Louis J Moses- PhD
- Professor (Full) at University of Oregon
Louis J Moses
- PhD
- Professor (Full) at University of Oregon
About
49
Publications
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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (49)
Children’s mentalizing abilities and their moral reasoning both develop rapidly during the preschool years and are jointly critical for navigating our complex social world. As children develop, they place more emphasis on intentions in making moral judgments, yet little research has examined the role of belief understanding in morally-relevant situ...
Children’s mentalizing abilities and their moral reasoning both develop rapidly during the preschool years and are jointly critical for navigating our complex social world. As children develop, they place more emphasis on intentions in making moral judgments, yet little research has examined the role of belief understanding in morally-relevant situ...
Although the influence of intent understanding on children's moral development has been long studied, little research has examined the influence of belief understanding on that development. In two studies we presented children with morally relevant belief vignettes to examine the extent to which they incorporate both intent and belief information i...
Although the influence of intent understanding on children’s moral development has been long studied, little research has examined the influence of belief understanding on that development. In two studies we presented children with morally-relevant belief vignettes to examine the extent to which they incorporate both intent and belief information i...
The reliability and validity of the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) was further assessed by examining fathers’ as well as mothers’ reports of children’s social understanding, along with behavioural measures of children’s mental state understanding. 112 families with children aged 38 to 64 months participated with both parents filling o...
Background
The association of adolescent social media use with mental health symptoms, especially depression, has recently attracted a great deal of interest in public media as well as the scientific community. Some studies have cited statistically significant associations between adolescent social media use and depression and have proposed that pa...
Increasing psychological distance is an established method for improving children's performance in a number of self-regulation tasks. For example, using a delay of gratification (DoG) task, Prencipe and Zelazo (Psychological Science, 2005, Vol. 16, pp. 501-505) showed that 3-year-olds delay more for "other" than they do for "self," whereas 4-year-o...
Increasing psychological distance is an established method for improving children’s performance in a number of self-regulation tasks. For example, using a delay of gratification (DoG) task, Prencipe and Zelazo (2005) showed that 3-year-olds delay more for “other” than they do for “self”, whereas 4-year-olds make similar choices for self and other....
The current study examined the impact of a verbal interference manipulation on 4- and 5- year olds’ prospective memory (PM). Children were randomly assigned to either complete a quiet delay activity (standard condition) or answer questions aloud during the delay activity (verbal interference condition). Children then completed a PM task followed by...
Children's theory of mind (ToM) is typically measured with laboratory assessments of performance. Although these measures have generated a wealth of informative data concerning developmental progressions in ToM, they may be less useful as the sole source of information about individual differences in ToM and their relation to other facets of develo...
The current study examined the impact of retention interval task difficulty on 4- and 5-year-olds’ prospective memory (PM) in order to test the hypothesis that children periodically monitor their intentions during the retention interval and that disrupting this monitoring may result in poorer PM performance. In addition, relations among PM, working...
Theory of mind (ToM) is a core topic in both social neuroscience and developmental psychology, yet theory and data from each field have only minimally constrained thinking in the other. The two fields might be fruitfully integrated, however, if social neuroscientists sought evidence directly relevant to current accounts of ToM development: modulari...
A simple “expression” account of the relation between executive function (EF) and children's developing theory of mind (ToM) has difficulty accounting for the generality of the changes occurring in children's mental-state understanding during the preschool years. The current study of preschool children (N = 43) showed that EF—especially conflict EF...
Background:
Studies utilizing measures of more advanced ToM, including Happ’s Strange Stories (Happ, 1994), the faux pas test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999), and Eyes test (Baron-Cohen, 1999) do not consistently find ToM impairments in higher functioning individuals with ASD (e.g., Speck et al., 2010). Given that higher functioning adolescents with A...
Background:
The ratio of males to females diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is 4:1. For this reason ASD research has primarily focused on males. Recent work suggests that higher functioning individuals with ASD in comparison to typically developing controls may have superior fluid intelligence, or the ability to reason quickly and...
New research on children's executive functioning and self-regulation has begun to reveal important connections to their developing social understanding (or “theories of mind”) and emotional competence. The exact nature of the relations between these aspects of children's social and emotional development is, however, far from being fully understood....
Background:
Embarrassment is the least researched of the self-conscious emotions among typically developing individuals (Hobson, 2006), and researchers have conducted even less research on embarrassment among individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). Keltner and Buswell (1977) defined embarrassment as the outcome of violating rules of convention...
Background:
There are inconsistent results in the literature about executive dysfunctions in individuals with higher functioning forms of autism, specifically in planning, set-shifting, and working memory (Ozonoff, South, & Miller, 2000; Goldberg, Mostofsky, Cutting, Denckla, & Landa, 2005; Ozonoff & Strayer, 2001). Gioia et al. (2002) examined e...
Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief task...
Preschoolers' theory-of-mind development follows a similar age trajectory across many cultures. To determine whether these similarities are related to similar underlying ontogenetic processes, we examined whether the relation between theory of mind and executive function commonly found among U.S. preschoolers is also present among Chinese preschool...
he ability to gather information from social sources is a hallmark of the human species that contributes immea- surably to uniquely human achievements such as lan- guage, science, and technology. The overwhelming share of knowledge is acquired through social transmission, a process that enables understanding to grow quickly well beyond what could o...
This research examined the relative contributions of two aspects of executive function-inhibitory control and planning ability-to theory of mind in 49 3- and 4-year-olds. Children were given two standard theory of mind measures (Appearance-Reality and False Belief), three inhibitory control tasks (Bear/Dragon, Whisper, and Gift Delay), three planni...
The relation between executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) may involve specific processes of inhibition and/or working memory capacity contributing to ToM, or it might be a reflection of general intellectual ability. To differentiate these alternatives, we administered task batteries measuring inhibitory control (IC), working memory, and...
If young children approached word learning with little social savvy, certain predictable patterns of error would arise in the way they interpret new words. The absence of such errors provides evidence that social understanding informs word learning even in the infancy period. We outline such evidence, and then scrutinize it with respect to four cha...
Four studies investigated whether 4- and 5-yr-olds recognize the potential for diversity in the intentions that motivate a given action. Children heard stories in which 2 characters performed the same action (e.g., running) yet had different desires (e.g., to be home for dinner vs. to be healthy and strong). Children were asked to determine what ea...
This research examined the relation between individual differences in inhibitory control (IC; a central component of executive functioning) and theory-of-mind (ToM) performance in preschool-age children. Across two sessions, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 107) were given multitask batteries measuring IC and ToM. Inhibitory control was strongly rel...
Two varieties of executive theories may be distinguished: emergence accounts and expression accounts. The meta-analytic findings are fully consistent with emergence accounts of theory of mind and do not entirely rule out expression accounts.
Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such social-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acquisition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they appreciate the referential quality of others' emotional...
Social interaction requires social cognition—the ability to perceive, interpret, and explain the actions of others. This ability fundamentally relies on the concepts of intention and intentionality. For example, people distinguish sharply between intentional and unintentional behavior; identify the intentions underlying others' behavior; explain co...
Two studies examined preschoolers' appreciation of how mental states arise. In Study 1, children aged 3 to 5 (24 at each age) better understood perception-generated beliefs (e.g., that looking in a certain location generates a belief about the location's content) and attitude-generated desires (e.g., that positive experiences with an activity gener...
Two studies examined preschoolers' appreciation of how mental states arise. In Study 1, children aged 3 to 5 (24 at each age) better understood perception-generated beliefs (e.g., that looking in a certain location generates a belief about the location's content) and attitude-generated desires (e.g., that positive experiences with an activity gener...
This research examines whether children's difficulties with deception and false belief arise from a lack of inhibitory control rather than from a conceptual deficit. In 3 studies, 3-year-olds deceived frequently under conditions requiring relatively low inhibitory control (e.g., misleading pictorial cues or arrows) but failed to do so under conditi...
This research examines whether children's difficulties with deception and false belief arise from a lack of inhibitory control rather than from a conceptual deficit. In 3 studies, 3-year-olds deceived frequently under conditions requiring relatively low inhibitory control (e.g., misleading pictorial cues or arrows) but failed to do so under conditi...
When facing the unknown, humans tend to consult others for guidance. This propensity to treat others as information sources has wide-ranging implications, being in part responsible for the breadth and depth of our world knowledge. As yet, little is known concerning when and how young children acquire this important skill. Social referencing and com...
Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans, and other species, focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. Several chapters focus on the controversial question of whether gorillas, like ot...
One important characteristic of rational action is that our intentions should be consistent with our beliefs. That is, an intention to perform an action should normally be accompanied by a belief that the action will in fact be performed, and be supported by other relevant beliefs. Thus, if the intention is unfulfilled it will have been accompanied...
Recent research on the development of children's knowledge about the mind has shown that young 3-year-olds have difficulty inferring that another person holds a false belief about a matter of verifiable fact, even when provided with considerable help. 4 studies tested the hypothesis that they would have less difficulty inferring that another person...
Current evidence suggests that young children have little understanding of false belief. Standard false belief tasks, however, may underestimate children's ability for 2 reasons. First, the only cue to belief in these tasks is a protagonist's lack of perceptual access to some critical event, and this may not be a very salient cue for young children...
Recent research on the development of children's knowledge about the mind has shown that young 3-year-olds have difficulty inferring that another person holds a false belief about a matter of verifiable fact, even when provided with considerable help. 4 studies tested the hypothesis that they would have less difficulty inferring that another person...
