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Theory of Mind - Y2 - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Predicting behaviour -
        
        2 year olds able to predict the behaviour based on desires - Wellman 1990
        
        3 years - beliefs as well as desires - Wellman 1990 - understanding beliefs about the location of books
        
        However, 3 year olds cannot predict a behaviour if it is based on false beliefs, only real beliefs - e.g. they knew books were on the shelf, so correctly predicted when the character in the story had the same belief which was correct
        
        Theory of mind is therefore said to be achieved when false beliefs can be identified and used to predict behaviour effectively - usually at about 4 years old, children can interpret and predict the behaviour of the people around them with a fair degree of accuracy, and during the following years they can develop more profound insights in social behaviour
  - - - Frith, 2003 - autistic children show islets of ability; in contrast to generally poor performance in some areas, in others they have a good if not better performance than typical (Grandin - visual learners but bad at algebra)
        
        Changing the way we label autism can impact the amount of people diagnosed, the comparability of samples in studies before and after a change and the reliability of diagnostic criteria - the expansion to an idea of a spectrum has changed diagnostic criteria and impacted treatment and resource availability
        
        Leslie and Thaiss (1992) - there is domain specificity in the representations autistic children understand; mental representation socially is impaired for example, but non-mental representation is not
        
        Baron Cohen et al (1986) - ASD children also struggle with other false belief stories - used mechanical (no people), behavioural (includes people, but you do not have to understand their thinking) and a mentalistic story (understanding beliefs)
        
        Sodian and Frith (1992) - those with ASD struggle with deception as they do not understand false belief
        
        Leslie and Thaiss (1992) - deficit in understanding mental representations, not all representations - particularly struggle with understanding the thoughts and beliefs of others
    - - Given that they struggle to understand independent beliefs, the beliefs of others and social interaction as lacking representations of beliefs impacts social understanding, it makes communication difficult and can lead to a confusing world, explaining the need for routine as some consistency and predictability can be maintained
        
        Helps us to understand social impairments and has stimulated much more research into previously unrecognised aspects of the disorder, but it does not explain specific language developments such as echolalia or islets of ability
        
        Poor performance does not indicate a deficit in the understanding of mind, but it is not a core impairment - it is a fundamental one; SAM allows understanding two people are looking at the same object, prompting understanding of perceptual mental states and desires
        -> Children with ASD lack this
        -> Baron-Cohen (1996) - screened 16,000 infants at the age of 18 months with 5 tests, including a shared attention test - only 12 children failed all five; when followed up at 42 months, nearly all of them had been diagnosed with ASD
        -> Lack of SAM could explain the later deficit in their understanding of mind
- - - - Perez-Zapata et al, 2016 - Modified strange stories - Australian protagonists v Chilean protagonists
        
        Exp 1 - 100 Australian adults
        -> Faster to respond and received higher scores for mental state stories for Australian protagonist relative to stories with Chilean protagonist
        
        Exp 2 - 120 Australian and 108 Chilean adults
        -> Faster to respond and received higher scores in the intra-cultural mindreading condition relative to the cross-cultural mindreading condition
      - Gonultas et al, 2020 - Modified strange stories - Turkish (ingroup), Syrian (similar outgroup), European (dissimilar outgroup) protagonists
        
        214 9-13 year olds
        
        Best performance for ingroup, followed by dissimilar outgroup, worst performance for similar outgroup
        
        Demonstrates that even within similar cultural backgrounds, other factors such as perceived threat from target group affect mentalizing - tasks are reductionist without these nuances
    - - Hackel et al, 2014 -
        
        Arbitrary groups - the minimal group paradigm (over-estimators and under-estimators defined through a dot estimation task, and the group has a fake social identity)
        
        Shown morphs between humans and computer-generated inanimate faces
        
        Assign a presence of mind to ingroup or outgroup morphs - need more humanness as an under-estimator to assign agency
        
        Required the characters to be more human-like to assign presence of mind when the character was out-group v ingroup
    - - Implications of not being able to mentalise with outgroups:
        
        Leads to discrimination and inability to work effectively in occupational / educational settings
        
        Inability to access healthcare, discrimination by jury bias
- - - - When does theory of mind develop - First order ToM (attributing beliefs, what Person A believes)
        
        Thought to develop at 4 years as children pass standard ToM tasks
        
        Anticipatory looking task - unexpected transfer type task -
        
        Teddy bear puts object in a box, agent is watching
        
        Participant is primed with knowing that the ball was put in the box as they are watching, and so after a flash and a chime they reach through the correct window to grab it from the box
        
        Agent knows what is happening as the bear transfers between boxes - thus, they pick the correct box
        
        Doorbell causes agent to look away - puppet returns, takes ball out and places it in another box whilst they are not looking
        
        Chime and window flash, and participants are asked to anticipate which window the hand will come through - measure where their eyes look
        
        Evidence that is develops as early as 25 months
        
        Southgate, Senju & Csibra, 2007 - 20 two year olds - eye tracking:
        
        Coded the location of the first saccade following illumination of the windows -
        -> Seventeen of the 20 infants gazed toward the correct window following illumination
        
        Coded the amount of time each infant focused on each window
        -> Infants spend almost twice as long focusing on the correct window than the incorrect window - hand does not come through
        
        Evidence that ToM develops early - result difference to Sally-Anne as they are testing for cognitive mechanism with this task
        -> WM is not involved in this task the same way as it is for the Sally-Anne task, and it also requires verbal understanding - explicit ToM may not be developed at this age but implicit would be
        
        However, paradigm is not well replicated - does not disprove results as other paradigms have shown this effect, even as young as 15 months, in violation of expectation tasks
      - Explicit or implicit theory of mind
        
        Implicit - eye tracking measures this more effectively:
        
        Develops earlier (~3 years)
        
        Fast
        
        Non-conscious, non-verbal
        
        Inflexible
        
        Cognitively efficieny
        
        Explicit - explicit ToM task test is Sally-Anne:
        
        Develops later (> 4 years)
        
        Slower
        
        Deliberate
        
        Flexible
        
        Cognitively demanding
    - - Second order false belief -
        Miller (2009) review:
        
        Pre-schoolers fail second order FBT, success emerges at age 5 or 6, all children pass about 7
        -> Confound of language - need language skills to understand the task, as well as social consequences of jokes
        
        Results vary between methods of assessments and exact questions posed
        
        ToM-2 competence positively related to other aspects of development, including social consequence
        
        Measures of both language and executive function relate positively to performance on ToM-2 tasks
        
        Does ToM continue to develop after early childhood?
        
        Third, fourth and fifth higher order ToM - is this possible?
        
        How can we test for this?
        -> More complex it becomes, the less intuitive it is - becomes cognitive problem solving and thus more explicit
        
        Development of ToM beyond childhood -
        
        Frith-Happe - animated triangles task:
        
        Requires making inferences about the kind of movement two animated triangles are involved in - have to develop different types of tasks for adults (ceiling and floor effects - majority pass or fail)
        -> Random, goal-directed and theory of mind
        -> Mentalising - the little triangle was hiding from the big triangle and surprised it
        --> Attribute characteristics, agency and other emotions - more likely in these tasks
        -> Goal-directed - big triangle was chasing the little triangle
        --> Physical interaction but no mental state
        --> Mentalising version is little triangle pretending they are not following big triangle
        -> Random - triangles are drifting around the screen
        
        Moriguchi et al, 2007 - brain imaging in 16 9-16 year olds:
        
        fMRI while watching the animated triangles - behaviour is needed to understand fMRI results
        
        Correlation between age and activation of mentalising related areas (MPFC)
        
        Devine & Hughes, 2013 -
        
        Strange stories (White et al, 2009) - subjects read short vignettes and are asked to explain why a character that says something which is not literally true
        -> Also used a silent film
        -> Successful performance requires attribution of desires, beliefs, intentions and higher order states of one character's belief about what other characters know
        -> mental state and control stories
        
        460 7-13 year olds - big sample for behavioural tasks -
        -> Strange stories (White et al, 2009) + silent films depicting similar situations
        -> Participants performance improved with age
        
        Dumontheil et al, 2010 -
        -> Director task by Keysar et al, 2003
        -> 179 7-28 year olds
        -> Less error with age - performance keeps improving adulthood with director task, control task plateaus at about 17 year old
        --> Mentalising still develops with age (no ceiling effects due to difficulty)
        
        ToM throughout the lifespan - Klindt et al, 2017:
        
        Large scale online study > 30,000 participants
        
        Used multiple mentalising tasks - first order and higher order ToM on an app
        -> lower order had higher correct answers than higher order
        -> ToM develops very quickly for lower order, but sharply declines at 70 - early development
        -> Higher order ToM - develops later but declines more gradually; maps onto executive function dysfunction and decline
        -> Mentalising happens across the lifespan
    - - Children pass classic FBT around age 4 - ToM-2 tasks by age 7
        
        Some evidence that implicit ToM develops earlier by age 2 - however there is still debate
        
        ToM continues to develop beyond early childhood, throughout the lifespan