Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western…

The mechanisms that support infant action processing are thought to be involved in the development of later social cognition. While a growing body of research demonstrates longitudinal links between action processing and explicit theory of mind (TOM), it remains unclear why this link emerges in some measures of action encoding and not others. In…

The ability to deceive is a key milestone in social cognitive development for typically developing individuals. In this scoping review, we systematically searched the literature to summarise research on deceptive behaviour in autism and identify gaps in knowledge. Across the 28 studies identified, three main themes were synthesised, with seven…

The study used an eye-tracking task to investigate whether preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to make inferences about others' behavior in terms of their mental states in a social setting. Fifty typically developing (TD) 4- and 5-year-olds and 22 5-year-olds with ASD participated in the study, where their eye-movements…

Research on early false belief understanding has entirely relied on affect-neutral measures such as judgments (standard tasks), attentional allocation (looking duration, preferential looking, anticipatory looking), or active intervention. We used a novel, affective measure to test whether preschoolers affectively anticipate another's misguided…

The ability to regulate behaviors and emotions depends in part on the ability to flexibly monitor one's own progress toward a goal. Atypical patterns of response monitoring have been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the current study we examined the error related negativity (ERN), an electrophysiological index…

Previous research indicates that children hold negative beliefs about peers with foreign accents, physical disabilities, and people who are obese. The current study examined skills associated with individual differences in children's social judgements about these typically stereotyped groups. Theory of mind, memory, and cognitive inhibition were…

It is argued that self-regulation skill is necessary both for displaying constructive behaviour and for controlling negative social behaviour, and self-regulation might affect social behaviours by increasing the ability to understand others' minds. In this research, in order to examine different aspects of self-regulation and their similarities…

Nowadays, we are surrounded by artifacts that are capable of adaptive behavior, such as electric pots, boiler timers, automatic doors, and robots. The literature concerning human beings' conceptions of "traditional" artifacts is vast, however, little is known about our conceptions of behaving artifacts, nor of the influence of the…

It has been suggested that infants' performance on the false belief task can be explained by the use of behavioural rules. To test this hypothesis, 18-month-old infants were trained to learn the new rule that an object that disappeared in location A could be found in location B. Infants were then administered a false belief task based on the…

Children of ages 3-5 ("N" = 62) were assessed by using standard theory-of-mind tasks and unusual belief tasks related to false information and beliefs endorsing violations of moral (welfare and fairness) and social conventional (school rules) domains. Younger children (under 5 years) did not accurately attribute unusual factual beliefs…

Behaving in a socially competent manner is a complex process that requires the coordination of a number of cognitive skills. The present study examined the unique contributions of executive functions (i.e., inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility), theory of mind, and verbal skills to socially competent behaviours during social interactions.…

Using a new paradigm for measuring children's saving behaviors involving two marble games differing in desirability, we assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds saved marbles for future use, saved increasingly on a second trial, saved increasingly with age, and were sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. We also assessed whether…

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so-called "alternative desires" were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological…