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The use of looking time procedures for the claim that infants understand other's false-beliefs has drawn criticism. In response, Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2009) have argued for the use of a more active behavioral measure involving children's willingness to help others. However, the current study challenges Buttelmann et al.'s response on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Theoretically, Buttelmann et al. take a mindreading framework for granted and are thus committed to the same type of "rich" interpretations that have accompanied infant looking procedures more broadly. Methodologically, the current study challenges Buttelmann et al.'s interpretation that children were using the adult's falsebelief to determine how to help in this paradigm. To test our alternative perspective, mentalistic and non-mentalistic interpretations of preschooler's helping behavior were compared. In the original study, the adult's false-belief was conflated with the playing of a trick. When these two factors were separated, children's helping behavior was not consistent with the adult's false-belief. Second, when the situation was characterized in terms of a hiding scenario (instead of playing a trick), older children altered their helping behavior accordingly. Together, these results provided evidence that children in the activehelping paradigm did not use the adult's false-belief to determine how to help and that the broader social situation is an important variable for understanding other's actions. In conclusion, the use of more active behavioral measures alone does not resolve the controversy that has played out with respect to infant looking procedures. Instead, any adequate methodological modifications must be accompanied by theoretical considerations as well.

Objective To examine the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure and biological sex on adolescent risk-taking while controlling for early environmental risk. Methods Adolescents (n = 114, mean age = 16) were grouped according to high and low risk-taking propensity as measured by the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) task. Prenatal cocaine exposure was assessed at birth, while environmental risk was assessed at three points during early childhood. Results A binary regression analysis indicated that males were 3.5 times more likely than females to be high risk-takers. Biological sex and prenatal cocaine exposure interacted such that exposed males were most likely to be high risk-takers while exposed females were the least likely to be high-risk takers. This pattern held after controlling for prenatal alcohol exposure and early environmental risk. Early environmental risk did not predict adolescent risk-taking. Conclusions These findings complement and extend earlier research demonstrating that prenatal cocaine exposure interacts with biological sex in domains related to inhibitory control, emotion regulation, anti-social behavior, and health risk behaviors during preadolescence.

There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents' child-directed speech and their children's Theory of Mind development. That such a relationship should exist is well motivated from both Theory Theory and Socio-Cultural (SC) perspectives. Despite this general convergence, we argue that theoretical differences between the two perspectives suggests nuanced differences in the expected outcomes of the empirical work. Further, the different ontological commitments of the two approaches have (mis)guided the design, coding, and analysis of existing research and imply different future directions. We discuss five areas of extant research that can be extended and diversified most coherently by adopting a SC framework. Keywords Theory of mind • Folk psychology • Socio-cultural theory • Theory theory • Mental state talk We seek to examine the role that social experience plays in the development of children's ability to reason about the mental perspectives of self and others. This ability, from here on referred to as theory of mind (ToM), is widely recognized as a sociocognitive ability that benefits from children's experience of perspectivally rich talk in meaningful social interaction contexts (e.g., conversations, storytelling, pretend play). One indicator of perspectivally rich talk is the use of mental state terms that describe mental processes that are not directly observable. Two approaches (i.e., theory theory and socio-cultural theory) underscore the importance of child-directed mental state language in theory of mind development. While evidence for the relationship between the richness of child-directed mental state talk and theory of mind has been taken to B Hande Ilgaz

Nativist and empiricist approaches require foundationalism because they cannot account for the emergence of representation. Foundationalism is the assumption of an innate representational base. In turn, foundationalism places limits on the nature of learning as a constructivist process. In contrast, action-based approaches can account for the emergence of representation through (inter)action. In so doing, action-based approaches can pursue an emergent constructivism for learning and development. Despite the theoretical symmetry between nativism and empiricism with respect to foundationalism, there is an asymmetry in nativist and empiricist research programs. Nativism generally ignores constructivist complexity with rich interpretations that non-nativist approaches assume needs to be investigated empirically. Importantly, the problem of a priori assumptions driving rich interpretations is not specific to nativism or looking methodologies. Mindreading as a research program also engages in rich interpretations for studies that concern social-cognition from infancy through preschool. To the extent that empiricist research programs incorporate constructivist thinking into research, they converge with action-based approaches. This creates a sort of methodological bridge between lean-empiricist research programs and action-based approaches. However, this bridge has limitations that we illustrate through an example concerning maternal mental-state discourse and theory of mind development.