Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

Recent research questions whether children conceptualize race as stable. We examined participants' beliefs about the relative stability of race and emotion, a temporary feature. Participants were White adults and children ages 5-6 and 9-10 (Study 1) and racial minority children ages 5-6 (Study 2). Participants were presented with target children…

Adolescents become increasingly sensitive to social evaluation. Some previous studies have related this change to pubertal development. The present longitudinal study examined the role of sociocognitive development. We investigated whether or not the transition to recursive thinking, the ability to think about (others') thoughts, would be…

The processes and mechanisms of theory-of-mind development were examined via a training study of false-belief conceptions in deaf children of hearing parents (N = 43). In comparison to 2 different control conditions, training based on thought-bubble instruction about beliefs was linked with improved false-belief understanding as well as progress…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF), which may be linked because one domain (EF) affects the other (ToM). Group differences (ASD vs. typical development) were examined in both cognitive domains, as well as EF's associations and regressions with ToM. Participants…

Objective: Research on the neurobiology of parenting has defined "biobehavioral synchrony," the coordination of biological and behavioral responses between parent and child, as a central process underpinning mammalian bond formation. Bi-parental rearing, typically observed in monogamous species, is similarly thought to draw on mechanisms of…

Recent structural and functional imaging studies have provided evidence for continued development of brain regions involved in social cognition during adolescence. In this paper, we review this rapidly expanding area of neuroscience and describe models of neurocognitive development that have emerged recently. One implication of these models is…

Parents with intellectual disabilities (PID) are overrepresented in the child protective services (CPS) system. This study examined a more nuanced view of the role of cognition in parenting risk. Its goal was to validate a social information processing (SIP) model of child neglect that draws on social cognition research and advances in…

Eye direction detection has been claimed to be intact in autism, but the development of this skill has not been investigated. Eleven children with autism and 11 typically developing children performed a demanding face-to-face eye direction detection task. Younger children with autism demonstrated a deficit in this skill, relative to younger…

Patterns of development of ToM belief abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM belief abilities were examined. EDEI-R [Perron-Borelli M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles…

We hypothesized that women with Turner syndrome (45,X) with a single X-chromosome inherited from their mother may show mentalizing deficits compared to women of normal karyotype with two X-chromosomes (46,X). Simple geometrical animation events (two triangles moving with apparent intention in relation to each other) which usually elicit…

Argues that there is a social-cognitive and a social-perceptual component to a theory of mind. Presents as evidence three studies comparing children with Williams syndrome to children with Prader-Willi syndrome, and to children with nonspecific mental retardation. The findings suggest that only social-perceptual components of theory of mind, which…

After distinguishing between neocortical abilities for executive control and subcortical sensory motor skills for proprioceptive and vestibular integration, we compare a sample of 116 normal preschoolers with a sample of 31 preschoolers receiving occupational therapeutical treatment. This is done in an experimental design controlled for age (mean:…

Investigates adolescents' perceptions of impressions held about them by important others, focusing on cross-sectional differences from early to late adolescence in the structure of social self-conceptions, on differences between parental and peer social self-conceptions and between individual and social self-conceptions, and on adolescents'…

Examined preschoolers' suggestibility when initial beliefs about an object's identity were contradicted by experimenter's suggestion. Found that subjects were good at accepting the suggestion only when the experimenter was better informed than they. Children were least accurate at reporting whether their final belief was based on what they were…