How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account

Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning

Intentional misunderstandings take advantage of the ambiguity of language to do what someone said, instead of what they actually wanted. These purposeful misconstruals or loopholes are a familiar facet of fable, law, and everyday life. Engaging with loopholes requires a nuanced understanding of goals (your own and those of others), ambiguity, and social alignment. As such, loopholes provide a unique window into the normal operations of cooperation and communication. Despite their pervasiveness and utility in social interaction, research on loophole behavior is scarce. Here, we combine a theoretical analysis with empirical data to give a framework of loophole behavior. We first establish that loopholes are widespread, and exploited most often in equal or subordinate relationships (Study 1). We show that people reliably distinguish loophole behavior from both compliance and non-compliance (Study 2), and that people predict that others are most likely to exploit loopholes when their goals are in conflict with their social partner's and there is a cost for non-compliance (Study 3). We discuss these findings in light of other computational frameworks for communication and joint-planning, as well as discuss how loophole behavior might develop and the implications of this work for human-machine alignment.

Taking theory of mind research into much needed new terrain - a commentary on Kochanska et al. (2025)

Contemporary research on developing theory of mind emphasizes its cognitive and neurobiological foundations, but studies of its relational origins have potential for opening new terrain in this expansive literature. The study by Kochanska and colleagues shows this in several ways. First, it offers a model for constructing theoretically guided causal models built on longitudinal research enlisting multiple predictors of developing theory of mind that can be examined in concert. Second, the findings invite deeper consideration of the processes by which theory of mind emerges by unpacking the relational predictors highlighted in this and other studies. In particular, examining the characteristics of early conversation focused on the child's experiences and mental states and studying the coordination of subjective states in parent-child interaction are each warranted avenues. Third, enlisting fathers and mothers into this inquiry broadens the range of relational partners contributing to young children's developing understanding of the mind.

Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional Misunderstandings in Children

What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies (N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020-2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3-18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non-compliance (Study 2, 4-10 years), predict that other children will be more likely to exploit loopholes when goals conflict (Study 3, 5-10 years), and are increasingly able to generate loopholes themselves (Study 4, 5-10 years). This work provides new insights on how children navigate the gray area between compliance and defiance and the development of loophole behavior across early and middle childhood.

Conversational topic maintenance and related cognitive abilities in autistic versus neurotypical children

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how autistic and neurotypical children maintain a conversation topic. We also investigated within-group relationships between conversational ability and cognitive and sociocognitive predictors. Study 1 found autistic children were more likely than neurotypical controls to give off-topic and generic minimal responses (e.g. 'mm', 'oh') and were less likely to give non-verbal responses (e.g. nodding or use of facial affect to respond). Nonetheless, the autistic group provided topic-supporting responses 62% of the time, indicating some aspects of conversation topic maintenance are a relative strength. Studies 2 and 3 found large individual differences in topic-supporting conversational responding among both neurotypical and autistic children. These were positively related to theory of mind ability and age in both groups. Conversational skills lie on a continuum for the general population and differences by diagnostic group are a matter of degree. Given the importance for peer relationships, we suggest a whole classroom approach to supporting conversation skills in all children.Lay abstractChildren who struggle to maintain conversation with peers often have fewer friends and lower popularity ratings, which can affect wellbeing. Verbal social communication more broadly is linked to both behavioural difficulties and emotional problems. We carried out three studies to examine children's ability to provide responses which keep a back and forth conversation going. The first study found that while autistic children had on average greater difficulties than their neurotypical peers with certain aspects of conversation topic maintenance, for other aspects the autistic group showed considerable strengths. Both studies 2 (neurotypical children) and 3 (autistic children) found relationships between, on the one hand, conversational ability, and on the other, the ability to consider another's viewpoint and the ability to maintain and update information in short term memory. We suggest support for social conversation skills should be part of mainstream classroom curricula for autistic and neurotypical children alike.

Bonobos point more for ignorant than knowledgeable social partners

Numerous uniquely human phenomena, from teaching to our most complex forms of cooperation, depend on our ability to tailor our communication to the knowledge and ignorance states of our social partners. Despite four decades of research into the "theory of mind" capacities of nonhuman primates, there remains no evidence that primates can communicate on the basis of their mental state attributions, to enable feats of coordination. Moreover, recent reevaluation of the experimental literature has questioned whether primates can represent others' ignorance at all. The present preregistered study investigated whether bonobos are capable of attributing knowledge or ignorance about the location of a hidden food reward to a cooperative human partner, and utilizing this attribution to modify their communicative behavior in the service of coordination. Bonobos could receive a reward that they had watched being hidden under one of several cups, if their human partner could locate the reward. If bonobos can represent a partner's ignorance and are motivated to communicate based on this mental state attribution, they should point more frequently, and more quickly, to the hidden food's location when their partner is ignorant about that location than when he is knowledgeable. Bonobos indeed flexibly adapted the frequency and speed of their communication to their partner's mental state. These findings suggest that apes can represent (and act on) others' ignorance in some form, strategically and appropriately communicating to effectively coordinate with an ignorant partner and change his behavior.

Being honest won't pay. Seven- but not 5-year-olds begin to predict that others will lie for reputational reasons

Children begin to manage their reputation around school-age, but it remains unclear when they start to explicitly reason about reputational strategies such as lying from a third-person perspective. The current study investigated whether 5- and 7-year-old children would explicitly predict reputational lying in the context of a third party interaction. Participants were told hypothetical stories and asked to predict whether a protagonist would lie to a peer character about a selfish resource allocation. Results revealed that about half of the 7-year-olds and neglectable few of the 5-year-olds began to predict that the protagonist would lie to his peer out of reputational concern and whitewash the selfishly distributed amount. The prediction of reputational lying did not differ for ingroup or outgroup third parties. Seven-year-olds justified their prediction of a lie with reference to how the protagonist would look to others. While reputational lying has been shown in 5-year-olds in comparable interactive scenarios with peers, a more abstract, explicit understanding of reputational lying seems to be a more complex cognitive ability, emerging around the age of 7 years.

Growth Trajectories of Joint Attention and Play as Predictors for Language in Young Children at Elevated Likelihood for Autism

This longitudinal study investigated the predictive value of initial level and growth rate of joint attention and play from 10 to 24 months for language abilities of 24-month-old toddlers at elevated likelihood (EL) for autism. (Semi-)structured assessments were used to measure all variables at different timepoints prospectively in younger siblings of children with autism (siblings, n = 48) and children born before 30 gestational weeks (preterms, n = 49). A positive association was found between initial level of play at 10 months and expressive language at 24 months in siblings, but not in preterms. We did not find an association between initial level of play and receptive language. Growth rate of play and initial level and growth rate of joint attention were not related to language abilities in siblings and preterms. Our results indicate that play and expressive language are interrelated, and early play behaviour may contribute to later language. As this association was absent in preterms, they may follow qualitatively different developmental processes. Moreover, future research including different EL-groups is needed to clarify these differential associations. In contrast to previous studies, no association between early joint attention and later language was found. These inconsistent findings warrant further exploration and highlight the importance of exploring alternative aspects of early development, for instance non-social factors, to expand our understanding of language acquisition.

Three- but not 2-year-olds misinform others spontaneously in an interaction-based task

One-year-olds spontaneously inform others, but less is known about the emergence of spontaneous misinforming. The current study investigated whether young children who spontaneously inform ignorant others also deliberately misinform others in matched uninstructed interactions. Conceptually, misinforming provides a convincing case for interaction-based, implicit false belief understanding. In a simplified, anticipatory and interactive paradigm, a protagonist puppet played with the child and an object and then hid the object in one of two boxes. When the protagonist was temporarily absent, either her friend or a competitor puppet searched for the hidden object. Children spontaneously joined the play and helped or hindered by informing or misinforming the puppets. Experiment 1 revealed that 2-year-olds spontaneously informed the friend. However, they did not selectively misinform the competitor. In order to exclude methodological biases and replicate previous findings, Experiment 2 tested 3-year-olds, confirming skills for spontaneous misinforming with the same paradigm. Findings reveal that informing, but not misinforming, is part of younger children's early spontaneous communication, which suggests a conceptual distinction in the use of communication and casts doubts on an interactive use of false belief understanding in early interactions.

Agent-Object Relationships in Level-2 Visual Perspective Taking: An Eye-Tracking Study

Visual perspective taking (VPT) generates a shared frame of reference for understanding how the world appears to others. Whilst greater cognitive and neurophysiological demands are associated with increasing angular distance between the self and other is well documented, accompanying attentional characteristics are not currently understood. Furthermore, although age and group status have been shown to impact task performance, other important cues, such as the relationship between agents and objects, have not been manipulated. Therefore, 35 university students participated in an eye-tracking experiment where they completed a VPT task with agents positioned at a low or high angular disparity (45° or 135° respectively). The congruence between the age of the agent (child vs adult) and the object they are attending to (e.g., teddy-bear vs kettle) was also manipulated. Participants were required to respond to the direction of the object from the agent's position. The findings reveal more fixations and increased dwell-times on agents compared to objects, but this was moderated by the age of the task agent. Results also showed more attentional transitions between agents and objects at higher angular disparities. These results converge with behavioural and neurophysiological descriptions of task performance in previous studies. Furthermore, the congruency of the relationship between agents and objects also impacted attention shifting and response times, highlighting the importance of understanding how social cues and contexts can modulate VPT processes in everyday contexts and social interaction.

Three- and 5-year-old children know their current belief might be wrong

By 4 or 5 years of age, children understand when their own past beliefs were incorrect, or when others' current beliefs are incorrect. In the current study, we asked whether young children understand when their own current belief might be incorrect. 3- and 5-year old children (N = 77) made a judgment and then experienced a puppet making a judgment about the same situation. Children of both ages rechecked their evidence more often when the puppet disagreed with them than when it agreed with them (and the nature of their rechecking was different in the two conditions as well). These results suggest that already by 3 years of age children understand that they might currently be wrong, and they know that rechecking the evidence can resolve their uncertainty.

How language affects social cognition and emotional competence in typical and atypical development: A systematic review

BACKGROUND

The ability to understand the mental state of others (social cognition), as well as language, is crucial for children to have good social adaptation. Social cognition (SC) has been shown to be a hierarchical model of three factors (Cognitive, intermediate and affective SC) interrelated with linguistic processes. Children on the autism spectrum and children with developmental language disorder (DLD) or social communication disorder (SCD) manifest language and SC difficulties, albeit in different ways.

AIMS

This systematic review aims to find how language and SC interact with each other and identify linguistic and socio-affective profiles in the target population.

METHODS

About 1593 articles were systematically reviewed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guide in November 2022, obtaining, through inclusion/exclusion criteria, a total of 38 articles for qualitative assessment. The majority of them were on autism (26) or DLD (14) and to a lesser extent SCD (3).

MAIN CONTRIBUTION

Although SC is related to all components of language, SC is strongly related to narrative and morphosyntax and partially related to lexicon. Pragmatics shows a complex relation with SC due to greater sensitivity to other factors such as age or task, and prosody appears to be more related to emotional processes. Besides, autistic, SCD and DLD children showed differences in their language and socio-affective performance. Mainstream DLD children have lower performance in general language, where autistic and SCD children have more linguistic variation and are lower in pragmatic and SC tasks, SCD children being more associated with language production difficulties and autistic children with both receptive and productive language.

CONCLUSION

Each language component has a different interaction with SC. Likewise, different linguistic profiles are partially found for each disorder. These results are important for future lines of research focusing on specific components of interaction and socio-emotional processes, as well as for clinical and educational treatment.

WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS

What is already known on the subject The hierarchical model of Schurz et al. (2021), divide social cognition into three brain constructs: cognitive social cognition (CSC), affective social cognition (ASC) and intermediate social cognition (ISC). They observe a large relationship between language and ISC, a fact that has been corroborated with some other studies. Studies have also found lower linguistic and socio-affective abilities in children with autism and language and communication disorders compared with children with neurotypical development, and large behavioural and neurocognitive overlaps between these disorders (Durrleman et al., 2019; Löytömäki et al., 2019). What this paper adds to existing knowledge This is the first review that relates all linguistic components (narrative, lexicon, morphosyntax, pragmatic and prosody) with the three constructs of social cognition (Cognitive, intermediate and affective). Moreover, it is the first review that studies the socio-linguistic factors comparing autism, developmental language disorder and social communication disorder with each other and with neurotypical development in children aged from 4 to 9 years. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Understanding how language and social cognition interact with each other in autism spectrum disorder, developmental language disorder and social communication disorder allows us to trace socio-linguistic profiles for each of the studied disorders, understand better children with these difficulties, and, with this, find specific potential intervention points to improve and prevent these difficulties.

Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs

False belief understanding is always regarded as a milestone of Theory of Mind (ToM), which is an important aspect of social intelligence. Recently, some researchers have suggested the existence of two ToM systems in individuals: one that explicitly guides false belief understanding and another that implicitly directs sensitivity to false beliefs. However, studies on sensitivity to false beliefs have encountered challenges with replicability, and the factors influencing the manifestation of sensitivity to false beliefs remain to be explored. Based on the anticipatory looking task, we investigated whether verbal perceptual prompts could improve children's performance of sensitivity to false beliefs. Fifty-eight children aged 5 to 6 were randomly assigned tasks with or without verbal perceptual prompts, involving verbal descriptions and explanations of the protagonist's perceptual state. The findings showed that verbal perceptual prompts could slightly reduce children's propensity to look at the actual location of the object in false belief situations and increase the likelihood of exhibiting accurate anticipatory looking patterns across false belief and true belief situations. The results suggest that children's sensitivity to false beliefs may be situation-dependent, yet further investigation is needed to determine which situational factors can most effectively trigger robust sensitivity to false beliefs in children. The results enlighten educational practice, indicating that introducing cues in social environments that convey insights into others' mental states, akin to the use of learning scaffolding, is advantageous for the development of children's social cognitive abilities.

Children's anthropomorphism of inanimate agents

This review article examines the extant literature on animism and anthropomorphism in infants and young children. A substantial body of work indicates that both infants and young children have a broad concept of what constitutes a sentient agent and react to inanimate objects as they do to people in the same context. The literature has also revealed a developmental pattern in which anthropomorphism decreases with age, but social robots appear to be an exception to this pattern. Additionally, the review shows that children attribute psychological properties to social robots less so than people but still anthropomorphize them. Importantly, some research suggests that anthropomorphism of social robots is dependent upon their morphology and human-like behaviors. The extent to which children anthropomorphize robots is dependent on their exposure to them and the presence of human-like features. Based on the existing literature, we conclude that in infancy, a large range of inanimate objects (e.g., boxes, geometric figures) that display animate motion patterns trigger the same behaviors observed in child-adult interactions, suggesting some implicit form of anthropomorphism. The review concludes that additional research is needed to understand what infants and children judge as social agents and how the perception of inanimate agents changes over the lifespan. As exposure to robots and virtual assistants increases, future research must focus on better understanding the full impact that regular interactions with such partners will have on children's anthropomorphizing. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Learning Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Computer Science and Robotics > Robotics.

How important is it to learn language rather than create it?

I focus here on concepts that are not part of core knowledge - the ability to treat people as social agents with shareable mental states. Spelke proposes that learning language from another might account for the development of these concepts. I suggest that homesigners, who create language rather than learn it, may be a potential counterexample to this hypothesis.

Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy

When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic ("rote"), or more thoughtful ("reflective"). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote-ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word-embedding analysis of an open-response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote-ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning.

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Do toddlers reason about other people's experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning

Human social life requires an understanding of the mental states of one's social partners. Two people who look at the same objects often experience them differently, as a twinkling light or a planet, a 6 or a 9, and a random cat or Cleo, their pet. Indeed, a primary purpose of communication is to share distinctive experiences of objects or events. Here, we test whether toddlers (14-15 months) are sensitive to another agent's distinctive experiences of pictures when determining the goal underlying the agent's actions in a minimally social context. We conducted nine experiments. Across seven of these experiments (n = 206), toddlers viewed either videotaped or live events in which an actor, whose perspective differed from their own, reached (i) for pictures of human faces that were upright or inverted or (ii) for pictures that depicted a rabbit or a duck at different orientations. Then either the actor or the toddler moved to a new location that aligned their perspectives, and the actor alternately reached to each of the two pictures. By comparing toddlers' looking to the latter reaches, we tested whether their goal attributions accorded with the actor's experience of the pictured objects, with their own experience of the pictured objects, or with no consistency. In no experiment did toddlers encode the actor's goal in accord with his experiences of the pictures. In contrast, in a similar experiment that manipulated the visibility of a picture rather than the experience that it elicited, toddlers (n = 32) correctly expected the actor's action to depend on what was visible and occluded to him, rather than to themselves. In a verbal version of the tasks, older children (n = 35) correctly inferred the actor's goal in both cases. These findings provide further evidence for a dissociation between two kinds of mental state reasoning: When toddlers view an actor's object-directed action under minimally social conditions, they take account of the actor's visual access to the object but not the actor's distinctive experience of the object.

Developmental Profile in Children Aged 3-6 Years: Down Syndrome vs. Autism Spectrum Disorder

This research aims to compare the developmental profiles of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with Down Syndrome (DS) between the ages of 3 and 6 years. The study examines whether these developmental disorders share common developmental milestones or exhibit distinctive characteristics. A total of 43 children, 23 with DS and 20 with ASD, participated in the study. Cognitive and language skills were assessed using standardized tools, including the Battelle Developmental Inventory, Reynell Developmental Language Scales III, and NEPSY-II battery. The results indicated that children with ASD outperformed children with DS in the areas of fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and communication. Additionally, children with ASD demonstrated higher scores in language comprehension and expressive language, compared to children with DS. Significant correlations were found between motor skills and communication abilities. Neuropsychological evaluations revealed significant differences between the two groups in various tasks, such as the comprehension of instructions, body part naming and identification, and recognition of emotions. These findings contribute to our understanding of the similarities and differences between ASD and DS, shedding light on the dissociation between cognition and language and its impact on adaptive functioning in these populations.

Selective Action Prediction in Infancy Depending on Linguistic Cues: An EEG and Eyetracker Study

Humans' capacity to predict actions and to socially categorize individuals is at the basis of social cognition. Such capacities emerge in early infancy. By 6 months of age, infants predict others' reaching actions considering others' epistemic state. At a similar age, infants are biased to attend to and interact with more familiar individuals, considering adult-like social categories such as the language people speak. We report that these two core processes are interrelated early on in infancy. In a belief-based action prediction task, 6-month-old infants (males and females) presented with a native speaker generated online predictions about the agent's actions, as revealed by the activation of participants' sensorimotor areas before the agent's movement. However, infants who were presented with a foreign speaker did not recruit their motor system before the agent's action. The eyetracker analysis provided further evidence that linguistic group familiarity influences how infants predict others' actions, as only infants presented with a native speaker modified their attention to the stimuli as a function of the agent's forthcoming behavior. The current findings suggest that infants' emerging capacity to predict others' actions is modulated by social cues, such as others' linguistic group. A facilitation to predict and encode the actions of native speakers relative to foreign speakers may explain, in part, why infants preferentially attend to, imitate, and learn from the actions of native speakers.

Artificial cognition vs. artificial intelligence for next-generation autonomous robotic agents

The trend in industrial/service robotics is to develop robots that can cooperate with people, interacting with them in an autonomous, safe and purposive way. These are the fundamental elements characterizing the fourth and the fifth industrial revolutions (4IR, 5IR): the crucial innovation is the adoption of intelligent technologies that can allow the development of cyber-physical systems, similar if not superior to humans. The common wisdom is that intelligence might be provided by AI (Artificial Intelligence), a claim that is supported more by media coverage and commercial interests than by solid scientific evidence. AI is currently conceived in a quite broad sense, encompassing LLMs and a lot of other things, without any unifying principle, but self-motivating for the success in various areas. The current view of AI robotics mostly follows a purely disembodied approach that is consistent with the old-fashioned, Cartesian mind-body dualism, reflected in the software-hardware distinction inherent to the von Neumann computing architecture. The working hypothesis of this position paper is that the road to the next generation of autonomous robotic agents with cognitive capabilities requires a fully brain-inspired, embodied cognitive approach that avoids the trap of mind-body dualism and aims at the full integration of Bodyware and Cogniware. We name this approach Artificial Cognition (ACo) and ground it in Cognitive Neuroscience. It is specifically focused on proactive knowledge acquisition based on bidirectional human-robot interaction: the practical advantage is to enhance generalization and explainability. Moreover, we believe that a brain-inspired network of interactions is necessary for allowing humans to cooperate with artificial cognitive agents, building a growing level of personal trust and reciprocal accountability: this is clearly missing, although actively sought, in current AI. The ACo approach is a work in progress that can take advantage of a number of research threads, some of them antecedent the early attempts to define AI concepts and methods. In the rest of the paper we will consider some of the building blocks that need to be re-visited in a unitary framework: the principles of developmental robotics, the methods of action representation with prospection capabilities, and the crucial role of social interaction.

Developmental differences in reported speech and internal state language in preschoolers' personal narratives

The present study explored developmental differences in preschoolers' use of reported speech and internal state language in personal narratives. Three-, four-, and five-year-olds attending a laboratory preschool shared 204 stories about 'a time when you were happy/sad'. Stories were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for reported speech (direct, indirect, narrativized) and internal state language (cognitive states, total emotion terms, unique emotion terms). Personal narratives told by five-year-olds included more cognitive states and more narrativized speech than those told by three- and four-year-olds, even when accounting for children's vocabulary skills, and that reported speech (narrativized, direct) were positively correlated with cognitive state talk. These findings highlight distinct shifts in children's use of cognitive state talk and reported speech in personal narratives told at age five. Associations between reported speech and internal state language are both informed by and support Vygotsky's (1978) fundamental claim that psychological processes are socially mediated by language.

Children and adults' intuitions of what people can believe

Two preregistered studies tested how 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and adults judged the possibility of holding alternative beliefs (N = 240, 110 females, U.S. sample, mixed ethnicities, data collected from September 2020 through October 2021). In Study 1, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were supported by evidence (but judged they could without this evidential constraint). In Study 2, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were moral beliefs (but judged they could without this moral constraint). Young children viewed moral beliefs as more constrained than adults. These results suggest that young children already have sophisticated intuitions of the possibility of holding various beliefs and how certain beliefs are constrained.

False belief understanding in deaf children: what are the difficulties?

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrate proficiency in verbal-story elicited-response (VS-ER) false-belief tasks, such as the Sally & Ann task, at a similar age as typically developing hearing children. However, they face challenges in non-verbal spontaneous-response (NV-SR) false-belief tasks, measured via looking times, which hearing infants typically pass by around 2 years of age, or earlier. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether these difficulties remain in a non-verbal-story elicited-response (NVS-ER) false-belief task, in which children are offered the opportunity to provide an elicited response to a non-verbal-story task. A total of thirty 4- to 8-year-old children with CI-s and hearing children completed three different kinds of false-belief tasks. The results showed that children with CI-s performed above chance level on the verbal task (i.e., VS-ER task), but not on the two non-verbal tasks, (i.e., NVS-ER and NV-SR tasks). The control group of typically developing hearing children performed above chance on all three kinds of tasks (one-tailed significance level). Our findings highlight the importance of external narrative support for children with CIs in tasks that involve mental perspective-taking, and specifically predicting actions based on false beliefs.

Seeing social interactions

Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered outside the scope of vision and grouped with higher-level social cognition like theory of mind. Recent work, however, has revealed that recognition of social interactions is efficient and automatic, is well modeled by bottom-up computational algorithms, and occurs in visually-selective regions of the brain. We review recent evidence from these three methodologies (behavioral, computational, and neural) that converge to suggest the core of social interaction perception is visual. We propose a computational framework for how this process is carried out in the brain and offer directions for future interdisciplinary investigations of social perception.

Cooperation within the therapeutic relationship improves metacognitive functioning: preliminary findings

Both clinical observations and empirical data suggest that metacognitive functioning is a factor strongly associated with a good psychotherapeutic outcome. It has been suggested that some interpersonal social motivations (i.e., attachment and cooperation) may be associated with different levels of metacognitive functioning also within the therapeutic relationship. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between cooperation and metacognitive monitoring within 58 psychotherapy sessions from seven different patients. All patients were initially assessed through a detailed psychiatric interview. Patients' adult attachment styles were evaluated using the Attachment Style Questionnaire. The association between the activation of patients' interpersonal social motivations (e.g., cooperation and attachment) and the modifications of metacognitive abilities during sessions was investigated using the Assessing Interpersonal Motivations in Transcripts method and the Metacognition Assessment Scale have been used. Our results showed that the activation of the patient's cooperative system is positively associated with an increase in metacognitive functioning, while the activation of attachment is not. The results of the present study have important implications for clinicians: they give empirical support for the role of cooperation in fostering metacognition within the therapeutic relationship.

The influence of socioeconomic status and appearance-reality understanding on pre-schoolers' sharing and generosity

Prosocial behaviour can be defined as any voluntary action that is performed to benefit another individual. Despite accumulating evidence of the importance of environmental variables (e.g., socioeconomic status; SES), and individual characteristics (e.g., theory of mind - ToM - skills), in influencing prosocial behaviours in young children, it is unknown how these factors relate to the underlying motivations for prosocial behaviours. Accordingly, both extrinsically (sharing) and intrinsically (generosity)-guided prosocial behaviours are measured in this study. We explore the influences of SES and ToM skills on young children's sharing behaviour and generosity, while controlling their age, working memory and language skills. Sixty-six 4- to 6 year olds (Mage  = 5.24 years, SD = 0.73) from diverse SES (measured by parental education level) and ethnic backgrounds in Singapore completed tasks assessing the ToM measures of false belief and appearance-reality understanding, working memory, language skills, generosity, and sharing behaviour. The results of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrate that the father's education level and children's appearance-reality understanding were significant predictors of sharing, after controlling for age, working memory, language skills, and the mother's education level. Children's appearance-reality understanding was the sole predictor of children's generosity. Our findings highlight the impact of children's ability to hold different views of reality and their family's education levels on the development of sharing and generosity in early childhood.

Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling individuals to engage in joint action in the mutually aware pursuit of shared goals. SITh theorises that SI evolved as late as 400,000 years ago, when our ancestors (in particular, Homo heidelbergensis) turned to a kind of food procurement that obligatorily required joint coordinated action. SI is, thus, hypothesized to be absent in other extant species, including our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes ("apes"). According to SITh, ape psychology is exclusively driven by individualistic motivations, as opposed to human psychology which is uniquely driven by altruistic motivations. The evolutionary scenario proposed by SITh builds on a series of findings from socio-cognitive research with apes and human children, and on the assumption that abilities expressed early in human development are human universals, unlikely to have been shaped by socio-cultural influences. Drawing on the primatological and developmental literature, we provide a systematic - albeit selective - review of SITh-inconsistent findings concerning psychological and behavioural traits theorised to be constitutive of SI. The findings we review pertain to all three thematic clusters typically addressed in SITh: (i) recursive mind reading; (ii) prosociality; (iii) imitation and cumulative culture. We conclude that such alternative data undermine two core SITh claims: the late evolutionary emergence of SI and the radical divide between ape and human psychology. We also discuss several conceptual and methodological limitations that currently hamper reliable comparative research on SI, in particular those engendered by Western-centric biases in the social sciences, where an overreliance on Western samples has promoted the formulation of Western-centric conceptualisations, operationalisations and methodologies.

Organizational benefits of neurodiversity: Preliminary findings on autism and the bystander effect

Although the bystander effect is one of the most important findings in the psychological literature, researchers have not explored whether autistic individuals are prone to the bystander effect. The present research examines whether autistic employees are more likely to report issues or concerns in an organization's systems and practices that are inefficient or dysfunctional. By bringing attention to these issues, autistic employees may foster opportunities to improve organizational performance, leading to the development of a more adaptive, high performing, and ethical culture. Thirty-three autistic employees and 34 nonautistic employees completed an online survey to determine whether employees on the autism spectrum (1) are more likely to report they would voice concerns about organizational dysfunctions, (2) are less likely to report they were influenced by the number of other witnesses to the dysfunction, (3) if they do not voice concerns, are more likely to acknowledge the influence of other people on the decision, (4) are less likely to formulate "elaborate rationales" for their decisions to intervene or not, and (5) whether any differences between autistic and nonautistic employees with regards to the first two hypotheses, intervention likelihood and degree of influence, are moderated by individual differences in camouflaging. Results indicate that autistic employees may be less susceptible to the bystander effect than nonautistic employees. As a result, autistic employees may contribute to improvements in organizational performance because they are more likely to identify and report inefficient processes and dysfunctional practices when they witness them. These preliminary findings suggesting potential benefits of neurodiversity in the workplace are promising. However, further research is required.

Bilingual toddlers show increased attention capture by static faces compared to monolinguals

Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young monolinguals and bilinguals show differences in social attention. For example, in the first year, bilinguals attend faster and more often to static faces over non-faces than do monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018). However, the developmental trajectories of these differences are unknown. In this pre-registered study, data were collected from 15- to 18-month-old monolinguals (English) and bilinguals (English and another language) to test whether group differences in face-looking behaviour persist into the second year. We predicted that bilinguals would orient more rapidly and more often to static faces than monolinguals. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. This suggests that, even into the second year of life, toddlers' rapid visual orientation to static social stimuli is sensitive to early language experience.

Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children

This study investigates the impact of evidentiality on source monitoring and the impact of source monitoring on false belief understanding (FBU), while controlling for short-term memory, age, gender, and receptive vocabulary. One hundred (50 girls) monolingual 3- and 4-year-olds from Turkey and the UK participated in the study in 2019. In Turkish, children's use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn, predicted their FBU. In English, FBU was not related to source monitoring. Combined results from both languages revealed that Turkish-speaking children had better FBU than English-speaking children, and only for Turkish-speaking children, better source monitoring skills predicted better FBU. This suggests an indirect impact of evidentiality on FBU by means of source monitoring in Turkish.

Précis of What Babies Know

Where does human knowledge begin? Research on human infants, children, adults, and nonhuman animals, using diverse methods from the cognitive, brain, and computational sciences, provides evidence for six early emerging, domain-specific systems of core knowledge. These automatic, unconscious systems are situated between perceptual systems and systems of explicit concepts and beliefs. They emerge early in infancy, guide children's learning, and function throughout life.

Theory of Mind and Young Children's Behaviour: Aggressive, Victimised, Prosocial, and Solitary

Theory of mind (ToM) undergoes significant developments during childhood, particularly between the ages of four and seven years. A growing body of research has indicated that children's social understanding may be related to their social behaviour with peers, in line with Theory Theory which proposes that children's social cognition is influenced by and influences their peer interactions. The current study examined the relationship between ToM and behaviour among 193 children aged 4-7 years. Children carried out a battery of ToM tasks, and teaching staff reported on children's aggressive, prosocial, and solitary behaviour and victimisation experiences. Aggression was not directly related to ToM; prosocial behaviour was positively associated with ToM for girls but not boys. Solitary behaviour and victimisation were negatively related to ToM. When this was broken down by gender, there was only a significant association between solitary behaviour and ToM for boys. When controlling for the relationship between behaviours, the only significant predictor of ToM was solitary behaviour for boys. ToM was also a significant predictor of solitary behaviour for boys, demonstrating that there is a bidirectional relationship at play. The findings highlight the importance of looking across these four behaviour types and understanding the relationship between behaviour profiles and ToM for boys and girls separately.

Pet dogs (Canis familiaris) re-engage humans after joint activity

Joint intentionality, the mutual understanding of shared goals or actions to partake in a common task, is considered an essential building block of theory of mind in humans. Domesticated dogs are unusually adept at comprehending human social cues and cooperating with humans, making it possible that they possess behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in interactions with humans. Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022) examined joint intentionality in a service dog population, finding that upon interruption of a joint experience, dogs preferentially re-engaged their former partner over a passive bystander, a behavior argued to be a signature of joint intentionality in human children. In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend these results in pet dogs. One familiar person played with the dog and then abruptly stopped. We examined if dogs would preferentially re-engage the player instead of a familiar bystander who was also present. Consistent with the findings of Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022), pet dogs preferentially gazed toward and offered the toy to the player significantly more than the familiar bystander. However, no difference was observed in physical contact. These findings provide preliminary evidence for behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in pet dogs, but future work is needed to understand whether this phenomenon extends to other contexts.

Toddlers' social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

Mature social evaluations privilege agents' intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention-based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods with 15-month-old toddlers. Toddlers viewed scenarios depicting a protagonist who sought to obtain one of two toys, each inside a different box, as two other agents observed. Then, the boxes' contents were switched in the absence of the protagonist and either in the presence or the absence of the other agents. When the protagonist returned, one agent opened the box containing the protagonist's desired toy (a positive outcome), and the other opened the other box (a neutral outcome). When both agents had observed the toys move to their current locations, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box containing the desired toy. In contrast, when the agents had not seen the toys move and therefore should have expected the desired toy's location to be unchanged, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box that no longer contained the desired toy. Thus, the toddlers preferred the agent who intended to make the protagonist's desired toy accessible, even when its action, guided by a false belief concerning that toy's location, did not produce a positive outcome. Well before children connect beliefs to social behavior in verbal tasks, toddlers engage in intention-based evaluations of social agents with false beliefs.

Responding to joint attention as a developmental catalyst: Longitudinal associations with language and social responsiveness

Joint attention (JA), infants' ability to engage in triadic attention with another person and a separate object or event, emerges in infancy. Responding to joint attention (RJA) develops earlier than initiating joint attention (IJA) and may benefit from a reconceptualization from a competence to a skill that varies in performance. Investigating associations between RJA performance and important skills of toddlerhood such as language, social responsiveness, and executive function (EF) in typically developing samples can better elucidate how RJA may serve as a developmental precursor to later dimensional skills, with implications for both typical and atypical development. Here, 210 (82% White) infants completed the Dimensional Joint Attention Assessment (DJAA), a naturalistic play-based assessment of RJA, at 8-15 months. At 16-38 months social responsiveness, verbal ability, and EF were assessed. Multilevel models showed that DJAA scores were associated with later verbal abilities and parent-reported social responsiveness. Exploratory analyses showed trend-level associations between RJA and EF. Results establish the content validity of the DJAA as a measure of RJA, and longitudinal associations with later verbal ability and social responsiveness. Future work should examine EF emergence and consolidation, and RJA and later EF associations.

Encoding interactive scripts at 10 months of age

Understanding action-reaction associations that give origin to interactive scripts (e.g., give-and-take interactions) is essential for appreciating social exchanges. However, studies on infants' action understanding have mainly investigated the case of actions performed by individual agents. Moreover, although extensive literature has explored infants' comprehension of action-effect relationships in object functioning, no study has addressed whether it also plays a role when observing social interactions, an issue we addressed here. In a first study, 10-month-old infants observed short videos of dyadic exchanges. We investigated whether they were able to link specific human gestures directed toward another person to specific vocal reactions in the receiver. We used a double-habituation paradigm in which infants were sequentially habituated to two specific action-reaction associations. In the test phase, infants watched one of the two habituated (Familiar) videos, a video with a reversed action-reaction association (Violation), and a Novel video. Results showed that the infants looked longer at both the Novel and Violation test trials than at the Familiar test trials. In a control study, we show that these results could not be accounted for by associative learning; indeed, learning of the action-reaction association did not occur when the vocalization was not produced by the receiver but only contingent on the agent's action. Thus, we show that 10-month-old infants can encode specific social action-effect relationships during the observation of dyadic interactions and that the interactivity of the social context may be critical to shaping young infants' understanding of others' behaviors.

Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines

Human infants are fascinated by other people. They bring to this fascination a constellation of rich and flexible expectations about the intentions motivating people's actions. Here we test 11-month-old infants and state-of-the-art learning-driven neural-network models on the "Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB)," a suite of tasks challenging both infants and machines to make high-level predictions about the underlying causes of agents' actions. Infants expected agents' actions to be directed towards objects, not locations, and infants demonstrated default expectations about agents' rationally efficient actions towards goals. The neural-network models failed to capture infants' knowledge. Our work provides a comprehensive framework in which to characterize infants' commonsense psychology and takes the first step in testing whether human knowledge and human-like artificial intelligence can be built from the foundations cognitive and developmental theories postulate.

Origins of Hierarchical Logical Reasoning

Hierarchical cognitive mechanisms underlie sophisticated behaviors, including language, music, mathematics, tool-use, and theory of mind. The origins of hierarchical logical reasoning have long been, and continue to be, an important puzzle for cognitive science. Prior approaches to hierarchical logical reasoning have often failed to distinguish between observable hierarchical behavior and unobservable hierarchical cognitive mechanisms. Furthermore, past research has been largely methodologically restricted to passive recognition tasks as compared to active generation tasks that are stronger tests of hierarchical rules. We argue that it is necessary to implement learning studies in humans, non-human species, and machines that are analyzed with formal models comparing the contribution of different cognitive mechanisms implicated in the generation of hierarchical behavior. These studies are critical to advance theories in the domains of recursion, rule-learning, symbolic reasoning, and the potentially uniquely human cognitive origins of hierarchical logical reasoning.

Small steps for mankind: Modeling the emergence of cumulative culture from joint active inference communication

Although the increase in the use of dynamical modeling in the literature on cultural evolution makes current models more mathematically sophisticated, these models have yet to be tested or validated. This paper provides a testable deep active inference formulation of social behavior and accompanying simulations of cumulative culture in two steps: First, we cast cultural transmission as a bi-directional process of communication that induces a generalized synchrony (operationalized as a particular convergence) between the belief states of interlocutors. Second, we cast social or cultural exchange as a process of active inference by equipping agents with the choice of who to engage in communication with. This induces trade-offs between confirmation of current beliefs and exploration of the social environment. We find that cumulative culture emerges from belief updating (i.e., active inference and learning) in the form of a joint minimization of uncertainty. The emergent cultural equilibria are characterized by a segregation into groups, whose belief systems are actively sustained by selective, uncertainty minimizing, dyadic exchanges. The nature of these equilibria depends sensitively on the precision afforded by various probabilistic mappings in each individual's generative model of their encultured niche.

Social cognition and metacognition in great apes: a theory

Twenty-five years ago, at the founding of this journal, there existed only a few conflicting findings about great apes' social-cognitive skills (theory of mind). In the 2 ½ decades since, we have discovered that great apes understand the goals, intentions, perceptions, and knowledge of others, and they use this knowledge to their advantage in competitive interactions. Twenty-five years ago there existed basically no studies on great apes' metacognitive skills. In the 2 ½ decades since, we have discovered that great apes monitor their uncertainty and base their decisions on that, or else decide to gather more information to make better decisions. The current paper reviews the past 25 years of research on great ape social cognition and metacognition and proposes a theory about how the two are evolutionarily related.

The Origins of Theory of Mind in Infant Social Cognition: Investigating Longitudinal Pathways from Intention Understanding and Joint Attention to Preschool Theory of Mind

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current study aimed to extend this literature by (a) recruiting a large sample of participants (n = 116; 53 boys; 63 girls; all U.S. residents; 88 White, 8 Hispanic or Latino, 2 Black or African American, 14 two or more races/ethnicities, 4 unknown; median family income: $74-122,000), (b) examining multiple measures of infant social cognition (intentional action understanding, responding to joint attention, initiating joint attention) at Time 1 (8-12 months), and (c) using an ecologically valid theory of mind assessment designed to capture individual differences in preschoolers' mental state understanding (the Children's Social Understanding Scale; Tahiroglu et al., 2014) at Time 2 (37-45 months). Measured variable path analysis revealed a significant longitudinal association between infants' initiating joint attention and later theory of mind: infants who engaged in more attempts to initiate joint attention with experimenters through gaze alternation or gestures went on to show better parent-reported mental state understanding as preschoolers. Notably, the paths from infants' responding to joint attention and intentional action understanding to later theory of mind did not emerge as significant. These findings bolster and clarify existing claims about how mental state reasoning is rooted in foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.

Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives

The processes of believing integrate external perceptual information from the environment with internal emotional states and prior experience to generate probabilistic neural representations of events, i.e., beliefs. As these neural representations manifest mostly below the level of a person's conscious awareness, they may inadvertently affect the spontaneous person's bodily expressions and prospective behavior. By yet to be understood mechanisms people can become aware of these representations and reflect upon them. Typically, people can communicate the content of their beliefs as personal statements and can summarize the narratives of others to themselves or to other people. Here, we describe that social interactions may benefit from the consistency between a person's bodily expressions and verbal statements because the person appears authentic and ultimately trustworthy. The transmission of narratives can thus lay the groundwork for social cooperation within and between groups and, ultimately, between communities and nations. Conversely, a discrepancy between bodily expressions and narratives may cause distrust in the addressee(s) and eventually may destroy social bonds.

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.