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A growing body of infant studies with various implicit, non-verbal measures has suggested that Theory of Mind (ToM) may emerge much earlier than previously assumed. While explicit verbal ToM findings are highly replicable and show convergent validity, systematic replication studies of infant ToM, as well as convergent validations of these measures, are still missing. Here, we report a systematic study of the replicability and convergent validity of implicit ToM tasks using four different measures with 24-month-olds (N = 66): Anticipatory looking, looking times and pupil dilation in violation-of-expectation paradigms, and spontaneous communicative interaction. Results of anticipatory looking and interaction-based tasks did not replicate previous findings, suggesting that these tasks do not reliably measure ToM. Looking time and new pupil dilation measures revealed sensitivity to belief-incongruent outcomes which interacted with the presentation order of outcomes, indicating limited evidence for implicit ToM processes under certain conditions. There were no systematic correlations of false belief processing between the tasks, thus failing to provide convergent validity. The present results suggest that the robustness and validity of existing implicit ToM tasks needs to be treated with more caution than previously practiced, and that not all non-verbal tasks and measures are equally suited to tap into implicit ToM processing.
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The present studies investigated the out-group homogeneity effect in 5- and 8-year-old Israeli and German children (n = 150) and adults (n = 96). Participants were asked to infer whether a given property (either biological or psychological) was true of an entire group—either the participants’ in-group (“Jews” or “Germans”) or their out-group (“Arabs” or “Turks”). To that end, participants had to select either a homogenous or a heterogeneous sample of group members. It was found that across ages and countries, participants selected heterogeneous samples less often when inferring the biological properties of out-compared to in-group members. No effect was found regarding psychological properties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the origins of intergroup bias.
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At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether even toddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18-month-old infants learnt a simple game-like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non-normative control, marked the same action as idiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non-normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second-personal normative expectations about their partner’s behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group-minded and abstract social norms.
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How do animals and young children see the world around them in its most basic structure, and how do such world-views develop over time? These are questions of what could be called comparative and developmental metaphysics. The present paper gives an introduction to this newly emerging field of research. Special emphasis is put on thinking about the world as made up of discrete and enduring objects as the most fundamental form of objective thought. The paper discusses whether language is necessary for such basic forms of objective thought, and whether thinking
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Recent work on the side-effect effect has shown that subjects' intentionality judgments are influenced by moral evaluations. In six experiments, we tested four different candidates for the cognitive foundation derived from prominent explanatory accounts (prescriptiveness, [un-] expectedness, blame and a shift in default attitudes) against each other in three steps. First, Study 1 showed that the effect even extends to certain descriptive norms. Second, Studies 2–5 investigated the candidates more directly. Results reveal that intentionality judgments could best be explained by underlying shifts in default attitudes. Third, Study 6 experimentally manipulated this default attitude, leading to the predicted change in intentionality judgments.
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When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent’s intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent-based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent-based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent’s mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children’s intent-based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children’s (but not adults’) normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent’s intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent’s false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief-based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent-based normative judgment.
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When children come to grasp the concept of intention is a central question in theory of mind research. Existing studies, however, present a puzzling picture. On the one hand, infants distinguish between intentional and accidental actions. On the other hand, previous work suggests that until 8 years of age children do not yet understand an essential property of intentions—their aspectuality. Intentions are aspectual in the sense that they refer to objects and actions only under specific aspects. For example, Oedipus married Jocasta without knowing that she was his mother. Thus, he intentionally married Jocasta but did not intentionally marry his mother. However, the negative findings from these studies may indicate performance limitations rather than competence limitations. The rationale of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test children’s understanding of the aspectuality of intentions in a simplified, cognitively less demanding design. The participants, 5- and 6-year-olds (Study 1) and 4-year-olds (Study 2), were involved in simple games where they (or another agent) intentionally acted on objects that had an obvious first identity and a hidden second identity. Children either did or did not know about the toy’s second identity at the moment of acting. After their actions, children were asked about their intentions regarding the toys’ different identities. Results revealed that the 5- and 6-year-olds, but not the 4-yearolds, systematically considered how they (or another agent) represented the objects when making intentionality judgments. Thus, an understanding of aspectual intentions seems to develop at around the late preschool years—much earlier than previously assumed.
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Human children and apes seem to be intuitive statisticians when making predictions from populations of objects to randomly drawn samples, whereas monkeys seem not to be. Statistical reasoning can also be investigated in tasks in which the probabilities of diferent possibilities must be inferred from relative frequencies of events, but little is known about the performance of nonhuman primates in such tasks. In the current study, we investigated whether long-tailed macaques extract statistical information from repeated types of events to make predictions under uncertainty. In each experiment, monkeys frst experienced the probability of rewards associated with diferent factors separately. In a subsequent test trial, monkeys could then choose between the diferent factors presented simultaneously. In Experiment 1, we tested whether long-tailed macaques relied on probabilities and not on a comparison of absolute quantities to make predictions. In Experiment 2 and 3 we varied the nature of the predictive factors and the complexity of the covariation structure between rewards and factors. Results indicate that long-tailed macaques extract statistical information from repeated types of events to make predictions and rational decisions under uncertainty, in more or less complex scenarios. These fndings suggest that the presentation format afects the monkeys’ statistical reasoning abilities.
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Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to agents, has usually been measured with explicit verbal tasks and found to develop slowly during the preschool years. New implicit ToM measures have lately revolutionized the field by suggesting that ToM may be present much earlier in development. However, recent replication studies of implicit ToM present a complex pattern of failed, partial and successful attempts. The big challenge is to identify an underlying system to this pattern that can explain why some tasks replicate while others do not. The rationale of the present study was to address this challenge by investigating one potential factor that may explain patterns of (non-)replications of implicit measures, namely elements of verbal narration in anticipatory looking tasks. Sixty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children completed modified versions of two different anticipatory looking implicit false belief tasks which recently proved difficult to replicate. The main modification was that verbal narration was added to the original stimulus videos. Results revealed that original looking patterns could still not be replicated. There was no improvement in one task, while a slight improvement was observed in the other task. In conclusion, adding verbal narration does not necessarily improve the replicability of anticipatory ToM tasks, suggesting either that these measures might not be sufficiently sensitive to tap implicit ToM, or that other factors are crucial for successful replications.
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In the last 15 years, Theory of Mind research has been revolutionized by the development of new implicit tasks. Such tasks aim at tapping children’s and adults’ uninstructed, largely automatic mental state ascription, indicated in spontaneous looking behavior when observing agents who act on the basis of false beliefs. Studies with anticipatory looking, in particular, have suggested that basic ToM capacities operate from very early in life and remain in unconscious operation throughout the lifespan. Recently, however, systematic replication attempts of anticipatory looking measures have yielded a complex and puzzling mixture of successful, partial and non-replications. The present study aimed at shedding light on the question whether there is a system to this pattern. More specifically, in a set of three preregistered experiments, it was tested whether those conditions that could previously be replicated and those that could not differ in crucial conceptual respects such that the former do not strictly require ToM whereas the latter do. This was tested by the implementation of novel control conditions. The results were complex. There was generally no unambiguous evidence for reliable spontaneous ToM and no effect of the number of passed familiarization trials. Neither was there any unambiguous evidence that the previous mixed patterns of (non-)replications could be explained (away) by the sub-mentalizing account tested in the new control conditions. The empirical situation remains puzzling, and the question whether there is some such thing as implicit and spontaneous ToM remains to be clarified.
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Recently, Theory of Mind (ToM) research has been revolutionized by newmethods. Eye-tracking studiesmeasuring subjects’looking times or anticipatory looking have suggested that implicit and automatic forms of ToM develop much earlier in ontogeny than traditionally assumed and continue to operate outside of subjects’ awareness throughout the lifespan. However, the reliability of these implicit methods has recently been put into question by an increasing number of non-replications. What remains unclear from these accumulating non-replication findings, though, is whether they present true negatives (there is no robust phenomenon of automatic ToM) or false ones (automatic ToM is real but difficult to tap). In order to address these questions, the current study implemented conceptual replications of influential anticipatory looking ToM tasks with a new variation in the stimuli. In two separate preregistered studies, we used increasingly realistic stimuli and controlled for potential confounds. Even with these more realistic stimuli, previous results could not be replicated. Rather, the anticipatory looking pattern found here remained largely compatible with more parsimonious explanations. In conclusion, the reality and robustness of automatic ToM remains controversial.
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Humans modulate their self-evaluations and behaviour as a function of conspecific presence and performance. In this study, we tested for the presence of human-like social comparison effects in long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). The monkeys’ task was to extract food from an apparatus by pulling drawers within reach and we measured latency between drawer pulls. Subjects either worked on the task with a partner who could access the apparatus from an adjacent cage, worked in the absence of a conspecific but with food moving towards the partner’s side or worked next to a partner who was denied apparatus access. We further manipulated partner performance and competitiveness of the set-up. We found no indication that long-tailed macaques compare their performance to the performance of conspecifics. They were not affected by the mere presence of the partner but they paid close attention to the partner’s actions when they were consequential for food availability. If social comparison processes are present in long-tailed macaques, the present study suggests they may only manifest in situations involving direct competition and would thus be different from social comparisons in humans, which manifest also in the absence of direct competition, for example in evaluative contexts.
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Much recent research has shown that children from age 4 onwards reveal a robust preference for reliable over unreliable informants when choosing whom to trust and learn from. Findings concerning selective model choice in children younger than 4 years have mostly been mixed. The present study developed a new touchscreen‐based paradigm with reduced task demands in order to test 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children (N = 48). Results showed that 3‐year‐olds selectively endorsed information from a previously reliable rather than a previously unreliable informant when searching for objects whereas 2‐ year‐olds just followed the first hint even if provided by an unreliable informant. Whether the lack of selective model choice in 2‐year‐olds reflects competence or performance deficits remains to be clarified. But the present results do suggest that 3‐years‐olds have the basic competence to selectively choose reliable over unreliable informants that may have been masked in some previous studies by task demands. Highlights • The paper develops a novel touchscreen‐based search paradigm to test young children's selective trust with reduced task demands. • Three‐year‐olds chose selectively between conflicting hints, whereas 2‐year‐olds followed the first hint even if provided by an unreliable informant.
