Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children

Wiesmann, Charlotte Grosse; Friederici, Angela D.; Singer, Tania; Steinbeis, Nikolaus

doi:10.1111/desc.12445

Cited by 101 publications

(144 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…This is in line with a large body of evidence on the close link between both cognitive domains (for a recent meta-analysis, see Devine and Hughes, 2014). Further, consistent with recent evidence (Low, 2010; Grosse Wiesmann et al, 2016), we found that executive function task performance was related to performance in the explicit, but not in the implicit mentalizing task. This provides further support for two-systems accounts of mentalizing (Apperly and Butterfill, 2009; cf., Perner and Roessler, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Yet, this remains to be proven empirically. Together with other recent work (Low, 2010; Senju et al, 2010; Grosse Wiesmann et al, 2016), our findings suggest that implicit mentalizing indeed is a phenomenon presumably persisting across lifespan.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…One recent example of a study investigating implicit and explicit mentalizing in older children comes from Grosse Wiesmann et al (2016). These authors found the usual developmental trend in explicit false belief understanding between 3 and 4 years of age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

et al. 2016

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Implicit mentalizing, a fast, unconscious and rigid way of processing other’s mental states has recently received much interest in typical social cognitive development in early childhood and in adults with autism spectrum condition (ASC). This research suggests that already infants implicitly mentalize, and that adults with ASC have a sustained implicit mentalizing deficit. Yet, we have only sparse empirical evidence on implicit mentalizing beyond early childhood, and deviations thereof in children with ASC. Here, we administered an implicit mentalizing eye tracking task to assess the sensitivity to false beliefs to a group of 8-year-old children with and without ASC, matched for chronological age, verbal and non-verbal IQ. As previous research suggested that presenting outcomes of belief-based actions leads to fast learning from experience and false belief-congruent looking behavior in adults with ASC, we were also interested in whether already children with ASC learn from such information. Our results provide support for a persistent implicit mentalizing ability in neurotypical development beyond early childhood. Further, they confirmed an implicit mentalizing deficit in children with ASC, even when they are closely matched to controls for explicit mentalizing skills. In contrast to previous findings with adults, no experience-based modulation of anticipatory looking was observed. It seems that children with ASC have not yet developed compensatory general purpose learning mechanisms. The observed intact explicit, but impaired implicit mentalizing in ASC, and correlation patterns between mentalizing tasks and executive function tasks, are in line with theories on two dissociable mentalizing systems.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

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Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

et al. 2016

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“…We therefore additionally assessed and controlled for a battery of executive function and language tests27 to understand to what extent the maturation of distinct brain structures uniquely supported the emergence of false belief understanding. Moreover, in the past decade, implicit false belief tasks have been developed which showed that, already before the age of 2 years, infants display correct expectations of the actions of an agent with a false belief in their looking behaviour2829.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

White matter maturation is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood

et al. 2017

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The ability to attribute mental states to other individuals is crucial for human cognition. A milestone of this ability is reached around the age of 4, when children start understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. The neural basis supporting this critical step is currently unknown. Here, we relate this behavioural change to the maturation of white matter structure in 3- and 4-year-old children. Tract-based spatial statistics and probabilistic tractography show that the developmental breakthrough in false belief understanding is associated with age-related changes in local white matter structure in temporoparietal regions, the precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex, and with increased dorsal white matter connectivity between temporoparietal and inferior frontal regions. These effects are independent of co-developing cognitive abilities. Our findings show that the emergence of mental state representation is related to the maturation of core belief processing regions and their connection to the prefrontal cortex.

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“…A second hint comes from correlational studies comparing children's performance in SR-and ERFBTs (Grosse Wiesmann et al 2016;Low 2010). These studies found no stable relation between children's (implicit) predictive looking in SR-FBTs and their (explicit) verbal response in ER-FBTs.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

Fenici

Garofoli

2017

J Cult Cogn Sci

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According to the thesis of natural mindreading (NMRT), mindreading-i.e., the capacity to attribute mental states to predict and explain behavior-is an intrinsic component of the human biological endowment, thus being innately specified by natural selection within particular neurocognitive structures. In this article, we challenge the NMRT as a phylogenetic and ontogenetic account of the development of the socio-cognitive capacities of our species. In detail, we argue that basic capacities of social cognition (e.g., the traces of early systems of bodily ornamentation within the archeological record, and infants' selective attention at others' beliefs in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) do not involve meta-representational mindreading but are better explained by appealing to situated embodied capacities acquired in social interaction. While we acknowledge that more flexible capacities of social cognition (e.g., those implied by the use of political emblems in industrialized societies, or by 4-year-olds' success in elicitedresponse false belief tasks) involve genuine mindreading, we argue that this ability is elicited and scaffolded by linguistic communication. We conclude that mindreading has emerged as the outcome of a highly derivative long-term constructivist process of biocultural becoming that led to a relatively recent restructuring of the human mind in multiple worldly locations at different times. In particular, we conjecture that humans gradually converged on establishing linguistic practices allowing the understanding of others' actions in terms of mental reasons. These practices were bequeathed to further generations, and continue nowadays to scaffold the acquisition of mindreading in early childhood.

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Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children

Cited by 101 publications

References 48 publications

Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

White matter maturation is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

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