Kevin J. Riggs

Is Belief Reasoning Automatic

Understanding the operating characteristics of theory of mind is essential for understanding how beliefs, desires, and other mental states are inferred, and for understanding the role such inferences could play in other cognitive processes. We present the first investigation of the automaticity of belief reasoning. In an incidental false-belief task, adult subjects responded more slowly to unexpected questions concerning another persons belief about an objects location than to questions concerning the objects real location. Results in other conditions showed that responses to belief questions were not necessarily slower than responses to reality questions, as subjects showed no difference in response times to belief and reality questions when they were instructed to track the persons beliefs about the objects location. The results suggest that adults do not ascribe beliefs to agents automatically.

Are errors in false belief tasks symptomatic of a broader difficulty with counterfactuality

Abstract When children acknowledge false belief they are handling a counterfactual situation. In three experiments 3-and 4-year-old children were given false belief tasks and physical state tasks which required similar handling of counterfactual situations but which did not require understanding about beliefs or representations: Children were asked to report what the state of the world might be now had an earlier event not occurred. The incidence of realist errors in the false belief and physical state tasks was significantly correlated independently of shared correlations with chronological age and receptive verbal ability. In a fourth experiment, children made significantly fewer realist errors when asked to infer a future hypothetical state. These results provide preliminary evidence consistent with the suggestion that pre-school childrens difficulty with false belief is symptomatic of a more general difficulty entertaining counterfactual situations.

Inhibitory and working memory demands of the day-night task in children

Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) investigated the development of inhibitory control in children aged 3½ – 7 years using the day–night task. In two studies we build on Gerstadt et al.s findings with a measure of inhibitory control that can be used throughout childhood. In Study 1 (twenty-four 3½-year-olds and sixteen 5-year-olds) we modified Gerstadt et al.s day–night task. Using this modified task we obtained further evidence for the development of inhibitory control in children between 3½ and 5-years-old. We also obtained data suggestive of more moderate working memory development. In Study 2 we tested 84 children aged between 3½ and 11 years. The aim was to determine how much inhibition and working memory taxed children of different ages. We obtained evidence that inhibitory demands were high and that inhibitory development was non-linear, with rapid improvements in children between 3½ and 5 years and only modest improvements thereafter. In contrast, working memory demands were low and working memory development was more linear. We interpret these findings as evidence that working memory has relatively little impact on performance in our modified version of the day–night task.

Subitizing in Tactile Perception

Department of Psychology, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom; Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, CNRS, and Rene Descartes University, Paris V, Boulogne-Billancourt, France; 3Laboratoire Images, Signaux et Systemes Inielligents, Universite Paris XII Val de Marne, Creteil, France; and 4Universite Paris XII Val de Marne, IUT de Creteil, Departement de GEII, Genie Electrique et Informatique Industrielle, Creteil, France PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Under what conditions do young children have difficulty inhibiting manual actions

Understanding how responses become prepotent is essential for understanding when inhibitory control is needed in everyday behavior. The authors investigated the conditions under which manual actions became prepotent in a go/no-go task. Children had to open boxes that contained stickers on go trials and leave shut boxes that were empty on no-go trials. In Experiment 1 (n = 40, mean age = 3.6 years), the authors obtained evidence consistent with this task requiring inhibitory control. Results of Experiment 2 (n = 40, mean age = 3.7 years) suggested that box opening was prepotent because (a) opening is the habitual action associated with boxes and (b) children planned to open boxes on go trials of the task. Experiment 3 (n = 96, mean age = 3.5 years) showed that even empty boxes elicited the same errors and that delaying responding reduced errors even though the delay occurred before the cue that indicated the correct response (contrary to a rule reflection account). Because the delay occurred after box presentation, performance was consistent with a transient activation account. Delay training might benefit children with weak inhibition.

Adaptive modelling and mindreading

This paper sets out to give sufficient detail to the notion of mental simulation to allow an appraisal of its contribution to ‘mindreading’ in the context of the ‘false-belief tasks’ used in developmental psychology. We first describe the reasoning strategy of ‘modified derivation’, which supports counterfactual reasoning. We then give an analysis of the logical structure of the standard false-belief tasks. We then show how modified derivation can be used in a hybrid strategy for mindreading in these tasks. We then formulate the hypothesis that children become able (around the age of 4 years) to pass these tasks when they acquire the counterfactual reasoning ability required in this strategy. We find this to be consistent with various empirical findings. We then discuss the implications for the theory/simulation debate, meta-representation and pretence.

Subitizing in congenitally blind adults

We investigated the role of vision in tactile enumeration within and outside the subitizing range. Congenitally blind and sighted (blindfolded) participants were asked to enumerate quickly and accurately the number of fingers stimulated. Both groups of participants enumerated one to three fingers quickly and accurately but were much slower and less accurate with four to nine fingers. Within the subitizing range, blind participants performed no differently from both sighted (blindfolded) and sighted-seeing participants. Outside of the subitizing range, blind and sighted-seeing participants showed better performance than did sighted-blindfolded participants, suggesting that lack of access to the predominant sensory modality does affect performance. Together, these findings further support the claim that subitizing is a general perceptual mechanism and demonstrate that vision is not necessary for the development of the subitizing mechanism.

Three- and 4-year-olds encode modeled actions in two ways leading to immediate imitation and delayed emulation.

When copying a models behavior with a tool, children tend to imitate (copy the specific actions to replicate the models goal) rather than emulate (bring about the models goal in the most efficient way). Tasks producing these findings test children immediately after the behavior is modeled. In 2 experiments, we investigated childrens copying behavior after a delay (of a week). In Experiment 1 (n = 90), we found that although 3- and 4-year-olds often imitate in the short term, they are more likely to emulate in the long term. Data from Experiment 2 (n = 80) were consistent with children remembering actions that were relevant to a causal narrative of the task. Overall, our data suggest that children simultaneously encode modeled behavior in 2 ways that lead to both imitation and emulation. In the discussion, we consider what kind of information leads children to emulate in the long term.

Under what conditions do children have difficulty in inhibiting imitation? Evidence for the importance of planning specific responses

The response set effect has been observed in a number of developmental tasks that are proposed to required inhibition. This effect has been interpreted as evidence that the specific responses children plan to make in these tasks become prepotent. Here we investigated whether there is a response set effect in the hand game. In this task, children need to suppress imitation and make a fist in response to a finger and point a finger in response to a fist. Following pilot data, we tested 7- and 11-year-olds (N=36, Experiment 1) and then 5- and 6-year-olds (N=40, Experiment 2). A response set effect was observed in the hand game with children 6years of age and older. Thus, we obtained evidence consistent with a domain-general intentional mechanism that modulates prepotency. In the General discussion, we consider how this mechanism may work and how our findings relate to current theories of imitation.

Thinking harder about false belief

Russell is right to claim that researchers should think harder about false belief [1]. Commenting on Riggs and Simpsons recent findings that young children have difficulty ascribing past true beliefs [2], he urges researchers to resist the conclusion that children have a problem with beliefs in general. Instead, he argues that childrens difficulty is with ‘currently false’ beliefs. He also reports on two alternative explanations for why children fail false-belief tasks: