Repetition priming and experimental context effects

Solving belief problems develops as a skill in normal children during the preschool years. To understand this process of development, it is necessary to provide an analysis of the tasks used to test preschool 'theory of mind' skills. This analysis should allow us to relate the structure of a given task to the underlying cognitive mechanisms that the task engages. In two experiments, we find that 3-year-old children show a pattern of success and failure on belief tasks that is not consistent with 'conceptual deficit' accounts. Young children possess the concept, BELIEF, but have certain characteristic difficulties with correctly calculating the contents of beliefs. In childhood autism, by contrast, the mechanisms that in normal development bestow conceptual competence in this domain are impaired. In the first experiment, parallel task structures are used to show that 3-year-olds are no better at predicting behavior from a partially true belief than they are at predicting behavior from an entirely false belief. We develop specific proposals about task structural factors that either facilitate or hinder success in belief-content calculation. These proposals are supported in a second experiment. We compare two false-belief tasks, one of which has helpful structural factors, the other of which has hampering factors, with a third task which exemplifies a hampering task structure but without any theory of mind content. We compare 3- and 4-year-olds' patterns of performance with that of autistic children. Each of the three groups shows a distinct performance profile across the three tasks, as predicted for each case by our model. Innate attentional mechanisms provide the conceptual foundations for 'theory of mind' but must be supplemented by a robust executive process that allows false beliefs to achieve 'conceptual pop-out.' Our approach has general implications for the study of conceptual development.     

Objects and events as determinants of parallel processing in dual tasks: Evidence from the backward compatibility effect.

The backward-compatibility effect (BCE) is a major index of parallel processing in dual tasks and is related to the dependency of Task 1 performance on Task 2 response codes (Hommel, 1998). The results of four dual-task experiments showed that a BCE occurs when the stimuli of both tasks are included in the same visual object (Experiments 1 and 2) or belong to the same perceptual event (Experiments 3 and 4). Thus, the BCE may be modulated by factors that influence whether both task stimuli are included in the same perceptual event (objects, as studied in cognitive experiments, being special cases of events). As with objects, drawing attention to a (selected) event results in the processing of its irrelevant features and may interfere with task execution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' use of desires to solve theory of mind problems in a pretense context

K. Bartsch and H. M. Wellman (1995) have suggested that 3-year-old children's preference to construe behavior in terms of desire may interfere with their ability to reason according to belief in standard false belief tasks. Other researchers have suggested that young children fail typical measures of theory of mind because they have a reality bias (e.g., P. Mitchell, 1994). Study 1 demonstrates that even young children are able to correctly attribute a false belief to an agent when that belief is about the status of a pretense. Study 2 shows that children find it easier to attribute a false belief when the desires of the agent are eliminated. However, Study 3 suggests that a reality bias also influences children's ability to consider beliefs. Implications for recent accounts of theory of mind development are discussed.     

The ABCs of deception: Do young children understand deception in the same way as adults?

Most research suggests that it is not until age 4 that children understand deception as a means of creating a false belief. Yet children could have failed on these tasks because of either (1) conceptual problems (an inability to understand that deception is a means of creating false belief), or (2) pragmatic problems (an inability to articulate an understanding of false beliefs) and task complexity (an inability to follow the narrative or make appropriate inferences). Three experiments were conducted to determine why children might fail deception tasks, and results indicated that (1) children were no better at understanding deception whether they were "active deceivers" or observers of a deceptive act, and (2) children's difficulty appeared to be associated with a conceptual deficiency (e.g., they could leave clues that would lead another to a possible belief but not a false belief). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selection of moving and static objects for the control of spatially directed action.

Research studying visual selective attention has largely examined filtering tasks in which stationary targets are selected from stationary distractors by a physical cue such as location and identity is the reported attribute. During many interactions with the visual environment however, target stimuli are selected by what they are, whereas action is controlled by where the stimulus is located. This study demonstrates that the interference and negative priming effects observed in standard filtering tasks, which suggest that distractors are analyzed and subsequently inhibited during selection, are also observed when targets are selected on the basis of identity and spatial location is the reported attribute. Furthermore, experimental results suggest that inhibition associated with distracting objects in this new task is object-centered, so that if the object is moving through space, inhibition moves with it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Validity of young children's self-reports of their emotion in response to structured laboratory tasks.

Can young children report coherently on their emotions, and how do their reports contribute to our understanding of emotional development? Two-hundred six children ages 3 to 6 years participated in structured laboratory tasks designed to elicit a range of positive and negative emotions and indicated their emotional state following each task. Children's reports of their emotions meaningfully varied along with the nature of the different tasks during which they were collected (i.e., reports of negative and positive emotions differed across tasks designed to elicit those states). There were no sex differences on reports of any emotion and only small age differences. Multilevel modeling analyses demonstrated that children's self-reports of each emotion converged significantly with objective coding of expressions of those emotions across laboratory tasks; higher convergence for some emotions was associated with older age, higher verbal intelligence, and greater emotion-recognition abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's memory for the true and pretend identities of objects.

Two studies examined how children conceive of the true and pretend identities of an object used in object-substitution pretense. In each study, 3- and 4-year-olds were assessed for their memory for each identity of an object that they used in a previous episode of pretend play (Study 1) or observed someone else using (Study 2). More children correctly remembered the true than the pretend identity of the objects, and there was no contingency between their tendency to remember each identity Additionally, children's tendency to correctly specify each identity was related to their age and when (i.e., during or after the pretend episode) the task was given. The results were explained by factors affecting young children's ability to manage separate representations of true and pretend identities of objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is the dissociability of working memory systems for name identity, visual-object identity, and spatial location maintained in old age?

The dissociability of working memory for name identity (verbal information), visual objects, and spatial location was explored in 3 experiments. Consistent with previous results, the 3 working memory systems were dissociable in younger adults. Both younger and older adults showed involvement of name identity in an object identity task, and older adults showed this involvement in a spatial memory task. Results were interpreted as showing that the systems are generally separable but that involvement of 1 with another is possible and more likely in older adults. A 4th, correlational study showed that there is generalized decline in working memory systems in old age, with the age differences in memory mediated to a moderate extent by age-related differences in speed of processing. It was speculated that the specific, possibly strategic changes are independent of and take place against a backdrop of generalized loss of nervous system integrity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

SPECT scatter modelling in non-uniform attenuating objects

When young children appear to recognize that someone else is engaging in make-believe play, do they infer what the pretender is thinking? Are they aware that the pretender is thinking about a pretend scenario yet knows what the real situation is? Preschoolers ages 3-5 (N = 45) viewed scenes from the Barney & Friends television series depicting either make-believe or realistic actions. Children were questioned concerning the presence of pretense and the thoughts and beliefs of the TV characters. The children were also presented with false belief and appearance/reality theory of mind tasks. Children who identified when TV characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders' thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on false belief and appearance/reality tasks, but simply recognizing pretense was not. These data support the view that children initially learn to recognize pretense from contextual cues and are able to infer pretenders' beliefs only with further development of metarepresentational ability.     

The effect of catecholaminergic depletion within the prelimbic and infralimbic medial prefrontal cortex on recognition memory for recency, location, and objects.

There is good evidence that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in different aspects of recognition memory. However, the mPFC is a heterogeneous structure, and the contribution of the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) cortices to recognition memory has not been investigated. Similarly, the role of different neuromodulators within the mPFC in these processes is poorly understood. To this end, we tested animals with 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) lesions of the PL and IL mPFC on three tests of object recognition memory that required judgments about recency, object location, and object identity. In the recency task, lesions to both PL and IL severely impaired animals' ability to differentiate between old (earlier presented) and recently presented familiar objects. Relative to sham and PL animals, the IL lesion also disrupted performance on the object location task. However, both lesions left novel object recognition intact. These data confirm previous reports that the mPFC is not required for discriminations based on the relative familiarity of individual objects. However, these results demonstrate that catecholamines within the PL cortex are crucial for relative recency judgments and suggest a possible role for neural processing within the IL in the integration of information about object location. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rehabilitation of the handicapped child--what about the caregiver?

The mental health of caregivers of handicapped children (n = 68) and of caregivers of children with minor ailments (n = 40) was assessed using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). In the comparative study, the caregivers of handicapped children had a significantly higher mean score (6.8), which was above the threshold score of 4. This suggests that the task of caring for disabled children may have a stressful impact on the caregivers which may contribute to psychiatric morbidity. There is a need periodically to assess the mental health of the caregiver, even as the rehabilitation of the handicapped child progresses. Addressing the psychological disturbances in the caregiver should form part of the treatment of the handicapped child.     

Neuropsychological correlates of early symptoms of autism

Both the medial temporal lobe and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex have been implicated in autism. In the present study, performance on two neuropsychological tasks--one tapping the medial temporal lobe and related limbic structures, and another tapping the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was examined in relation to performance on tasks assessing autistic symptoms in young children with autism, and developmentally matched groups of children with Down syndrome or typical development. Autistic symptoms included orienting to social stimuli, immediate and deferred motor imitation, shared attention, responses to emotional stimuli, and symbolic play. Compared with children with Down syndrome and typically developing children, children with autism performed significantly worse on both the medial temporal lobe and dorsolateral prefrontal tasks, and on tasks assessing symptoms domains. For children with autism, the severity of autistic symptoms was strongly and consistently correlated with performance on the medial temporal lobe task, but not the dorsolateral prefrontal task. The hypothesis that autism is related to dysfunction of the medial temporal lobe and related limbic structures, such as the orbital prefrontal cortex, is discussed.     

Caregiver personality characteristics and adaptation to juvenile rheumatic disease.

Objective: To assess the impact of caregiver personality characteristics on the adaptation of children with juvenile rheumatic diseases (JRDs). Method: This study examined the relationships between caregivers' personality characteristics and adaptation among 59 children with JRDs. The NEO Five-Factor Inventory was administered to caregivers, and scores on each scale served as predictor variables. Criterion variables included child emotional and behavior problems, depression, self-esteem, and pain. Results: Pearson correlation coefficients and hierarchical regression analyses revealed that caregivers' personality scores were related to indexes of emotional functioning, depression, self-esteem, and pain. Conclusion: Identification of specific caregiver personality characteristics that enhance or detract from children's adaptation may facilitate early identification of risk and protective factors and the development of interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive factors and family structure associated with theory of mind development in young children.

Factors associated with individual variation in false belief understanding were examined. Sixty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on 4 standard false belief tasks. General language ability and verbal memory were found to be significant predictors of false belief understanding after the effects of age were partialled out, but nonverbal memory was not. There was evidence for a threshold effect in that children did not pass false belief tasks before they reached a certain level of linguistic ability. False belief scores were higher in children from larger families, after the effect of age and language had been partialled out. Family size was more strongly associated with false belief understanding in children who were less competent linguistically, suggesting that the presence of siblings can compensate for slower language development in developing false belief understanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Limitations on preschool children's knowledge about counting: Using counting to compare two sets.

Possible limitations on preschool children's understanding of counting were examined by asking twenty 3-year-olds and twenty 4-year-olds to judge the appropriateness of counting carried out by a puppet. The puppet was asked to count either to find out how many objects were present altogether or to find out whether every object in one subset could have a corresponding object from the other subset. Within each counting task, half of the time the puppet counted all of the objects together and half of the time it counted the two subsets separately. Children at both ages showed some differentiation between the two counting tasks and performed at an above-chance level on the how-many task but not on the compare-sets task. The most common individual response pattern among the 3-year-olds was to judge both kinds of counts to be appropriate on both tasks, whereas the most common individual response pattern among the 4-year-olds was to judge counting of all the objects together to be appropriate and counting of the two subsets separately to be inappropriate on both tasks. The fact that children managed to differentiate appropriately between the two counting tasks despite using these basically undifferentiated strategies suggests that correct judgment processes coexisted with their predominant strategies and competed with them to determine performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of logical search skills in infancy.

Presented 60 9–18 mo old Ss with manual search tasks involving the invisible displacement of objects. Ss were required to search 1 of 2 visited locations on the basis of critical information concerning the last place a hidden object was seen and the 1st place it was known to be missing. There were 2 task conditions: In the object-absent task, the object's container was shown to be empty after visiting the 1st and before visiting the 2nd location. In the object-present task, the object was shown to be still in the container after visiting the 1st location. The object was invisibly hidden at the 1st and 2nd locations, respectively, in the 2 tasks. Although the actual hiding could not be perceived, it could be inferred from the perceived sequence of events in each task. Results show that although 9-mo-olds frequently refused to search and 12-mo-olds were as likely to search the incorrect as the correct location, 15- and 18-mo-olds performed logical 1st searches. Analysis showed that 12-mo-olds preferred either spatial or temporal positions, while correct performance required the coordination of both types of information, a skill exhibited by the majority of 18-mo-olds. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's false-belief reasoning: Interpretation of messages is no easier than the classic task.

E. J. Robinson and P. Mitchell (see record 1992-34569-001) devised a message-desire discrepant task in which a speaker gives a message based on a false belief. A correct nonliteral interpretation of the message requires taking into account this false belief, which children were more likely to achieve in this task than in a classic prediction task. In 2 studies reported here, the comparison using more closely matched tasks was repeated. Study 3 followed the Robinson and Mitchell procedure precisely but failed to replicate the constrast reported previously. Although the message-desire discrepant task reveals early understanding that messages are the product of mental representations, it offers no advantage over the classic test in revealing false-belief reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The healing process for the multidisciplinary team: recovering post-inpatient suicide

1. With an inpatient suicide, the staff may experience grief for a variety of reasons. The staff member's perception of self as a competent mental health care provider may be destroyed. The caregiver may grieve the loss of an ideal. Some inpatient staff members mistakenly believe that suicide can always be prevented and that the multidisciplinary team can accurately assess all patients. 2. To successfully mourn a loss, Worden (1982) identified four tasks of grieving that must be completed: accept the reality of the loss; experience the pain of grief; adjust to an environment in which the deceased or lost object is missing; and withdraw emotional energy and reinvest it in another relationship. 3. Interventions to promote healing post-inpatient suicide must be aimed at individual caregivers and the multidisciplinary team. Individual caregivers will differ in their responses based on experiences, beliefs, values, and culture.     

Children’s understanding of second-order mental states.

The most popular topic in theory-of-mind research has been first-order false belief: the realization that it is possible to hold false beliefs about events in the world. A more advanced development is second-order false belief: the realization that it is possible to hold a false belief about someone else’s belief. This article reviews research directed to second-order false belief and other forms of higher order, recursive mentalistic reasoning. Three general issues are considered. Research directed to developmental changes indicates that preschoolers typically fail second-order tasks and that success emerges at about age 5 or 6, although results vary some with method of assessment. Research directed to the consequences of second-order competence has revealed positive relations with a number of other aspects of children’s development. Finally, measures of both language and executive function relate positively to performance on second-order tasks; the causal bases for the correlations, however, remain to be established. This article concludes with suggestions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of inhibitory processes in young children's difficulties with deception and false belief

This research examines whether children's difficulties with deception and false belief arise from a lack of inhibitory control rather than from a conceptual deficit. In 3 studies, 3-year-olds deceived frequently under conditions requiring relatively low inhibitory control (e.g., misleading pictorial cues or arrows) but failed to do so under conditions of high inhibitory control (deceptive pointing). Study 2 ruled out that the findings were due to social intimidation: Children were equally successful using an arrow to deceive under anonymous and public conditions. Study 3 indicated that, under well-controlled conditions, children did not reveal greater understanding of false belief in deceptive than nondeceptive conditions. The results of these studies suggest that children may have greater deceptive abilities than some earlier studies indicated, and that the source of their difficulty on deceptive pointing tasks lies in a failure of inhibitory control. More generally, it is argued that children's performance on false belief tasks is also likely to be affected by inhibition deficits.