Individuals with ASD display incompetency in developing the "Theory of Mind" (ToM), a mechanism that allows humans to interpret others' intentions and reciprocate actions, leading to difficulty in social communication and interaction. The Simulation Theory of ToM proposes that the brain constructs a simulation of others' states of mind…

The present study evaluates the test-retest reliability of six theory of mind (ToM) tasks that measured cognitive, affective, and spontaneous ToM in 7 to 11 year-old children with autism spectrum disorder. Our results revealed considerable variation in test-retest reliability depending on the type of ToM task, which ranged from poor to good with…

Background: This preregistered study compares adolescents with mild-to-borderline intellectual disability (MBID) and typically developing (TD) adolescents on their susceptibility to peer influence. To understand why adolescents with MBID are susceptible to peer influence, links with inhibition, Theory of Mind (ToM) and negative interpretation bias…

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept…

This paper gives four examples of the use of short speculative fiction for teaching different aspects of information privacy. Information privacy is multi-faceted; as an area of study it intersects with a number of fields. A non-exhaustive list could include: law, information systems, decision science, marketing, management, philosophy,…

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…

Although much is known about supporting preschoolers' alphabet knowledge, less is known about instructional moves that support preschoolers' narrative comprehension or how preschoolers' developing cognitive skills may support their narrative comprehension development. This school-university partnership project examined relations of preschoolers'…

Understanding emotions based on false beliefs is a necessary component of theory of mind. Previous research has indicated a lag in children's understanding of belief-based emotions as compared to false beliefs. Experiment 1 involved 83 Chinese 3- to 5-year-old children who were tested for the developmental change of the belief-emotion lag.…

Previous research has shown that linguistic cues such as mental and modal verbs can influence young children's judgments about the reliability of informants. Further, certain languages include grammatical morphemes (i.e. evidential markers), which clarify the source of information coming from testimony (e.g., Bulgarian, Japanese, Turkish).…

Two studies of 100 children aged 3-12 years examined theory of mind (ToM) understanding via explanations and predictions in hearing preschoolers and ToM-delayed deaf children. Study 1's 75 children (31 deaf; 44 hearing) displayed an "explanation advantage," devising valid epistemic ToM explanations despite failing simpler forced-choice…

Mind wandering constitutes a major part of everyday experience and is inherently related to how we feel and identify ourselves. Thus, probing the character and content of thoughts and feelings experienced during mind-wandering episodes could lead to a better understanding of the human mind in health and disease. How mind wandering and spontaneous…

Theory of mind (ToM) is crucial for social interactions. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development. However, it is unclear whether this is the case for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) before and around the second year of life. The…

In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some 'and possibly all' dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("'Not all' dogs are mammals," known as a "scalar implicature"). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the…

Theory of mind (ToM) allows people to understand their own and others' behaviour, crediting it with intentions, desires and beliefs. In the case of parenting, maternal reflective function unfolds within child-caregiver interactions, and previous studies have pointed out this variable as necessary for positive care. In the present study we sought…

The present study examined the way in which behavioural difficulties in cool and hot EFs relate to measures of cognitive and affective ToM in preschoolers. A total of 144 children between 35 and 71 months were assessed with a first-order false-belief task (measuring cognitive ToM), the Test of Emotion Comprehension (measuring affective ToM) and a…