Intuitive physics and intuitive psychology (“theory of mind”) in offspring of mothers with psychoses

Abstract

Offspring of individuals with psychoses sometimes display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of children of mothers with schizophrenia (n = 28) and bipolar disorder (n = 23) to understand mental states of others using the Eyes Test (folk psychology or “theory of mind”) and physical causal interactions of inanimate objects (folk physics). Compared with healthy controls (n = 29), the children of mothers with schizophrenia displayed significantly impaired performances on the Eyes Test but not on the folk physics test when corrected for IQ. The children of mothers with bipolar disorder did not differ from the controls. The folk physics test showed a significant covariance with IQ, whereas the Eyes Test did not exhibit such covariance. These results suggest that the attribution of mental states, but not the interpretation of causal interaction of objects, is impaired in offspring of individuals with schizophrenia, which may contribute to social dysfunctions.

Video-Language Models as Flexible Social and Physical Reasoners

“…Relevantly, unified computational frameworks using deep reinforcement learning (RL) have been developed to render many Heider-Simmel-type stimuli in a simulated psychological space that captures a partition between physical law violations and differential involvement of social intention (Shu et al, 2021). In the same vein, converging behavioral and neurofunctional evidence suggest that the computations underlying both mental spaces are largely dissociable, regardless of how they are jointly represented in downstream tasks (Sajjad et al, 2023)(Maróthi & K′eri, 2014)(Mitko & Fischer, 2020)(Kamps et al, 2017). In adults with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic developmental disorder that severely impairs spatial cognition, intuitive physical judgments were significantly worse than psychological judgments (Kamps et al, 2017).…”

Social cognition in first-degree relatives of bipolar disorder: Theory of Mind and nonverbal sensitivity

“…When measuring ToM in FDRs, with RMET, there are contradictory results. One study comparing offsprings with controls found significant deficits in this population [ 50 ]; another study did not find significant differences in unaffected adult FDRs of euthymic persons with BD [ 47 ]. Nonverbal sensitivity has not been measured in FDRs and only one study has been done with remitted BD, showing that these subjects performed significantly worse than the control group [ 51 ].…”