Evidence for successful socio-cognitive training in typical adults is rare. This study attempted to improve Theory of Mind (ToM) and visual perspective taking in healthy adults by training participants to either imitate or to inhibit imitation. Twenty-four hours after training, all participants completed tests of ToM and visual perspective taking.…

Older adults often perform poorly on Theory of Mind (ToM) tests that require understanding of others' beliefs and intentions. The course and specificity of age changes in belief reasoning across the adult lifespan is unclear, as is the cause of the age effects. Cognitive and neuropsychological models predict that two types of processing might…

Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other "theory of mind" processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task…

The time-course of representing others' perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a character's basic preferences (e.g. "Tom's favourite colour is pink") and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to…