The Relationship Between Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggression in Japanese Children

Previous studies showed that hostile intent attribution (HIA) was significantly correlated with and contributed to the development of aggression in children. Studies that directly examined the factors that explained the relationship between HIA and aggression are lacking. Hence, this study investigated (a) the correlation between HIA and aggression and (b) the variables (hyperactivity, prosociality, and collaborative problem-solving) that mediated the relationship between HIA and aggression in Japanese children aged 4-9 years. The participants were 180 children and their caregivers. First, the caregivers reported their children's aggression, hyperactivity, prosociality, and collaborative problem-solving through questionnaires. Next, the children worked on an HIA task. The results showed a weak positive correlation between HIA and aggression. Furthermore, significant indirect effects were observed among all the mediation models. The model that contained all three mediators yielded the smallest Akaike Information Criterion value. In this model, the indirect effect was significant only for the path with hyperactivity as the mediator. These findings provide several suggestions for revealing the mechanism of the relationship between HIA and aggression during childhood. Notably, children's hyperactivity was suggested to play a particularly important role in the relationship between HIA and aggression.

The Illusion of Agency in Human–Computer Interaction

This article makes the case that our digital devices create illusions of agency. There are times when users feel as if they are in control when in fact they are merely responding to stimuli on the screen in predictable ways. After the introduction, the second section of the article offers examples of illusions of agency that do not involve human–computer interaction in order to show that such illusions are possible and not terribly uncommon. The third and fourth sections of the article cover relevant work from empirical psychology, including the cues that are known to generate the sense of agency. The fifth section of the article shows that our devices are designed to deliver precisely those cues. In the sixth section, the argument is completed with evidence that users frequently use their smartphones without the sort of intentional supervision involved in genuine agency. This sixth section includes the introduction of Digital Environmental Dependency Syndrome (DEDS) as a possible way of characterizing extended use of the smartphone without genuine agency. In the final section of the article, there is a discussion of questions raised by the main claim, including suggestions for reducing occurrences of illusions of agency through software design.

Overcoming Lexical Bias in the Judgment of Emotion in Speech: Role of Executive Function and Usefulness Understanding in Young Children

Studies have shown that when listening to speech sounds that express different emotions through prosodic and lexical content, adults tend to judge a speaker's emotion based on prosody, while young children tend to judge a speaker's emotion based on lexical content. This study examined three factors that can help 3- to 5-year-old children overcome their lexical bias and use prosody to judge a speaker's emotion. The results showed that an understanding of the usefulness of prosody to infer emotion from speech influenced young children's tendency to focus on prosody, and that only children with well-developed executive functions could judge a speaker's emotions by focusing on prosody-to the extent that they could read emotions from it. To achieve this, in addition to understanding, children needed to switch their attention away from lexical content and read emotions from prosody.

How Children Learn From Others: An Analysis of Selective Word Learning

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children's selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children's ability to engage in selective word learning appeared to be present in the youngest samples surveyed. Their more metacognitive understanding that epistemic competence indicates reliability or that others are good sources of knowledge has more of a developmental trajectory. We also found that various methodological factors used to assess children influence performance. We conclude with a synthesis of theoretical accounts of how children learn from others.

Extending experiences of voluntary action by association

"Sense of agency" refers to the experience that links one's voluntary actions to their external outcomes. It remains unclear whether this ubiquitous experience is hardwired, arising from specific signals within the brain's motor systems, or rather depends on associative learning, through repeated cooccurrence of voluntary movements and their outcomes. To distinguish these two models, we asked participants to trigger a tone by a voluntary keypress action. The voluntary action was always associated with an involuntary movement of the other hand. We then tested whether the combination of the involuntary movement and tone alone might now suffice to produce a sense of agency, even when the voluntary action was omitted. Sense of agency was measured using an implicit marker based on time perception, namely a shift in the perceived time of the outcome toward the action that caused it. Across two experiments, repeatedly pairing an involuntary movement with a voluntary action induced key temporal features of agency, with the outcome now perceived as shifted toward the involuntary movement. This shift required involuntary movements to have been previously associated with voluntary actions. We show that some key aspects of agency may be transferred from voluntary actions to involuntary movements. An internal volitional signal is required for the primary acquisition of agency but, with repeated association, the involuntary movement in itself comes to produce some key temporal features of agency over the subsequent outcome. This finding may explain how humans can develop an enduring sense of agency in nonnatural cases, like brain-machine interfaces.

The acquisition of a theory of action and the dissociation between action intention and outcome intention in children aged 2-6 years

The aim of an action is linked to a desire, the choice of the action is linked to the subject’s beliefs about the world. Much data on the acquisition of a theory-of-mind by children evidence a lag in the conceptualisation of desires and beliefs. The authors assume that there is also a lag between the awareness and the recall of an outcome intention and of an action intention. Their central idea is the following: When an action fails, the outcome intention is frustrated and the associated action intention is deleted by a new action intention more in agreement with the expected outcome. This hypothesis was confirmed in a ” rst experiment when action intention and outcome intention verbalisations were clearly differentiated. A second experiment showed that the difficulties were not associated with an inadequate analysis of temporal markers. The hypothesis of a conceptual lag between binary and ternary structures, via the activation of more sophisticated computing in the latter case (according to Fodor, 1992), was theoretically attractive, but it was not possible to support it empirically in a third experiment. A fourth experiment compared an action intention item with a false belief item. A ”fth and a sixth experiment, both using a nonverbal design, confirmed the previous data. The six experiments were conducted with 310 children aged from 2;6 to 6;6 years.

Causal learning in children

How do children learn the causal structure of the environment? We first summarize a set of theories from the adult literature on causal learning, including associative models, parameter estimation theories, and causal structure learning accounts, as applicable to developmental science. We focus on causal graphical models as a description of children's causal knowledge, and the implications of this computational description for children's causal learning. We then examine the contributions of explanation and exploration to causal learning from a computational standpoint. Finally, we examine how children might learn causal knowledge from others and how computational and constructivist accounts of causal learning can be integrated. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:413-427. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1291 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

The Side-Effect Effect in Children Is Robust and Not Specific to the Moral Status of Action Effects

Adults’ intentionality judgments regarding an action are influenced by their moral evaluation of this action. This is clearly indicated in the so-called side-effect effect: when told about an action (e.g. implementing a business plan) with an intended primary effect (e.g. raise profits) and a foreseen side effect (e.g. harming/helping the environment), subjects tend to interpret the bringing about of the side effect more often as intentional when it is negative (harming the environment) than when it is positive (helping the environment). From a cognitive point of view, it is unclear whether the side-effect effect is driven by the moral status of the side effects specifically, or rather more generally by its normative status. And from a developmental point of view, little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the effect. The present study therefore explored the cognitive foundations and the ontogenetic origins of the side-effect effect by testing 4-to 5-year-old children with scenarios in which a side effect was in accordance with/violated a norm. Crucially, the status of the norm was varied to be conventional or moral. Children rated the bringing about of side-effects as more intentional when it broke a norm than when it accorded with a norm irrespective of the type of norm. The side-effect effect is thus an early-developing, more general and pervasive phenomenon, not restricted to morally relevant side effects.

Intentional binding effect in children: insights from a new paradigm

Intentional binding (IB) refers to the temporal attraction between a voluntary action and its sensory consequence. Since its discovery in 2002, it has been considered to be a valid implicit measure of sense of agency (SoA), since it only occurs in the context of voluntary actions. The vast majority of studies considering IB have recruited young adults as participants, while neglecting possible age-related differences. The aim of the present work is to study the development of IB in 10-year-old children. In place of Libet's classical clock method, we decided to implement a new and more suitable paradigm in order to study IB, since children could have some difficulties in dealing with reading clocks. A stream of unpredictable letters was therefore used: participants had to remember which letter was on the screen when they made a voluntary action, heard a sound, or felt their right index finger moved down passively. In Experiment I, a group of young adults was tested in order to replicate the IB effect with this new paradigm. In Experiment II, the same paradigm was then administered to children in order to investigate whether such an effect has already emerged at this age. The data from Experiment I showed the presence of the IB effect in adults. However, Experiment II demonstrated a clear reduction of IB. The comparison of the two groups revealed that the young adult group differed from the children, showing a significantly stronger linkage between actions and their consequences. The results indicate a developmental trend in the IB effect. This finding is discussed in light of the maturation process of the frontal cortical network.

The Big ‘Whoops!’ in the Study of Intentional Behavior: An Appeal for a New Framework in Understanding Human Actions

Abstract

Distinguishing intentional behavior from accidental behavior is a crucial component of social cognition and a major developmental achievement. It has often been assumed that developmental changes in intentional reasoning result from a gradual sophistication in the ability to discern intentions in action. We take issue with this notion, demonstrating that data from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology are more consistent with the hypothesis that it is instead a gradual sophistication in the ability to understand accidents that drives developmental change.

The psychology of volition

Volition can be studied from two perspectives. From the third-person view, volitional behaviour is internally generated, rather than being determined by the immediate environmental context, and is therefore, to some extent, unpredictable. Such behaviour is not unique to humans, since it is seen in many other species including invertebrates. From the first-person view, our experience of volitional behaviour includes a vivid sense of agency. We feel that, through our intentions, we can cause things to happen and we can choose between different actions. Our experience of agency is not direct. It depends on sub-personal inferences derived from prior expectations and sensations associated with movement. As a result, our experiences and intuitions about volition can be unreliable and uncertain. Nevertheless, our experience of agency is not a mere epiphenomenon. Anticipation of the regret we might feel after making the wrong choice can alter behaviour. Furthermore, the strong sense of responsibility, associated with agency, has a critical role in creating social cohesion and group benefits. We can only study the experience of agency in humans who can describe their experiences. The discussion of the experience of volition, that introspection and communication make possible, can change our experience of volitional actions. As a result, agency, regret and responsibility are cultural phenomena that are unique to humans.

Distinguishing intentions from desires: contributions of the frontal and parietal lobes

The ability to represent desires and intentions as two distinct mental states was investigated in patients with parietal (N=8) and frontal (N=6) lesions and in age-matched controls (N=7). A task was used where the satisfaction of the desire and the fulfilment of the intention did not co-vary and were manipulated in a 2 × 2 set. In two experiments we show that lesions to the frontal lobe may impair the ability to deal with desires when their outcome is not congruent with that of the intention, and that parietal damage - especially if it encompasses the left temporo-parietal junction - may cause severe difficulties in the processing of both desires and intentions. The implications of the results for the neuropsychological and the developmental literature are discussed.

The link between infant attention to goal-directed action and later theory of mind abilities

Various studies have shown that infants in their first year of life are able to interpret human actions as goal-directed. It is argued that this understanding is a precondition for understanding intentional actions and attributing mental states. Moreover, some authors claim that this early action understanding is a precursor of later Theory of Mind (ToM) development. To test this, we related 6-month-olds' performance in an action interpretation task to their performance in ToM tasks at the age of 4 years. Action understanding was assessed using a modified version of the Woodward-paradigm (Woodward, 1999). At the age of 4 years, the same children were tested with the German version of the ToM scale developed by Wellman and Liu (2004). Results revealed a correlation between infants' decrement of attention to goal-directed action and their ability to solve a false belief task at the age of 4 years with no modulation by language abilities. Our results indicate a link between infant attention to goal-directed action and later theory of mind abilities.

To what extent can children with autism understand desire?

Previous studies of theory of mind abilities in young people with autism have found that their understanding of false belief is specifically impaired, but that simple aspects of desire are understood in line with mental age. We explored the possibility that more complex aspects of desire (in which comparison of goals with outcomes is not a sufficient strategy) are not understood by children with autism. In two experiments, we found that these children were specifically impaired in understanding desire satisfaction and desire change, when compared with children with mental handicap and normal 4-6-year-olds. Although there was some evidence that understanding of desires may be easier for individuals with autism than understanding false belief, it would appear that they have difficulties in understanding both epistemic and volitional mental states.

The emergence of children's causal explanations and theories: evidence from everyday conversation

This research examines the content of explanations that 4 English-speaking children gave or asked for in everyday conversations recorded from 2 1/2 to 5 years of age. Analyses of nearly 5,000 codable explanations (identified by markers like why or because) focused on the entity targeted for explanation (e.g., person, animal, object), the explanatory mode of causal reasoning (e.g., psychological, physical), and interrelations between these elements. Children's explanations focused on varied entities (animals, objects, and persons) and incorporated diverse modes (psychological, physical, social-conventional, and even biological reasoning). Children's pairings of entities with explanatory modes suggest appropriately constrained yet flexible causal reasoning. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that young children draw on several complementary causal-explanatory theories to make sense of real-life events.

Action perception and outcome valence: effects on children's inferences of intentionality and moral and liking judgments

The influences of different action-outcome scenarios on children's evaluative judgments and inferences of outcome intentionality were assessed. One hundred forty-five kindergartners, 2nd graders, and 4th graders heard 4 stories about child actors who engaged in 1 action or 3 equifinal actions and caused a positive or negative outcome. The stories made no mention of the actors' anticipated outcome so that we could assess the children's inferences of whether the actors wanted and had tried to cause the outcome. Children also rated their liking for the actors and the actors' morality. Children's moral and liking judgments were not significantly differentiated by action condition. However, actors who caused positive outcomes received favorable liking and moral judgments, and actors who caused negative outcomes received neutral liking and moral judgments. Children's intentionality inferences varied by the actors' actions and were moderated by outcome valence. The authors discuss children's apparent use of the valence rule when inferring intentionality and their reluctance to judge harshly actors who cause negative outcomes when not privy to the actors' intentions.

Development of theory of mind and executive control

Several recent studies have demonstrated a developmental link, in the age range of 3-5 years, between the acquisition of a 'theory of mind' and self control. In this review, we consider the existence of such a link in assessing five competing theoretical hypotheses that might help us to understand the nature of this developmental advance: (1) executive control depends on theory of mind; (2) theory of mind development depends on executive control; (3) the relevant theory of mind tasks require executive control; (4) both kinds of task require the same kind of embedded conditional reasoning; (5) theory of mind and executive control involve the same brain region. We briefly describe these theoretical accounts and evaluate them in the light of existing empirical evidence. At present, only account (3) can be ruled out with some confidence.

Explaining human movements and actions: children's understanding of the limits of psychological explanation

Human actions and movements can be caused by psychological states (e.g. beliefs and desires), physical forces (e.g. gravity) and biological processes (e.g. reflexes). In three studies we explored young children's understanding of the causes of human movements in order to examine their ability to differentiate and coordinate psychological, physical and biological reasoning to account for the activities of one single entity--a human being. In Study 1, 4-year-olds explained characters' voluntary actions, mistakes, physically-caused and biologically-caused behaviors and movements. Children gave psychological explanations for the intended actions and mistakes, but biological and physical explanations for the biologically-caused and physically-caused movements. Studies 2 and 3 extended the investigation to younger children (3-year-olds), encompassed a greater variety of items, and used several converging methods in order to examine children's judgments and explanations. Consistently, 3- and 4-year-olds gave appropriately different responses and explanations to the different item types. These findings show that far from viewing people in strictly psychological terms, young children evidence multiple causal-explanatory construals of human behavior. We discuss the implications of these findings for children's everyday psychological, physical, and biological theories. One implication of the findings is that young children do not assume a match between entities and theories (persons-psychology, objects-physics). If they do not, this raises the question of what information they use to decide which explanatory system fits which events.

Discounting in preschoolers: effect of type of reward agent

The effect of type of reward agent on children's discounting was examined. In Study 1, 49 preschool children were told two stories illustrated with small dolls and toys. Subjects discounted intrinsic interest in toy A when a "big, mean brother" told a sibling that if he played with toy A he could play with toy B. Discounting did not appear when the reward agent in the story was the child's mother, which is the typical outcome in previous research with young children. Studies 2 and 3 suggested that the combination of a negative valence and a particular social role/status accounted for the effect of the big, mean brother of Study 1. More specifically, neither a "big brother" nor a "mean mother" as reward agents elicited a significant amount of discounting. The results suggest that social knowledge guides the application of the discounting schema.