A model of communicative perspective-taking for typical and atypical populations of children

Five-year-olds' sensitivity to knowledge discrepancies about object identity during online language comprehension

In everyday communication, children experience situations where their knowledge or perspectives differ from those of their communicative partner. The current study examined this issue in the context of real-time language comprehension, focusing on 5-year-old children's ability to manage knowledge discrepancies about the identity of mutually visible objects. In Experiment 1, we examined 5-year-olds' ability to manage privileged knowledge about an object's identity. Using a referential communication task, we tested children (N = 60) in either a shared knowledge condition, where both the child and the speaker knew the identity of a visually misleading object (e.g., a candle that looks like an apple), or a privileged knowledge condition, where only the child knew the identity of the visually misleading object. Of interest was whether children could suppress private knowledge while processing a phonologically related word (e.g., "Look at the candy"). Results showed that children did not inhibit this knowledge during the early moments of referential interpretation. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), we contrasted the privileged knowledge condition in Experiment 1 with the more traditional scenario used to test common ground use, where the child knows the speaker cannot see certain display objects. Results confirmed a stronger ability to manage discrepancies in the latter case. Together, the findings demonstrate differences in children's ability to manage distinct types of knowledge discrepancies during real-time language comprehension.

Malleability of spatial skills: bridging developmental psychology and toy design for joyful STEAM development

Previous research has established that advances in spatial cognition predict STEAM success, and construction toys provide ample opportunities to foster spatial cognition. Despite various construction toy designs in the market, mostly brick-shaped building blocks are used in spatial cognition research. This group of toys is known to enhance mental rotation; however, mental rotation is not the only way to comprehend the environment three-dimensionally. More specifically, mental folding and perspective taking training have not received enough attention as they can also be enhanced with the construction toys, which are framed based on the 2×2 classification of spatial skills (intrinsic-static, intrinsic-dynamic, extrinsic-static, extrinsic-dynamic). To address these gaps, we compile evidence from both developmental psychology and toy design fields to show the central role played by mental folding and perspective taking skills as well as the importance of the variety in toy designs. The review was conducted systematically by searching peer reviewed design and psychology journals and conference proceedings. We suggest that, over and above their physical properties, construction toys offer affordances to elicit spatial language, gesture, and narrative among child-caregiver dyads. These interactions are essential for the development of spatial skills in both children and their caregivers. As developmental psychology and toy design fields are two domains that can contribute to the purpose of developing construction toys to boost spatial skills, we put forward six recommendations to bridge the current gaps between these fields. Consequently, new toy designs and empirical evidence regarding malleability of different spatial skills can contribute to the informal STEAM development.

The Influence of Tourist Attraction Type on Product Price Perception and Neural Mechanism in Tourism Consumption: An ERP Study

Background

Tourism consumption is a topic with heated debates in tourism research, and pricing tourism products is a crucial task for tourism managers. Different types of tourist attractions offer different experiences to tourists, which affect their price perceptions and purchase decisions.

Methods

This study combined questionnaires and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures to explore the magnitude of psychological conflict and the degree of emotional arousal that consumers experience when faced with different prices of goods in different scenic types.

Results

The questionnaire results showed that attraction type influenced consumers' price perceptions and that consumers were willing to pay higher prices for products in attractions. The ERP results implied that in the early stage of cognition, attraction type did not affect consumers' perceptual processing, while price information attracted consumers' cognitive attention. In the late stage of cognition, attraction type, and price information jointly influenced consumers' decision-making, and consumers tended to accept high prices of products in entertainment attractions and cultural attractions, but consumers were more sensitive to the price of products in cultural attractions and less tolerant to price increases.

Conclusion

The study elucidated how price information influenced consumers' purchase decisions of tourism products at different stages of the dual-process theory, which can assist tourism managers in devising different pricing strategies and positioning strategies based on the attributes of attractions, to enhance product sales and revenues. This would further the vision of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) of "tourism fostering economic development".

Virtual Reality Training of Social Skills in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Examination of Acceptability, Usability, User Experience, Social Skills, and Executive Functions

Poor social skills in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are associated with reduced independence in daily life. Current interventions for improving the social skills of individuals with ASD fail to represent the complexity of real-life social settings and situations. Virtual reality (VR) may facilitate social skills training in social environments and situations similar to those in real life; however, more research is needed to elucidate aspects such as the acceptability, usability, and user experience of VR systems in ASD. Twenty-five participants with ASD attended a neuropsychological evaluation and three sessions of VR social skills training, which incorporated five social scenarios with three difficulty levels. Participants reported high acceptability, system usability, and user experience. Significant correlations were observed between performance in social scenarios, self-reports, and executive functions. Working memory and planning ability were significant predictors of the functionality level in ASD and the VR system's perceived usability, respectively. Yet, performance in social scenarios was the best predictor of usability, acceptability, and functionality level. Planning ability substantially predicted performance in social scenarios, suggesting an implication in social skills. Immersive VR social skills training in individuals with ASD appears to be an appropriate service, but an errorless approach that is adaptive to the individual's needs should be preferred.

When did you stop speaking to yourself? Age-related differences in adolescents' world knowledge-based audience design

The ability to adapt utterances to the world knowledge of one's addressee is undeniably ubiquitous in human social cognition, but its development and association with other cognitive mechanisms during adolescence have not been studied. In an online production task, we measured the ability of children entering adolescence (ages 11-12, M = 11.8, N = 29 ,   17   girls ) and adolescents (ages 15-16, M = 15.9, N = 29 ,   17   girls ) to tailor referential expressions in accordance with the inferred world knowledge of their addressee-an ability we refer to as world knowledge-based audience design (AD). A post-test survey showed that both age groups held similar assumptions about the addressees' knowledge of referents, but the younger age group did not consistently adapt their utterances in accordance with these assumptions during online production, resulting in a significantly improved AD behaviour across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of AD on executive functions (EF). Executive functioning (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in AD performance. We thus provide evidence in support of an adolescent development of world knowledge-based AD over and above development of EF.

A New Look at Young Children's Referential Informativeness

In this article, I review experimental evidence for the dependence of 2- to 5-year-olds' linguistic referential informativeness on cues to common ground (CG) and propose a process model. Cues to CG provide evidence for CG, that is, for the shared knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes of interlocutors. The presence of cues to CG (e.g., unimpeded listener line of regard or prior mention) is shown to be associated with less informative reference (e.g., pronouns). In contrast, the absence of cues to CG (e.g., impeded listener line of regard or new mention) is shown to be associated with more informative reference (e.g., nouns). Informativeness is sensitive to linguistic before nonlinguistic cues to CG (i.e., 2.0 vs. 2.5 years old, respectively). Reference is cast as a process of active inference, a formulation of Bayesian belief-guided control in biological systems. Child speakers are hierarchical generative models that, characteristically, expect sensory evidence for the evolved, prior Bayesian belief that interlocutor mental states are aligned (i.e., that CG exists). Referential control emerges as an embodied tool to gather evidence for this prior belief. Bottom-up cues to CG elicited by action drive updates to beliefs about CG. In turn, beliefs about CG guide efficient referential control.

"And they had a big, big, very long fight:" The development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional stories told in a peer-group context

This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized that this STSA context might yield new information about the early development of this language, prior to elementary school. We analyzed 60 stories: the first and last story told by 10 children in each of three preschool classrooms (3-, 4-, and 5-year-old classes) that used STSA throughout the school year. Stories were coded for evaluative expressions and evidential expressions. Five-year-olds used significantly more evaluative language than did 3-year-olds, and children at all ages used significantly more evaluative language at the end than at the beginning of the year. The number of stories told throughout the year explained unique variance in children's evaluative language growth.

How to turn that frown upside down: Children make use of a listener's facial cues to detect and (attempt to) repair miscommunication

Communication involves the integration of verbal and nonverbal cues. This study assessed preschool-age children's ability to use their conversational partner's facial expression to determine whether the partner required additional information or not. Children (aged 4;0-5;11 [years;months]; N = 101) played a game with a virtual child partner where they attempted to tell the virtual child in which box a prize was hidden. Children needed to provide several features of pictures on each box to uniquely identify the correct box. After providing their instructions, children viewed a video of the virtual child's emotional reaction (prize found = happy, not found = sad). We assessed children's recognition that miscommunication had occurred, their decision of whether or not to repair their message, and the content of their repairs. We found that children were able to determine whether or not the listener found the prize, and gauge their own skill at providing instructions, based on the listener's facial expression. Furthermore, children were more likely to attempt to repair messages when the listener appeared to be sad, although their actual success in repairing the message was minimal. With respect to individual differences, children with higher executive functioning and higher emotion knowledge skills were more accurate in their perceptions of communicative success. Children with higher emotion knowledge skills were more likely to attempt to repair their messages when the listener appeared to be sad. Overall, this study demonstrates that children are able to make inferences about communication using a listener's facial expression and that emotion recognition and executive functioning support this ability.

Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real-Time Language Comprehension

In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or "common ground," to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds' (n = 95) use of two different speakers' perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this ability related to individual differences in executive function and representational skills. Gaze measures indicated partner-specific common ground guided children's interpretation from the earliest moments of language processing. Nonegocentric online processing was positively correlated with performance on a Level 2 visual perspective-taking task. These results demonstrate that preschoolers readily use the perspectives of multiple partners to guide language comprehension and that more advanced representational skills are associated with the rapid integration of common ground information.

Executive function predicts theory of mind but not social verbal communication in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND

The association between Executive Function (EF) and Theory of Mind (ToM) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been mainly investigated using false belief tasks, whilst less is known about the EF effect on other ToM facets. Furthermore, the role EF plays in social communication in ASD is mainly assessed using parent-report EF ratings rather than direct assessment.

AIMS

The aim of this study was to shed more light on the effect of performance-based EF measures on ToM and social communication in middle childhood in ASD relative to neurotypical controls.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Cross-sectional data were collected from 64 matched, school-aged children with and without ASD (8-12 years old), tested on measures of EF (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility), ToM mental state/emotion recognition and social verbal communication.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

Significant group differences were observed only in selective EF skills (inhibition &cognitive flexibility) and social verbal communication. EF working memory contributed to the explained variance of ToM but not social verbal communication in middle childhood.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

These findings suggest that EF and ToM are still associated in middle childhood and EF may be a crucial predictor of ToM across childhood in ASD. Implications are discussed regarding the social-cognitive impairment relationship in ASD.

Inhibitory control and lexical alignment in children with an autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND

Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, and whether conflict inhibition mediated alignment.

METHODS

Children with ASD and chronological- and verbal-age-matched typically developing controls played a picture-naming game. We manipulated whether the experimenter used a preferred or dispreferred name for each picture, and examined whether children subsequently used the same name.

RESULTS

Children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, to the same extent as typically developing controls. Alignment was unrelated to conflict inhibition in both groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Children with ASD's referential communication is robust to impairments in conflict inhibition under some circumstances. Their pragmatic deficits may be mitigated in a highly structured interaction.

When You're Happy and I Know It: Four-Year-Olds' Emotional Perspective Taking During Online Language Comprehension

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time interpretation of ambiguous statements. However, these sensitivities were less apparent in overt responses, suggesting preschoolers' ability to integrate emotional perspective cues is at an emergent state. Perspective taking during online language processing was positively correlated with receptive vocabulary and an offline measure of emotional perspective taking, but not with cognitive perspective taking, conflict or delay inhibitory control, or working memory. Together, the results underscore how children's emerging communicative competence involves different kinds of perspective inferences with distinct cognitive underpinnings.

Words are not enough: how preschoolers' integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding

When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.

Cognitive and behavioural predictors of adolescents' communicative perspective-taking and social relationships

Given the pivotal role that social interactions play for adolescents' well-being, understanding the factors that influence communication is key. The present study examined relations between adolescents' communicative perspective-taking, executive function skills, and ADHD traits and explored the role communicative perspective-taking plays in peer relations. Data was collected from a community sample of 15 to 19-years-olds (N = 46) in Waterloo, Canada. Two communicative perspective-taking tasks required participants to infer speakers' communicative intentions. A battery of tasks assessed adolescents' working memory and inhibitory control. Elevated ADHD traits were associated with weaker working memory, inhibitory control, and communicative perspective-taking. Working memory was the strongest predictor of communicative perspective-taking. Highlighting the importance of communicative perspective-taking for social interactions, adolescents with weaker skills in this area reported worse peer relations. Findings underscore the importance of communicative perspective-taking for adolescents' social relations and have relevance for understanding the social difficulties faced by adolescents with elevated ADHD traits.

Mother-Child Communication: The Influence of ADHD Symptomatology and Executive Functioning on Paralinguistic Style

Paralinguistic style, involving features of speech such as pitch and volume, is an important aspect of one's communicative competence. However, little is known about the behavioral traits and cognitive skills that relate to these aspects of speech. This study examined the extent to which ADHD traits and executive functioning (EF) related to the paralinguistic styles of 8- to 12-year-old children and their mothers. Data was collected via parent report (ADHD traits), independent laboratory tasks of EF (working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility), and an interactive problem-solving task (completed by mothers and children jointly) which was coded for paralinguistic speech elements (i.e., pitch level/variability; volume level/variability). Dyadic data analyses revealed that elevated ADHD traits in children were associated with a more exaggerated paralinguistic style (i.e., elevated and more variable pitch/volume) for both mothers and children. Mothers' paralinguistic style was additionally predicted by an interaction of mothers' and children's ADHD traits, such that mothers with elevated ADHD traits showed exaggerated paralinguistic styles particularly when their children also had elevated ADHD traits. Highlighting a cognitive mechanism, children with weaker inhibitory control showed more exaggerated paralinguistic styles.

Why Is Theory of Mind Important for Referential Communication?

This research studies the relation between children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) and the communicative behaviour and strategies used in a referential communication task. A total of 46 children (aged 6 to 10) were administered 6 ToM tasks, and they also participated in pairs in a cooperative task. Each pair built 4 construction models. Results showed that several ToM skills were related to the communicative behaviours of requesting clarification and giving information. In addition, the most used communicative strategy was Joint review, in which participants reviewed together the location of their blocks. This strategy was the most related to ToM abilities and to cooperative success. The importance of ToM for developing the communicative behaviours and strategies necessary for cooperation is discussed.

The direct way may not be the best way: Children with ADHD and their understanding of self-presentation in social interactions

Knowledge and use of self-presentational tactics is an important social skill. We examined understanding of the function of three different self-presentational tactics (self-promotion, ingratiation and blasting) in 11 8–12-year-old boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 11 matched comparison children. Children were given six different self-presentation stories, two for each one of the three different tactics. After each story, they were asked to evaluate the effects of the self-presentational tactic used. Children with ADHD rated self-promotion and blasting as more positive and more effective—and ingratiation as less positive and less effective—than children in the control group. This implicates that children with ADHD prefer simple and direct self-presentational strategies (like self-promotion), and, therefore, may not as easily understand more subtle strategies (like ingratiation). They also seem to be more inclined to use negatively connoted strategies (like blasting). We suggest that this limited understanding of self-presentational strategies in children with ADHD may explain some of their problems in social interactions. Therefore, social skill interventions in children with ADHD should incorporate elements focusing on use and understanding of different self-presentational strategies.

Social Communication is Predicted by Inhibitory Ability and ADHD Traits in Preschool-Aged Children: A Mediation Model

OBJECTIVE

Given the role inhibitory control plays in both ADHD and communication, this study examined whether inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive traits mediate the impact of weak inhibitory ability upon the knowledge and application of pragmatic rules early in development.

METHOD

Participants were 36 typically developing preschoolers and their caregivers. ADHD traits were assessed per caregiver report. Inhibition was assessed in children using a distraction task. Pragmatic language was assessed by asking children about hypothetical social situations (knowledge) and by asking caregivers to report on children's actual communicative behaviors (application).

RESULTS

Individual differences in inhibition predicted both facets of pragmatic language development. Hyperactive-impulsive behaviors were a significant mediator of this relationship-but only with regard to children's ability to effectively apply pragmatic rules in everyday life.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggest that social communication difficulties in some young children are a downstream consequence of hyperactive-impulsive behaviors that arise from poorly developed inhibitory control.

The cognitive mechanisms underlying perspective taking between conversational partners: evidence from speakers with Alzheimer׳s disease

Successful communication requires speakers to consider their listeners׳ perspectives. Little is known about how this ability changes in Alzheimer׳s Disease (AD) although such knowledge could reveal the cognitive mechanisms fundamental to perspective-taking ability, and reveal which cognitive deficits are fundamental to communication disorders in AD. Patients with mild to moderate AD and age and education matched controls were tested in a communicative perspective-taking task, and on measures of executive control, general cognitive functioning, and lexical retrieval. Patients׳ ability to perform the perspective-taking task was significantly correlated with performance on measures of general cognitive functioning, visual scanning and construction, response conflict and attention. Measures of lexical retrieval tended not to be correlated with performance on the communication task with one exception: semantic but not letter fluency predicted a derived score of perspective-taking ability. These findings broaden our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying perspective taking, and suggest that impairments in perspective taking in AD occur during utterance planning, and at a relatively early processing stage which involves rapid visual scanning and problem solving, rather than during retrieval of lexical items needed to speak. More broadly, these data reveal executive function and semantic deficits, but not problems with lexical retrieval, as more fundamental to the basis of cognitive changes associated with AD.

Communicative perspective-taking performance of adults with ADHD symptoms

OBJECTIVE

The ability to take the perspective of one's conversational partner is essential for successful communication. Given the significant cognitive and attention resources required to use another's perspective, the authors assessed whether adults who report symptoms of ADHD would have difficulty using their conversational partner's visual perspective to guide their interpretations.

METHOD

Adults with high (clinical range) or low (nonclinical range) self-reported ADHD symptoms participated in a communication task that required perspective-taking.

RESULTS

Eye movement measures revealed that individuals with high ADHD symptoms fixated on objects obscured from their partners' view more often than did those participants with low ADHD symptoms, and the degree to which this "egocentric" object was considered correlated with the degree of inattention symptoms. However, overt behavior (object choice) was not impacted by ADHD symptomatology.

CONCLUSION

Individuals with high levels of ADHD symptoms, especially inattention, are less efficient in their ability to use another's perspective during conversation.

Referential communication in children with ADHD: challenges in the role of a listener

PURPOSE

Successful communication requires that listeners accurately interpret the meaning of speakers' statements. The present work examined whether children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) differ in their ability to interpret referential statements (i.e., phrases that denote objects or events) from speakers.

METHOD

Children (6 to 9 years old), diagnosed with ADHD (n = 27) and typically developing (n = 26), took part in an interactive task in which they were asked by an adult speaker to retrieve objects from a display case. Children interpreted the referential statements in contexts that either did or did not require perspective-taking. Children's eye movements and object choices were recorded. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their child's frequency of ADHD symptoms and pragmatic communicative abilities.

RESULTS

Behavioral and eye movement measures revealed that children with ADHD made more interpretive errors and were less likely to consider target referents across the 2 communicative conditions. Furthermore, ADHD symptoms related to children's performance on the communicative task and to parental report of the child's pragmatic skills.

CONCLUSION

Children with ADHD are less accurate in their interpretations of referential statements. Such difficulties would lead to greater occurrences of miscommunication.

Depressive symptoms and use of perspective taking within a communicative context

OBJECTIVE

The ability to take the perspective of one's conversational partner is essential for successful communication. We assessed whether individuals who report high levels of depressive symptoms have more difficulty with navigating this interpersonal task.

METHOD

Undergraduate students participated in a computerised communication task that, on some trials, required perspective taking (N=125).

RESULTS

When participants were grouped according to their self-reported depressive symptoms, the "dysphoric group" (BDI ≥ 16, n=37) showed more errors than a "non-dysphoric group" (BDI ≤ 10, n=56) on trials requiring participants to use the perspective of the speaker, but not on control trials where perspective taking was not required. The dysphoric group demonstrated slower response times overall.

CONCLUSIONS

Individuals with moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms are more challenged by using a speaker's perspective to interpret statements.