This study employed a multiple baseline, across-participants, single-subject design to investigate the feasibility of an individual, narrative-based, social problem-solving intervention on the social problem-solving, narrative, and theory of mind (ToM) abilities of 3 incarcerated adolescent youth offenders identified as having emotional…

This paper problematizes contemporary cultural understandings of autism. We make use of the developmental psychology concepts of "Theory of Mind" and "mindblindness" to uncover the meaning of autism as expressed in these concepts. Our concern is that autism is depicted as a puzzle and that this depiction governs not only the way Western culture…

As adults, we know that others' mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others' false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed…

A role for rostral prefrontal cortex (BA10) has been proposed in multitasking, in particular, the selection and maintenance of higher order internal goals while other sub-goals are being performed. BA10 has also been implicated in the ability to infer someone else's feelings and thoughts, often referred to as theory of mind. While most of the data…

Michael Polanyi's conceptions of tacit knowing and emergent being are used to correct a reductionism that developed from, or reacted against, the excesses of several Cartesian assumptions: (a) the method of universal doubt; (b) the emphasis on reductive analysis to unshakeable foundations, via connections between clear and distinct ideas; (c) the…

Camp Campus is a 1-week campus experience for juniors or seniors in high school or high school graduates who are diagnosed with high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, or a related social communication disorder and who plan to attend college. Participants experience campus life by partaking of campus services, living and dining on campus,…

Background: Research on retelling ability and cognition is limited in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and speech impairment. Aims: To explore the impact of expressive and receptive language, narrative discourse dimensions (Narrative Assessment Profile measures), auditory and visual memory, theory of mind (ToM) and non-verbal cognition on the…

Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind holds that language mediates thought. According to the theory, speech does not merely put completed thought into words; rather, it is a tool to refine thought as it evolves in real time. This study investigated from a sociocultural theory of mind perspective how nine beginning learners of Latin used private…

We investigated cultural influences on young children's acquisition of social-cognitive concepts. A theory of mind (ToM) scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) was given to 129 children (71 boys, 58 girls) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 7 years 10 months. The children were from three distinct cultural groups: (a) trash pickers…

Thinking about other people's thoughts recruits a specific group of brain regions, including the temporo-parietal junctions (TPJ), precuneus (PC), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). The same brain regions were recruited when children (N = 20, 5-11 years) and adults (N = 8) listened to descriptions of characters' mental states, compared to…

Many authors have argued that infants understand goals, intentions, and beliefs. We posit that infants' success on such tasks might instead reveal an understanding of behaviour, that infants' proficient statistical learning abilities might enable such insights, and that maternal talk scaffolds children's learning about the social world as well. We…

Language has been shown to play a key role in the development of a child's theory of mind, but its role in adult belief reasoning remains unclear. One recent study used verbal and nonverbal interference during a false-belief task to show that accurate belief reasoning in adults necessarily requires language (Newton & de Villiers, 2007). The…

This study reports on a new false belief measure in a sample of 124 children and adolescents with or without high functioning autism (HFASD). In the classic paradigm, a participant predicts in which of two discrete locations a deceived protagonist will look for an object. In the current Sandbox task, the object is buried and reburied in a sandbox,…

This study investigates the relationship between mental-state language and theory of mind in primary school children. The participants were 110 primary school students (mean age = 9 years and 7 months; SD = 12.7 months). They were evenly divided by gender and belonged to two age groups (8- and 10-year-olds). Linguistic, metacognitive and cognitive…

In an experimental design, we examined the effects of middle-term training in social information processing (SIP) and in Theory of Mind (ToM) on preschoolers' social cognition and social adjustment. 48 preschoolers took part in a pre-test and post-test session involving cognitive, socio-cognitive and social adjustment (direct and indirect)…