For more than two decades, research has focused on the understanding of pretence as an important means for young children to conceptualise the mind. Many use the phrase "mental representation" to a mental model of some entity or concept, which describes what is inside the minds of young children in relation to a real-world situation or…

Few tools are available to comprehensively describe the unique social-emotional skill profiles of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study describes the usability, reliability, and validity of SELweb, a normed, web-based assessment designed to measure four core social-emotional domains, when used to measure these skills in a…

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…

The purpose of this study was to specify the development of and links between executive functioning and theory of mind during middle childhood. One hundred four 7- to 12-year-old children completed a battery of age-appropriate tasks measuring working memory, inhibition, flexibility, theory of mind, and vocabulary. As expected, spatial working…

Attention is crucial for effective learning. There is an emerging research trend that suggests attention can be improved by changing the structure of the learning task, leading to increased learning. This chapter reviews and reanalyzes studies of attention in educational settings with respect to the structure of the learning task. This analysis is…

Background: Children's bullying involvement may arise from biases and deficiencies in social information processing, and it is important to consider cognitive and emotional aspects of bullying because social cognition is an important aspect of children's social skills and their ability to get along with others. It is also important to understand…

We investigated "scalar implicature" in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12-18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when…

The two prior studies that have examined associations between the sibling constellation and theory of mind in autism spectrum disorder yielded discrepant findings. Thus, efforts to better understand the sibling-theory of mind link in autism spectrum disorder are necessary. This study examined a sample of prekindergarten- and kindergarten-aged…

In an attempt to broaden participation in STEM, a new type of high school is emerging, high schools which include a focus on engineering, have few or no academic admission criteria, and actively involve students of all levels of ability, known as Inclusive STEM High Schools (ISHSs). One aspect of successful ISHSs includes the intentional and…

Performance of a group of 35 youth and adults with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) was compared with a typical developing (TD) group on three Advanced Theory of Mind tests. The distinction between the social-cognitive and social-perceptual components of Theory of Mind was also explored. The HFA group had more difficulties in all tasks. Performance…

Despite the increasing utilisation of mindfulness-based interventions in children, research investigating the impact of these interventions in children is still in its infancy. One significant gap in the literature is the general omission of the child's voice in how they experience and benefit from mindfulness-based intervention. Therefore, the…

Background: Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether…

Children under 4 years of age often evaluate belief reports based on reality instead of beliefs. They tend to reject sentences like, "John thinks that giraffes have stripes" on the grounds that giraffes do not have stripes. Previous accounts have proposed that such judgments reflect immature Theory of Mind or immature syntactic/semantic…

Sibling relationships are argued to offer a rich social context for the development of young children's theory of mind (ToM). There is evidence that the presence of siblings, particularly older siblings, may promote preschoolers' ToM, but it has not been investigated among toddlers. This study evaluated differences in early manifestations of ToM…

The present study examined the relationships between shyness, a number of personal and interpersonal variables (i.e. social skills, self-esteem, attachment style, advanced Theory of Mind skills and peer relations) in a sample of 243 Greek pre-adolescents. Participants completed self-reports of the variables. Results indicated that females scored…