Social Understanding

False belief tasks are problematic as a measure of social understanding...

...Such require elicited responses. They are language heavy and this may overwhelm children's capacities across multiple domains - artificial and lacking ecological validity as explaining how people feel may be difficult and strange for children. Compared against spontaneous response false belief tasks (which are passed by much younger children).

Cognitive "theory theory"(ies) suggest that...

...humans understand what others are thinking by creating a cognitive mental representation (i.e. theory of how people theorise) - mechanisms allowing to create representations of how others feel.

Spontaneous response false belief tasks...

...suggest that children understand false beliefs at as young ages as 2. SRFB tasks work upon the premise that children de-habituate more when something appears impossible - 2 year olds demonstrate shock when an individual does something/ knows something impossible (He et al, 2011).

Passing a false belief task is correlated with...

1) Interpretation of counterfactual statements (German & Nichols, 2003). 2) Inhibition of own behaviour (Carlson et al, 2004).

Theory of Mind

A cognitive psychological account of social understanding. An organised understanding of how mental processes, such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions and emotions, influence behaviour. Schematic understanding, i.e. if people are behaving differently, one understands that an individual has different intentions/desires/beliefs.

Subsystem 1

Active from infancy, enables infants to predict other's behaviours by blocking information available to the infant but not to the actor - let's you understand others' intentions.

Two Theory of Mind Subsystems

Baillargeon (2011)

Not just ASD children struggle with FB tasks

Children with early language disorder but no social cognition difficulties later appear delayed on false belief tasks (Nillson & Lopez, 2015).

Identification theory: research example (Hobson et al., 2007)

Compared adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder ASD (N=12, both groups) on an imitated communication task. Examples of imitated actions: stacking blocks; standing "proudly" with hands on hips; jumping aggressively on a toy frog. Used a range of ratings: emotional engagement; stylistic form of imitation; ability to shift stance between learner/teacher. All participants communicated/imitated aspects of actions. Participants with ASD less likely to show signs of emotional engagement, communicate emotion of action, and shift stance. In order to copy emotions you must/have to understand/identify with how others are feeling. ASD struggle with refined emotions - struggle with identification. Those with ASD are not sensitive to the elements of actions which required identification.

Language and ToM

Complex links - ToM historically suggested to directly underpin social communication behaviours. Pragmatics = social use of language/actual use of language. At one point, pragmatics were entirely pinned on ToM (Baron-Cohen, 2001). Now understood to be more complex - e.g. brain injury > problems with inhibition > problems with social communication/pragmatics (Douglas, 2010).

Subsystem 2

Enables complete construction of entirely alternatively/divergent representations of a current situation but from another's perspective - allows construct of another perspective in order to understand false beliefs.

Simulation theory(ies)

Essentially mirroring. Children develop mechanisms that allow you to understand how you feel to perceive others experiencing the same emotions - empathy (experiencing feelings of others).

Enactive social cognition (De Jaegher and Di Paoli, 2007)

Evidence suggests that we do not operate socially through 'prediction and planning'. Theories of social cognition should not focus on individuals. Instead, we should consider how people co-ordinate behaviour and sense-making as a real-time, embodied and participatory phenomena. Links back to interactional behaviour. Cognition behaviour coordinated between people - active involvement.

Identification theory (Hobson, 2009)

Human psychological development is best understood in terms of social relatedness and emotions rather than representational development. "Attachment stages" describe early developmental trajectories of identifying with self (subjectivity) and others (intersubjectivity). Children do not learn that others have minds, but about others with minds. We are born ready with innate structures that enable us to identify with each other.

Most researchers agree that...

Infants are sensitive to the social behaviours/intentions of others from very early on. - Possibly important for cultural learning (Tomasello et al, 2005). Emergence of joint attention behaviours at 9 months is a fundamental turning point of social development. - Triadic relating (any situation of two people looking at the same object - 1) object, 2) child, 3) adult - both looking @ object with joint attention) / pointing (protoimperative/protodeclarative). - Also relates to language learning Implicit forms of mind reading appear soon after/at the same time/before? Unresolved. Explicit forms of mind reading (particularly in relation to false belief tasks) emerge later (4ish).

Spontaneous response false belief tasks. Built around violation of expectation tasks (He et al, 2011).

Involve examining child's real time responses to a false belief task, rather than asking them to explain an answer. Definitely passed by 2.5 year olds, but probably younger (He et al, 2011).

Surprising findings in relation to ToM

Kovac et al (2010) - eye-tracker study: Used videos of a ball disappearing behind a screen (would presume it to carry on); in some conditions, an actor on the video would have been expected to possess a false belief about the direction of the ball, and also some conditions introduced a ramp to reverse the ball. 7 month olds and adults both influenced by the false belief - states that the behaviour of others influences children (actor influence).

Many other aspects of language appear related to ToM

Many language abilities appear correlated to false belief task performance: understanding of mental state words; and the understanding of complex sentences (Pyers and Senghas, 2010). Must have this understanding in order to understand and complete false-belief tasks reliably.

Evidencing ToM using interactional paradigms - behaviour as an indication of mind-reading

O'Neill (1996): Examined gestures produced by 2.5 year old children when assisting an adult to find a hidden object. More gestures were used when the children knew that the adult held a false belief about the object location. Condition 1 - Child saw something being moved when parent wasn't there. Condition 2 - Child and parent both don't know.. In condition 1, 2.5 year old children used significantly more gestures to help parent find object. Requires ToM as they demonstrate more gestures when they knew what the parent didn't - must have known paren't didn't know where the object was and therefore required more help.

(Baillargeon, 2010) Understanding others is a distinctly human trait

Our ability to understand the complex social actions of others has been argued as a uniquely human ability.

Evidencing early ToM using eye tracking

Southgate et al (2007). Used an anticipatory looking approach (do children look at things before someone looked for an object?). Where do children gaze before someone searched for an object based on a false belief. Found that 25 month old could anticipate the actions/had understanding of a person with a false belief in this way.

Only 7-11 year old children can reliably complete...

Tasks that integrate false belief and emotional recognition - Baron-Cohen et al (1997) and "Second Order" false belief tasks - Liddle & Nettle (2006) - only @ 11 years.

Eval - development of ToM

The ToM develops between 4 and 5 year olds - but it is questionable as to whether children are really incapable of understanding others prior to this age.

Meta-representations

The ability to switch off own representations in order to allow the development of another's thoughts, feelings and desires. (Temporarily turn off own representation, and when done using meta, turn back on and delete meta-representation) People have representations of things and representations of own feelings/thoughts/emotions. Cant get rid of own representation of feelings etc, so make representations of others feelings etc = meta-representations.

Theories about ToM

The classic view is a nativist, cognitive psychology perspective (Leslie, 1986). Theory of Mind is a cognitive module which activates @ 4 years of age. It enables "mind-reading". Possible to have domain-specific impairments in ToM "mind blindness". Broken ToM - mind blindness - theory suggests that this may be linked to autism (ASD). This module operates upon meta-representations (a system also implicated in symbolic pretend play). Originally argued to be a "deep isomorphism" between symbolic pretending and Theory of Mind (Leslie, 1986) which was argued to be the reason why children with autism struggle both with social communication and symbolic play (Baron-Cohen et al, 1987).

It was originally proposed that children under 4 do not possess a developed theory of mind.

This was evidenced by their performance on false belief tasks. However, this doesn't seem likely. ToM suggests ASD children can't play, but Vgotskyan theory suggests they can by helping the child to develop - scaffolding.

ToM isn't a huge part of pragmatics

ToM appears only a small part of understanding and using more pragmatically complex language (e.g. metaphor) between 5 and 10 (Cailles & le Sourn-Bissaoui, 2008; Norbury, 2005). Early ToM abilities do not predict later language abilities, but early language abilities do predict later ToM abilities (Astington & Jenkins 1999).

Testing ToM

ToM is classically tested with false belief tasks such as the Sally-Ann task and the Smarties task. Move marble from Sally's basket to anne's box. When sally comes back from playtime, where will she look for the marble? Children need to mind-read situation from Sally's point of view - children between 4-5 yrs old are typically able to pass this task. The need to be able to attribute a different set of beliefs to that doll than you yourself hold is required. (SPONT better - less reliance upon language/articulated responses) SAT Smartie's tube filled with drawing pins - show the child that it's drawing pins. Then ask them what their mother will think is in there. (SPONT better - less reliance upon language/articulated responses) SMART

(Wimmer and Perner, 1983)

Typically developing children under 4 do not pass 'traditional' first order false belief tasks.

False beliefs seem particularly hard for young children (but these are only one small part of social understanding).

Wellman & Liu (2004) found that children understand others' desires before beliefs, and false beliefs are more difficult to understand than diverse beliefs.

Second order false belief task

When you have to understand what another person is thinking about what another has said (i.e. representation of sadness).