The inference that others are subject to private events is almost universal among humans. Since no one has direct access to another person's private events, we have proposed this inference occurs because of: 1) The almost simultaneous occurrence a child's private kinesthetic stimuli and the visual stimuli produced by another person's motor act during imitation of motor acts; 2) The similarity b...

Little is known about the functional and neural architecture of social reasoning, one major obstacle being that we crucially lack the relevant tools to test potentially different social reasoning components. In the case of belief reasoning, previous studies have tried to separate the processes involved in belief reasoning per se from those involved in the processing of the high incidental deman...

Sybil attacks are a fundamental threat to the security of distributed system. There has been a growing interest in leveraging social network to mitigate Sybil attacks. We introduce Sybil belief a semi supervised learning framework to detect Sybil nodes. Sybil Belief takes a social network of the nodes in the system, a small set of known benign nodes, and, optionally, a small set of known Sybil’...

We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children’s development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a nonverbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005). This is well before the...

Language has been shown to play a key role in the development of a child's theory of mind, but its role in adult belief reasoning remains unclear. One recent study used verbal and nonverbal interference during a false-belief task to show that accurate belief reasoning in adults necessarily requires language (Newton & de Villiers, 2007). The strength of this inference depends on the cognitive pr...

Under what conditions do people automatically encode and track the mental states of others? A recent investigation showed that when subjects are instructed to track the location of an object but are not instructed to track a belief about that location in a non-verbal false-belief task, they respond more slowly to questions about an agent's belief, suggesting that belief information was not enco...

Recent studies suggest that by the second year of life, infants can attribute false beliefs to agents. However, prior studies have largely focused on infants' ability to predict a mistaken agent's physical actions on objects. The present research investigated whether 20-month-old infants could also reason about belief-based emotional displays. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants viewed an agent who...

Misperceptions about politics and health can undermine public debate and distort people’s choices and behavior. Why do people hold these false or unsupported beliefs and why is it so difficult to change their minds? An emerging literature examines the difficulty of correcting false or unsupported beliefs and the reasons for this resistance, but relatively little is known about the sources of mi...

A knowledge system S describing a part of real world does in general not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world. A false belief may suggest wrong decisions and lead to harmful actions. So an important goal is to make false beliefs as unlikely as possible. This work intr...

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief tasks, but not on false photograph tasks. Study 2 (...