Siblings,Theory of Mind,and Executive Functioning in Children Aged 3–6 Years: New Longitudinal Evidence

Longitudinal data were obtained from 157 children aged 3 years 3 months to 5 years 6 months at Time 1. At Time 2 these children had aged an average of 12 months. Theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) were measured at both time points. Results suggest that Time 1 ToM scores predict Time 2 EF scores. Detailed examination of sibling influences suggests that benefits—in terms of advanced ToM development—accrue to children with siblings versus without, and to those with a larger number of child‐aged siblings. Any advance in either area (ToM or EF) is likely to benefit the other, and early sibling interaction appears to act as a catalyst.     

Relations Between False Belief Understanding and Executive Function in Early Childhood: A Meta‐Analysis

The association between executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) has been hotly debated for 20 years. Competing accounts focus on: task demands, conceptual overlap, or functional ties. Findings from this meta‐analytic review of 102 studies (representing 9,994 participants aged 3–6 years) indicate that the moderate association between EF and one key aspect of ToM, false belief understanding (FBU) is: (a) similar for children from different cultures, (b) largely consistent across distinct EF tasks, but varies across different types of false belief task, and (c) is asymmetric in that early individual differences in EF predict later variation in FBU but not vice versa. These findings support a hybrid emergence‐expression account and highlight new directions for research.     

The Moving Window Technique: A Window Into Developmental Changes in Attention During Facial Emotion Recognition

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5–12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse‐controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age‐related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11–12 years and reached significance in adulthood. This left‐eye bias is consistent with previous eye tracking research and findings of a perceptual bias for the left side of faces. These results suggest that a strategic attentional bias to the left eye begins to emerge at age 11–12 years and is likely established sometime in adolescence.     

Changes in Sensory Dominance During Childhood: Converging Evidence From the Colavita Effect and the Sound‐Induced Flash Illusion

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6–7, 9–10, and 11–12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6–7, 9–10, and 11–12 years) were tested on the sound‐induced flash illusion (Experiment 2). In both experiments, an auditory dominance emerged in 6‐ to 7‐year‐old children compared to older children. Adult‐like visual dominance started to emerge from 9 to 10 years of age, and consolidated in 11‐ to 12‐year‐old children. These findings show that auditory dominance persists up to 6 years, but switches to visual dominance during the first school years.     

Three‐Year‐Olds’ Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment

When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3‐year‐old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how to play, or (c) the apparatus broke. The subject child reacted differently in the three cases, protesting normatively against defection (with emotional arousal and later tattling), teaching when the partner seemed to be ignorant, or simply blaming the apparatus when it broke. These results suggest that 3‐year‐old children are competent in making appropriate normative evaluations of intentions and obligations of collaborative partners.     

Young Children’s Memories for Social Actions: Influences of Age,Theory of Mind,and Motor Complexity

Children learn actions performed by a social partner better when they misremember these actions as their own. Identifying the factors that alter the propensity to make appropriation errors is critical for optimizing social learning. In two experiments (N = 110), we investigate the developmental trajectory of appropriation errors and examine social-cognitive and motor-related factors in 3- to 8-year-olds. Children with better theory of mind (ToM) skills made fewer appropriation errors for motorically complex actions. Appropriation errors did not differ as a function of ToM if children could perform the corresponding actions. A second experiment replicated this effect and found no influence of collaborative context on appropriation errors. This research sheds light on the complex relations among development, social-cognition, and motor-related factors.     

The Contribution of Symbolic Skills to the Development of an Explicit Theory of Mind

Theorists have speculated about the symbolic underpinnings of theory of mind (ToM), but no study has examined them across the main developmental span of ToM. Here, the onset of symbolic understandings in three domains (pretend play, language, and understanding representations) and ToM was examined. Fifty‐eight children were tested on batteries of tasks four times from ages 2.5 to 5 years. Some significant interrelations among variables were seen at each age level. Canonical correlation analysis found that a subset of the symbolic variables was significantly related to ToM at ages 4 and 5, providing the best evidence to date that ToM is undergirded by a symbolic element that also supports language, pretend play, and representational understanding.     

Meta‐Analysis of Theory of Mind and Peer Popularity in the Preschool and Early School Years

It has been argued that children who possess an advanced theory of mind (ToM) are viewed positively by their peers, but the empirical findings are mixed. This meta‐analysis of 20 studies including 2,096 children (aged from 2 years, 8 months to 10 years) revealed a significant overall association (r = .19) indicating that children with higher ToM scores were also more popular in their peer group. The effect did not vary with age. The effect was weaker for boys (r = .12) compared to girls (r = .30). ToM was more strongly associated with popularity (r = .23) than with rejection (r = .13). These findings confirm that ToM development has significant implications for children's peer relationships.     

Training Preschoolers on First‐Order False Belief Understanding: Transfer on Advanced ToM Skills and Metamemory

This study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and metamemory knowledge using a training methodology. Sixty‐two 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: A first‐order false belief (ToM) and a control condition. Intervention and control groups were equivalent at pretest for age, parents' education, verbal ability, inhibition, and ToM. Results showed that after the intervention children in the ToM group improved in their first‐order false belief understanding significantly more than children in the control condition. Crucially, the positive effect of the ToM intervention was stable over 2 months and generalized to more complex ToM tasks and metamemory.     

Mini managers: Children strategically divide cognitive labor among collaborators,but with a self-serving bias

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.     

Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences

Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in‐group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3–8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences task, participants saw pairs of children (White, Black, and Asian) and chose with whom they most wanted to socially affiliate. Biracial children showed flexibility in racial identification during learning and social tasks. However, minority‐primed biracial children were not more likely than monoracial minorities to socially affiliate with primed racial in‐group members, indicating their in‐group preferences are contextually based.     

Differences in Established Joint Attention in Hearing-Hearing and Hearing-Deaf Mother-Child Dyads: Associations With Social Competence,Settings, and Tasks

The authors examined relations among observed joint attention, maternal report of child’s social competence, setting (home vs. laboratory), task (unstructured vs. semi-structured), and dyad type [hearing mother–hearing child (n = 55, M_age = 25.8 months) vs. hearing mother–deaf child (n = 27, M_age = 26.9 months)]. Hearing child dyads scored higher on joint attention during unstructured tasks, especially in their home environment. Hearing child dyads displayed similar joint attention to deaf toddler dyads when they engaged in a semi-structured task, but higher on these measures during unstructured free play. Unlike hearing children, joint attention was differentially related to social competence in deaf children, with relatively higher versus lower social competence depending on relatively high versus low observed joint attention, respectively.     

Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind

This research examined the relation between individual differences in inhibitory control (IC; a central component of executive functioning) and theory-of-mind (ToM) performance in preschool-age children. Across two sessions, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 107) were given multitask batteries measuring IC and ToM. Inhibitory control was strongly related to ToM, r = .66, p < .001. This relation remained significant controlling for age, gender, verbal ability, motor sequencing, family size, and performance on pretend-action and mental state control tasks. Inhibitory tasks requiring a novel response in the face of a conflicting prepotent response (Conflict scale) and those requiring the delay of a prepotent response (Delay scale) were significantly related to ToM. The Conflict scale, however, significantly predicted ToM performance over and above the Delay scale and control measures, whereas the Delay scale was not significant in a corresponding analysis. These findings suggest that IC may be a crucial enabling factor for ToM development, possibly affecting both the emergence and expression of mental state knowledge. The implications of the findings for a variety of executive accounts of ToM are discussed.     

Theory of Mind Predicts Emotion Knowledge Development in Head Start Children

Research Findings: Emotion knowledge (EK) enables children to identify emotions in themselves and others, and its development facilitates emotion recognition in complex social situations. Sociocognitive processes, such as theory of mind (ToM), may contribute to developing EK by helping children realize the inherent variability associated with emotion expression across individuals and situations. The present study explored how ToM, particularly false belief understanding, in preschool predicts children's developing EK in kindergarten. Participants were 60 Head Start children ages 3 to 5 years. ToM and EK measures were obtained from standardized child tasks. ToM scores were positively related to performance on an EK task in kindergarten after we controlled for preschool levels of EK and verbal ability. Exploratory analyses provided preliminary evidence that ToM serves as an indirect effect between verbal ability and EK. Practice or Policy: Early intervention programs may benefit from including lessons on ToM to help promote socioemotional learning, specifically EK. This consideration may be most fruitful when the targeted population is at risk.     

Language facility and theory of mind development in deaf children

Deaf children with signing parents, nonnative signing deaf children, children from a hearing impaired unit (HIU), and oral deaf children were tested on three first-order theory of mind (ToM) tasks--a subset was also given a second-order task (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). A British Sign Language (BSL) receptive language task (Herman, Holmes, & Woll, 1999) and four nonverbal executive function tasks were also administered. The new BSL task allowed, for the first time, the receptive language abilities of deaf children to be measured alongside ToM abilities. Hearing children acted as controls. These children were given the same tasks, except the British Picture Vocabulary Scale was substituted for the BSL task. Language ability correlated positively and significantly with ToM ability, and age was correlated with language ability for both the deaf and hearing children. Age, however, underpinned the relationship between ToM and language for deaf children with signing parents and hearing children but not for nonnative signing, HIU, or oral deaf children. Executive function performance in deaf children was not related to ToM ability. A subset of hearing children, matched on age and language standard scores with signing deaf children, passed significantly more ToM tasks than the deaf children did. The findings are discussed with respect to the hypotheses proposed by Peterson and Siegal (1995, 2000) and Courtin (2000).     

Why We Think We Can't Dance: Theory of Mind and Children's Desire to Perform

Theory of mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3‐ to 12‐year‐olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated with health and well‐being, such as singing and dancing. One hundred and fifty‐nine middle‐class children from diverse backgrounds in a Northeastern U.S. metropolitan area completed the study in 2011. The development of ToM is associated with decreases in self‐esteem, which in turn predicts decreases in children's willingness to perform. This shift away from performance begins at age 4 (when ToM begins to develop), years before children enter puberty.     

Children's Judgments About Prosocial Decisions and Emotions: Gender of the Helper and Recipient Matters

Children ages 5–13 years (N = 82) responded to prosocial and prohibitive moral dilemmas featuring characters whose desires conflicted with another person's need for help or ownership rights. The gender of the characters matched for half the trials (in‐group version) and mismatched for the other half (out‐group version). Both boys and girls judged that people would more likely help and not harm the gender in‐group versus out‐group. Only girls exhibited gender bias in emotion attributions, expecting girls to feel happier helping girls and better ignoring the needs of boys. With increasing age, children exhibited greater awareness of the emotional benefits of prosocial sacrifice and made stronger distinctions by need level when evaluating prosocial decisions, obligations, and permissibility.     

Lying and Theory of Mind: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis investigated the link between lying and theory-of-mind (ToM) by integrating findings from 81 studies involving 7,826 children between 2 and 14 years of age from 14 different collectivist and individualist cultures. Overall, there was a small, significant positive association (r = .23). Four main moderators were examined: facet of lying (understanding, instigated production, spontaneous production, maintenance); valence of lies (antisocial, prosocial); type of ToM (first-order, second-order); and culture (collectivist, individualist). Facet of lying and type of ToM were significant moderators. ToM was positively related to all facets of lying, but most strongly linked to lie maintenance and weakest for spontaneous production. Both first-order and second-order ToM were positively related to lying, but the link was stronger for the former.     

Longitudinal Theory of Mind (ToM) Development From Preschool to Adolescence With and Without ToM Delay

Longitudinal tracking of 107 three- to-thirteen-year-olds in a cross-sequential design showed a 6-step theory of mind (ToM) sequence identified by a few past cross-sectional studies validly depicted longitudinal ToM development from early to middle childhood for typically developing (TD) children and those with ToM delays owing to deafness or autism. Substantively, all groups showed ToM progress throughout middle childhood. Atypical development was more extended and began and ended at lower levels than for TD children. Yet most children in all groups progressed over the study's mean 1.5 years. Findings help resolve theoretical debates about ToM development for children with and without delay and gain strength and weight via their applicability to three disparate groups varying in ToM timing and sequencing.     

Language and Cognitive Predictors of Text Comprehension: Evidence From Multivariate Analysis

Using data from children in South Korea (N = 145, M_age = 6.08), it was determined how low‐level language and cognitive skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and working memory) and high‐level cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and theory of mind [ToM]) are related to listening comprehension and whether listening comprehension and word reading mediate the relations of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension. Low‐level skills predicted comprehension monitoring and ToM, which in turn predicted listening comprehension. Vocabulary and syntactic knowledge were also directly related to listening comprehension, whereas working memory was indirectly related via comprehension monitoring and ToM. Listening comprehension and word reading completely mediated the relations of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension.