Developmental Trends in Flexibility and Automaticity of Social Cognition

Abstract

Age-related changes in flexibility and automaticity of reasoning about social situations were investigated. Children (N = 101; age range = 7;8-17;7) were presented with the flexibility and automaticity of social cognition (FASC), a new measure of social cognition in which cartoon vignettes of social situations are presented and participants explain what is happening and why. Scenarios vary on whether the scenario is socially ambiguous and whether or not language is used. Flexibility is determined by the number of unique, plausible explanations, and automaticity is indicated by speed of response. Overall, both flexibility and automaticity increased significantly with age. Language and social ambiguity influenced performance. Future work should investigate differences in FASC in older populations and clinical groups.

Measuring advanced theory of mind: Do story‐based tasks work?

“…Although results showed a lack of coherence among advanced ToM measures, there were still some links that are worth emphasizing. For early adolescents, two factors based on the FASC task (Hayward et al, 2018), i.e., the number of mental state terms and the number of utterances containing unique mental state, correlated with the factor based on an index of psychological complexity in The Picture Test of ToM (Brüne, 2003). Although the correlation coefficients were low to moderate (0.23 and 0.48, respectively), future studies should still look for a relation between FASC performance (Hayward et al, 2018) and performance on tasks measuring complexity of psychological reasoning in ambiguous stories, consistent with previous studies (e.g., Bosacki & Astington, 1999; Hayward & Homer, 2017).…”

“…The material in the chosen measures is presented verbally and/or visually, but it always includes a social scenario and requires story‐based reasoning about mental states, and all the measures require verbal answers. We decided to use two group administrated tasks: (1) the modified Hinting Task (adapted from Corcoran, Mercer, & Frith, 1995) and (2) a modified Unexpected Outcome Test (adapted from Dyck, Ferguson, & Shochet, 2001) and four individually administrated tasks: (3) the Picture Test of ToM (Brüne, 2003), (4) the Faux Pas Test (Stone et al, 1998; Gregory et al, 2002); (5) the Flexibility & Automaticity of Social Cognition (FASC; Hayward et al, 2018); and (6) the Self‐Persuasion Story Task (Kołodziejczyk & Bosacki, 2016). This last task was newly developed and it was founded on the assumption that mental state reasoning is a necessary condition to persuade oneself to do something difficult or unwanted (Maio & Thomas, 2007) and the persuasion is related to ToM (Slaughter, Peterson, & Moore, 2013).…”

Reliability and validity of advanced theory‐of‐mind measures in middle childhood and adolescence

“…Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the reliability and validity of widely used measures of advanced ToM with typically developing children ages 7–13. Although other measures of advanced ToM have been developed, and in some cases validated (e.g., Bosco, Gabbatore, Tirassa, & Testa, ; Devine & Hughes, ; Hayward, Homer, & Sprung, ; Hutchins, Prelock, & Bonazinga, ; Sivaratnam, Cornish, Gray, Howlin, & Rinehart, ), second‐order false belief tasks, interpretive tasks, the Strange Stories, the Faux Pas test, and the Reading‐the‐Mind‐in‐the‐Eyes task remain some of the most broadly used ToM measures. The overall comprehension of these tasks was also examined, as valid measurement hinges on the assumption that participants comprehend the materials (Fantuzzo, McDermott, Manz, & Hampton, ).…”

Language, ambiguity, and executive functions in adolescents' theory of mind

“…While findings indicate that EF are related to the development of ToM in young children (Carlson et al, 2004; Devine & Hughes, 2014), less work has been done to examine the role of EF in aToM among older children or adolescents. Therefore, the current studies examined the roles of the EF skills of shifting and inhibitory control, as well as language use and ambiguity, in adolescents' performance on a measure of aToM, the computerized version of the Flexibility and Automaticity of Social Cognition task (FASC; Hayward et al, 2018).…”

“…The FASC task (Hayward et al, 2018) was developed in part to better capture developments in aToM that occur in late childhood and adolescence. It was informed by the proposal that there are two types of processes involved in social cognition: flexible but cognitively demanding higher‐level processes that rely on explicit reasoning, and automated , cognitively efficient but inflexible lower‐level processes that rely on social routines and scripts (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009).…”