Deficits in social cognition may impair the ability to negotiate social transactions and relationships and contribute to socio emotional difficulties experienced by some postinstitutionalized children. We examined false belief and emotion understanding in 40 institutional care-adopted children, 40 foster care-adopted children and 40 birth children. Both groups of adopted children were adopted i...

Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the variability across studies--including aspect of...

Characterizing the cognitive architecture of human mindreading forces us to address two puzzles in people’s attributions of belief: why children show inconsistent expectations about others’ belief-based actions, and why adults’ belief reasoning is sometimes automatic and sometimes not. The seemingly puzzling data suggest humans have multiple mindreading systems that use different models of the ...

Three experiments investigated the development of Japanese children's false belief understanding. In Experiment 1, children's mastery of two standard false belief tasks was considerably later and slower than typically reported, with the full development between 6 and 7 years. Experiments 2 and 3 tested Japanese 6to 8-year-olds on interpersonal transfer tasks where a relocated item was a person ...

Using the format of a false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), we investigated the ability of 88 3- and 4-year-olds to ascribe a previously held true belief to a story protagonist. In an unexpected transfer task, children found true belief ascription as difficult as false belief ascription even though they could answer memory questions about story details. Results are discussed in relation to...

There is currently much controversy about which, if any, mental states chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates understand. In the current two studies we tested both chimpanzees' and human children's understanding of both knowledge-ignorance and false belief - in the same experimental paradigm involving competition with a conspecific. We found that whereas 6-year-old children understood both of ...

Recently, there have been two process-based computational cognitive models of theory of mind (ToM) (Hiatt & Trafton, 2010; Arslan, Taatgen, & Verbrugge, 2013). Ours (Hiatt & Trafton, 2010) models the development of ToM cognitive mechanisms, such as simulation, and focuses on first-order false belief tasks; the other (Arslan et al., 2013) learns to perform ToM using the activation of declarative...