Jason Low

Preschoolers' Implicit and Explicit False-Belief Understanding: Relations With Complex Syntactical Mastery

Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a characters mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct false-belief questions. Gaze was independent of complement mastery. These patterns held when other low-verbal false-belief tasks were considered and the predictive looking task was presented as a time-controlled film. While implicit (gaze) knowledge predicted explicit (verbal) false-belief understanding, complement mastery and cognitive flexibility also supported explicit reasoning. Overall, explicit false-belief understanding is complexly underpinned by implicit knowledge and input from higher-order systems of language and executive control.

Adaptive numerical competency in a food-hoarding songbird

Most animals can distinguish between small quantities (less than four) innately. Many animals can also distinguish between larger quantities after extensive training. However, the adaptive significance of numerical discriminations in wild animals is almost completely unknown. We conducted a series of experiments to test whether a food-hoarding songbird, the New Zealand robin Petroica australis, uses numerical judgements when retrieving and pilfering cached food. Different numbers of mealworms were presented sequentially to wild birds in a pair of artificial cache sites, which were then obscured from view. Robins frequently chose the site containing more prey, and the accuracy of their number discriminations declined linearly with the total number of prey concealed, rising above-chance expectations in trials containing up to 12 prey items. A series of complementary experiments showed that these results could not be explained by time, volume, orientation, order or sensory confounds. Lastly, a violation of expectancy experiment, in which birds were allowed to retrieve a fraction of the prey they were originally offered, showed that birds searched for longer when they expected to retrieve more prey. Overall results indicate that New Zealand robins use a sophisticated numerical sense to retrieve and pilfer stored food, thus providing a critical link in understanding the evolution of numerical competency.

Implicit and explicit theory of mind: State of the art

From their different vantage points, the contributors to this issue address the developmental puzzle of infants as young as 14 or 15 months (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007) displaying sensitivity to people’s mistaken false-belief-based behaviour in certain tasks, when it has proved difficult to show any such understanding before 3 or 4 years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) in many variations of the traditional false-belief test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Borrowing from the consciousness literature, these classes of tasks can be called indirect and direct tests. In the traditional falsebelief test and its variations, children are directly asked about the mistaken agent’s belief or behaviour, while in the tasks used with young infants any understanding has to be inferred indirectly from infants’ or toddlers’ spontaneous behaviour in the test situation. Baillargeon, Scott, and He (2010) used the cognate characterization of induced as opposed to spontaneous responding. Understanding shown in an indirect test when no such understanding is shown on the direct test is one of the hallmarks of implicit or unconscious knowledge (Merikle & Reingold, 1991). On these grounds, Perner and Clements (2000) spoke of implicit understanding of belief. The implicit– explicit distinction has however become a general expression of marking the intuitive difference between an inchoate earlier and a more robust later understanding.

Listening to Mozart does not improve children's spatial ability: Final curtains for the Mozart effect

We investigated the Mozart effect, as documented by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993), with school-aged children. Experiment 1 contrasted the spatial IQ scores of children who had listened to a Mozart sonata (K.448) with the scores of children who had listened to a piece of popular dance music in a pretest-post-test design. There was no significant main effect of music and no significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores for both groups. Owing to the non-significant findings, a second experiment was carried out. We used a methodology that had previously replicated the Mozart effect. Again, Expt. 2 did not support the claim that Mozarts music can enhance spatial performance. Groups performed similarly on the control test and the experimental test, irrespective of whether they listened to Mozart or to popular dance music. Since the two different designs produced similar findings, the data suggest that the Mozart effect is so ephemeral that it is questionable as to whether any practical application will come from it. In the discussion, we suggest more fruitful avenues for future research on the relationship between music and spatial performance: arousal and transfer of learning.

Attributing False Beliefs About Object Identity Reveals a Signature Blind Spot in Humans’ Efficient Mind-Reading System

How can human beings make significant but cognitively taxing inferences about others’ beliefs yet also effectively “mind read” in fast-moving social situations? We tested the idea that humans have two mind-reading systems: a flexible system and an efficient system that can make fast calculations because it has natural blind spots to the kinds of input it processes. We showed that the automatic gaze anticipations of 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults displayed a signature blind spot specific to calculating an actor’s false belief about object identity—a calculation that required the complex understanding that an object can be interpreted differently depending on one’s visual perspective. Participants’ deliberate verbal inferences demonstrated significant flexibility in calculations of another person’s beliefs. Our results show that quick, efficient mind reading eschews conceptual sophistication.

Large quantity discrimination by North Island robins (Petroica longipes)

While numerosity—representation and enumeration of different numbers of objects—and quantity discrimination in particular have been studied in a wide range of species, very little is known about the numerical abilities of animals in the wild. This study examined spontaneous relative quantity judgments (RQJs) by wild North Island robins (Petroica longipes) of New Zealand. In Experiment 1, robins were tested on a range of numerical values of up to 14 versus 16 items, which were sequentially presented and hidden. In Experiment 2, the same numerical contrasts were tested on a different group of subjects but quantities were presented as whole visible sets. Experiment 3 involved whole visible sets that comprised of exceedingly large quantities of up to 56 versus 64 items. While robins shared with other species a ratio-based representation system for representing very large values, they also appeared to have developed an object indexing system with an extended upper limit (well beyond 4) that may be an evolutionary response to ecological challenges faced by scatter-hoarding birds. These results suggest that cognitive mechanism influencing an understanding of physical quantity may be deployed more flexibly in some contexts than previously thought, and are discussed in light of findings across other mammalian and avian species.

Generativity and imagination in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from individual differences in children's impossible entity drawings

This study examined the cognitive underpinnings of spontaneous imagination in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by way of individual differences. Children with ASD (N = 27) and matched typically developing (TD) children were administered Karmiloff-Smiths (1990) imaginative drawing task, along with measures that tapped specific executive functions (generativity, visuospatial planning, and central coherence processing style) and false belief theory of mind (ToM) understanding. The ASD group drawings displayed deficits in imaginative content and a piecemeal pictorial style. ASD participants also showed group deficits in generativity, planning and ToM, and exhibited weak coherence. Individual differences in generativity were related to imaginative drawing content in the ASD group, and the association was mediated through planning ability. Variations in weak coherence were separately related to a piecemeal drawing style in the ASD group. Variations in generativity were also linked with imaginative drawing content in the TD group; the connection unfolded when it received pooled variance from receptive language ability, and thereupon mediated through false belief reasoning to cue imaginative content. Results are discussed in terms of how generativity plays a broad and important role for imagination in ASD and typical development, albeit in different ways.

Do children with autism use inner speech and visuospatial resources for the service of executive control? Evidence from suppression in dual tasks

Three experiments used dual-task suppression methodology to study the use of inner speech and visuospatial resources for mediating central executive performance by children with autism (CWA) and group-matched typically developing (TD) controls. Expt 1 revealed that CWA did not recruit inner speech to facilitate arithmetic task-switching performance: there was no effect of articulatory suppression (AS) on completion time for CWA compared to the TD group. Expt 2 revealed that suppression of visuospatial resources disrupted the task-switching performance of both CWA and TD groups. It also confirmed that the task-switching performance of CWA was significantly slowed by visuospatial compared to AS. Expt 3 showed that CWA also did not employ inner speech, compared to visuospatial resources, for implementing planning movements. Overall, compared to the mixture of representations used by the TD group for problem solving, CWA seemed to use visuospatial working memory resources but not inner speech to service executive control.

Structure and causal connections in children's on-line television narratives: What develops? ☆

Abstract This study investigated the role of event knowledge in childrens (Grades 1, 3, 5, 7) inference of narrative structure and causal coherence in television narratives. Children narrated on-line stories for a script-based television program presented as a canonical or non-canonical version. For the canonical version, all children produced well-structured stories through the inclusion of basic narrative and episodic components. They also showed evidence of causally relating the scenes. In contrast, for the non-canonical version first and third graders focused primarily on basic narrative components and related the scenes by means of elementary temporal connections rather than causal. Only fifth and seventh graders inferred episodic components and causal connections in the non-canonical version. Results suggest that younger childrens event knowledge allows them to infer narrative structure and causal connections in familiar script-based programs and that, with age, children become more flexible in using their event knowledge in inferring narrative structure and causal connections in less routine television narratives

Finnish and English Children's Color Use to Depict Affectively Characterized Figures.

Recent research has shown that children use colors systematically in relation to how they feel about certain colors and the figures that they draw. This study explored cultural differences between Finnish and English childrens use of color to represent figures with contrasting emotional characters. One hundred and eight children (54 Finnish, 54 English) were divided into two age groups (5–7 years and 7–9 years). All children colored three emotionally characterized drawings and rated their affect towards the 10 colors provided and the three differentially characterized figures. It was found that Finnish and English children differed in their use of color for drawings of neutral and nasty figures. The findings are discussed in terms of the need to explore the role of culture in mediating childrens use of color when drawing figures they feel negatively and positively towards.