, including LATE ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL1 and PSEUDO RESPONSE REGULATOR5. Thus, site II elements in the promoter regions of genes encoding mitochondrial, plastid, and peroxisomal proteins provide a direct mechanism for the coordination of expression for genes involved in a variety of organellar functions, including energy metabolism, with the time-of-day specific needs of the organism.
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