We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When…

According to current accounts of social cognition, the emergence of verbal and non-verbal components of social perception might rely on the acquisition of different cognitive abilities. These components might be differently sensitive to the pattern of neuropsychological impairments in congenital neurodevelopmental disorders. Here, we explored the…

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…

Educational research regularly claims, with lots of evidence, that humans learn from experience. However, experience is composed of outer and inner sensations. Thus, if humans learn from experience, we would expect that educational research would be replete with work on sensation. Yet sensation in the wild, outside laboratory studies, plays no…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…

If educators presuppose that brain and mind are synonymous, perhaps it is out of necessity. Such an equivalency might be required in order for mind to be accessible, knowable and a "thing" like the brain is. Such a presupposition, that mind is a thing which we can understand nonetheless rests on an insecure foundation. As suggested by…

Background: Social communication problems are common in adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), particularly problems in spoken discourse. Social communication problems are thought to reflect underlying cognitive impairments. Aims: To measure the contribution of two cognitive processes, executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM), to the…

Whenever the author explains the brain to her second-grade students, the look on their faces is one of simultaneous fascination and relief. What caught her off guard was the relief. In retrospect, it makes pure sense. Of course it was a relief for them to realize that they could affect their brains and its abilities--that nothing was set in stone.…

Empathy describes an individual's ability to understand and feel the other. In this article, we review recent theoretical approaches to the study of empathy. Recent evidence supports 2 possible empathy systems: an emotional system and a cognitive system. These processes are served by separate, albeit interacting, brain networks. When a cognitive…

The development of fMRI techniques has generated a boom of neuroscience research across the psychological sciences, and revealed neural correlates for many psychological phenomena seen as central to the human experience (e.g., morality, agency). Meanwhile, the rise of neuroscience has reignited old debates over mind-body dualism and the soul.…

Alison Gopnik, PhD, a researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, responds to questions about the ways researchers are discovering the complex processes of early cognitive development. Dr. Gopnik shares some of the creative research methods that are demonstrating how infants are figuring out what is going on in the mind of…

From its inception, the field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) has been conceived as an interdisciplinary science, and with good reason: The phenomena the field aims to understand often arise from interactions among multiple factors, span levels of analysis, and are context dependent. In this article, we argue that to reach its potential as an…

Theory of mind requires belief- "and" desire-understanding. Event-related brain potential (ERP) research on belief- and desire-reasoning in adults found mid-frontal activations for both desires and beliefs, and selective right-posterior activations "only" for beliefs. Developmentally, children understand desires before beliefs; thus, a critical…

The efficacy of a peer-mediated, theatre-based intervention on social competence in participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was tested. Thirty 8-to-14 year-olds with ASD were randomly assigned to the treatment (n = 17) or a wait-list control (n = 13) group. Immediately after treatment, group effects were seen on social ability,…

The potential utility of a distinction between "automatic (or spontaneous) and implicit" versus "controlled and explicit" processes in theory of mind (ToM) is undercut by the fact that the terms can be employed to describe different but related distinctions within cognitive systems serving that function. These include distinctions in the…