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A storyboard of the Sally-Ann or Location False Belief Task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983) used to test attribution of mental states to others in children.
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Theory of Mind (ToM) has received significant research attention. Traditional ToM research has provided important understanding of how humans reason about mental states by utilizing shared world knowledge, social cues, and the interpretation of actions; however, many current behavioral paradigms are limited to static, "third-person" protocols. Emer...
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It has been demonstrated that brief exposure to behavioral information is sufficient for making accurate social judgments. Movement coordination during social interaction, is one potential cue. Although coordination between individuals has been identified, our ability to perceive it when making judgments regarding affiliation (friends vs. strangers...
Citations
... 34 Finding evidence for the first research question put forward in this review study, it is said that in adolescence, affective and cognitive empathy has become increasingly essential as more advanced social cognitive skills develop, such as ToM, the judgment of social status, understanding social norms, etc. ToM depends on the accurate identification and interpretation of social signals from social cognitive processing. 35 Thus, it is clear that emotional and cognitive empathy are the primary factors in developing social cognition among adolescents. ...
... Adolescent empathy failures may reflect executive dysfunction. 34,35 This element is demonstrated in adolescents, who found that they can conceptualize their emotions related to their social cognitive abilities. ...
Empathy and social cognition among adolescents have been mainly studied in recent years. There are several reasons that adolescence and social cognition are being studied. Adolescents find themselves fully facing the external world and equipped with social cognitive skills, including emotional and cognitive empathy, along with the theory of mind acquired at home or school. Now, they must interact with others with diverse views, thoughts, and emotions from society. One of the fundamental components of social cognition among adolescents is described as empathy. Archival techniques are used in this review paper. This paper explores the connection between empathy and social cognition in adolescent development and how emotional and cognitive empathy influence social cognitive skills. It also investigates the changes in brain regions to social cognition and empathy among adolescents. Identifying this relationship reveals that emotional and cognitive empathy are both indispensable in the construct of social cognition during the adolescence period. The findings of the study point to the need for assessing the different components of empathy in psychopathological conditions among adolescents, which is marked by difficulties in emotional identification and expression. Developing a typical training program that improves social cognitive skills may help adolescents track their behavior in every aspect.
... Third, the participants in the present study were observers of a conflict in which they themselves were not involved. It is possible, however, that there are different motivation-based consequences when an individual is socially engaged with others as opposed to when he or she is an observer of others [77]. Research on how we humans react to service robots that have a conflict-detection ability would therefore benefit from an experimental paradigm making the participant in a study more engaged in an interaction with a service robot than what a mere observer is. ...
... In fact, social interactions require individuals to quickly infer their conversational partners' mental states, in order to produce appropriate responses. Previous literature suggests that three important mechanisms are involved in ToM: (i) knowledge of shared content, (ii) perception of social cues, and (iii) interpretation of actions (Byom & Mutlu, 2013). Overall, they contribute to the inference of others' mental states, which allows for accurate predictions of future behavior. ...
Research investigating pragmatic abilities in healthy aging suggests that both production and comprehension might be compromised; however, it is not clear how pragmatic abilities evolve in late adulthood, as well as when difficulties are more likely to arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the decline of pragmatic skills in aging, and to explore what cognitive and demographic factors support pragmatic competence. We assessed pragmatic production skills, including discourse abilities such as speech, informativeness, information flow, paralinguistic aspects, as well as the ability to produce informative descriptions of pictures, and pragmatic comprehension skills, which encompassed the ability to understand discourse and the main aspects of a narrative text, to infer non-literal meanings and to comprehend verbal humor in a group of elderly individuals and in a sample of younger participants. Moreover, specific cognitive functions (short-term memory, verbal and visuospatial working memory, inhibition Theory of Mind, and Cognitive Reserve) were assessed in both groups. Pragmatic difficulties seem to occur in late adulthood, likely around 70 years, and emerge more prominently when participants are asked to understand verbal humor. Age was the only predictor of general pragmatic performance in a sample of cognitively unimpaired older adults; conversely, when elderly individuals with less intact inhibitory control are considered, a general role of inhibition emerged, in addition to working memory and ToM in specific tasks.
... Another limitation is our reliance on third-person paradigms in the Social Cognition Rating Tool in an Indian Setting (SOCRATIS) for assessing theory of mind. These paradigms may not fully capture this complex social ability in its ecologically valid form (15). ...
... Generally speaking, the theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to infer from others' thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, what their intended action would be, in order to predict it (Byom & Mutlu, 2013). As for the TT, FB-ToM involves the mental representation of propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires and intentions, e.g.: subjects represent the belief of another agent, such as an object is behind a wall, by holding a second-order belief, namely a representation, and not by adopting or imitating the first-order belief that the object is behind the wall (Lurz et al., 2022). ...
In the article , a theoretical model of how motor simulation is a mechanism that underlies language acquisition is described. It is argued that motor areas might play a role in both the recognition of linguistic communicative and informative intentions in infants, by activating brain regions dedicated to speech processing. In this paper, I will extend the position taken there (i) by connecting my model to the features of infant-caregiver interaction in speech perception, (ii) by explaining the process that causes brains to create networks between speech areas and the motor cortex, and (iii) by showing how the most influential mindreading models can be made compatible with both the embodied simulation theory and with the cognitive abilities in children.
... Humans with ToM (abilities) make use of three underlying mechanisms in order to infer the mental states of others [3]: inferring actions of others, sharedworld knowledge and perceiving social cues. The first mechanism is used in order to perform false belief tasks, such as the Sally-Anne test [2] and is not necessarily lacking in bvFTD patients. ...
People with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) struggle with social interactions and the recognition of emotions. Currently, questionnaires with pen and paper are used to diagnose people with bvFTD. In these questionnaires, people are asked to identify faux pas scenarios based on a short text. However, these questionnaires cannot convey enough emotion or realism for the test to be effective in recognizing early stages of bvFTD. We created Tommy’s Quest, a serious game to support bvFTD detection. Based on the Theory of Mind, the game gently leads players to consider what the in-game characters are thinking, as this is often challenging for people with bvFTD. Tommy’s Quest gives players an immersive feeling while answering the same type of questions as in the questionnaires currently used. However, the questions in the game are incorporated into a story which makes them less obvious. Moreover, the scenarios feel more real because they feature characters with emotions. The game generates a report based on the answers and choices of the player, to help researchers in their bvFTD diagnosis. An upcoming clinical study will be instrumental in assessing the potential of Tommy’s Quest to help clinicians improve the diagnosis of bvFTD.
... Manuscript submitted to ACM a partner model can be broadly understood as a mental model of the dialogue partner. Informed by research examining the role of partner models in HHD and HMD interactions [13,15,23,28], and established explanations of closely related concepts such as mental models [45,46,65,84] and theory of mind [2,3,20], recent work proposed a working definition of partner models, defining them as: " an interlocutor's cognitive representation of beliefs about their dialogue partner's communicative ability. These perceptions are multidimensional and include judgements about cognitive, empathetic and/or functional capabilities of a dialogue partner. ...
Recent work has looked to understand user perceptions of speech agent capabilities as dialogue partners (termed partner models), and how this affects user interaction. Yet, currently partner model effects are inferred from language production as no metrics are available to quantify these subjective perceptions more directly. Through three studies, we develop and validate the Partner Modelling Questionnaire (PMQ): an 18-item self-report semantic differential scale designed to reliably measure people's partner models of non-embodied speech interfaces. Through principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, we show that the PMQ scale consists of three factors: communicative competence and dependability, human-likeness in communication, and communicative flexibility. Our studies show that the measure consistently demonstrates good internal reliability, strong test-retest reliability over 12 and 4-week intervals, and predictable convergent/divergent validity. Based on our findings we discuss the multidimensional nature of partner models, whilst identifying key future research avenues that the development of the PMQ facilitates. Notably, this includes the need to identify the activation, sensitivity, and dynamism of partner models in speech interface interaction.
... Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to understand other people's minds, including their interests, beliefs, emotions, and intentions. Finally, empathy allows us to respond to the thoughts and feelings of others with an appropriate emotion (Dennis et al., 2012;Byom and Mutlu, 2013;Neumann et al., 2022). Childhood is a key time in the development of these skills that people need to interact and function successfully in society (Bulgarelli et al., 2022). ...
Background
Social cognitive deficits are common after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The participant in this single-case experimental design (SCED) was 7 years old when he sustained a severe TBI. After 2 years in rehabilitation, he continues to show deficits in social cognition.Objective
To determine the effectiveness of three interventions, each aimed at improving a behavior altered by social cognition deficits. These behaviors were: (1) expression of positive emotions, (2) reacting to changes in plans, and (3) greeting classmates.Method
An A-B-A’ design was used for each behavior. In addition, each behavior was targeted with a rehabilitation program applied over 10 sessions.ResultsFor the first behavior, changes between phases B-A’ (NAP = 0.712) and A-A’ (NAP = 0.864) indicated improvements in the child’s ability to express positive emotions. In the second behavior, changes in the intensity of reactions between phases B and A’ (NAP = 0.815) and A vs. A’ (NAP = 0.834) indicated that the child adapted to changes in a plan and to unexpected situations in a more adaptive way. For the third behavior, changes in the number of greetings between phases A and B (NAP = 0.883) and A vs. A’ (NAP = 0.844) suggested that during the third phase of the study, the participant fully acquired the habit of greeting peers and increased his interactions with others.Conclusion
While the participant showed improvements in all three targeted behaviors, due to the complexity of the third behavior, it is recommended that in future research, the intervention targeting social interactions should be applied over a longer timeframe to ensure that improvements are more stable in the long term.
... Among such processes, a crucial component for navigating social contexts is ToM, defined as the cognitive operations implicated in attributing affective and cognitive mental states to ourselves and to others, meaning feelings, beliefs, intentions, or desires (Byom and Mutlu, 2013;Frith and Frith, 2006;Molenberghs et al., 2016;Schurz et al., 2014). Through ToM, we attribute mental states to others, distinguishing them from our own. ...
The Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Theory of Mind (ToM) networks play a crucial role in our understanding of the neurocognition of the self. The DMN is commonly associated with introspection, while the ToM is involved in perspective-taking. There is no research investigating the overlap between the DMN and ToM in relation to causal effects such as induced by psychedelics, and their precise relationship remains therefore unknown. Psychedelics alter self-perception and modulate these networks, providing a unique opportunity to shed light on this relationship. We performed a quantitative meta-analysis of 88 studies with a total of 2122 participants to investigate the overlap between DMN and ToM and whether psychedelics affect their neural relationship. We found that the cingulate cortex (BA23 and BA31) plays a crucial role in the overlap between these networks which is substantiated by the effects of psychedelics. These compounds affect the neural basis of ToM and social cognition, which may underlie their therapeutic potential and deepen our understanding of the neural correlates of the self.
... In everyday life, humans continuously engage in social interactions, they communicate, coordinate, collaborate or even compete with each other. These activities require tracking others' mental states adequately (Byom & Mutlu, 2013;Boyd & Richerson, 1996) in situations where the environment is constantly changing, and one's own beliefs, as well as those attributed to others, have to be frequently updated. Thus, the mindreading system must be highly effective and dynamically adaptive to the needs of such a dense social milieu, raising the question of how and when flexible mindreading is achieved in ontogeny. ...
Successful social interactions rely on flexibly tracking and revising others’ beliefs. These can be revised prospectively, new events leading to new beliefs, or retrospectively, when realizing that an attribution may have been incorrect. However, whether infants are capable of such belief revisions is an open question. We tested whether 18-month-olds can revise an attributed FB into a TB when they learn that a person may have witnessed an event that they initially thought she could not see. Infants first observed Experimenter 1 (E1) hiding two objects into two boxes. Then E1 left the room, and the locations of the objects were swapped. Infants then accompanied Experimenter 2 (E2) to the adjacent room. In the FB-revised-to-TB condition, infants observed E1 peeking into the experimental room through a one-way mirror, whereas in the FB-stays-FB condition, they observed E1 reading a book. After returning to the experimental room E1 requested an object by pointing to one of the boxes. In the FB-stays-FB condition, most infants chose the non-referred box, congruently with the agent’s FB. However, in the FB-revised-to-TB condition, most infants chose the other, referred box. Thus, 18-month-olds revised an already attributed FB after receiving evidence that this attribution might have been wrong.
