Contrasting one's share of the shared life space: Comparing the roles of metacognition and inhibitory control in the development of theory of mind among Scottish and Japanese children.

Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western samples. In independent cultures, an emphasis on one's own mind offers a clear route to 'simulate' other minds, and inhibitory control may be required to set aside one's own perspective to represent the perspective of others. However, in interdependent cultures, social norms are considered the key catalyst for behaviour, and metacognitive reflection and/or suppression of one's own perspective may not be necessary. The cross-cultural generalizability of the western developmental route to ToM is therefore questionable. The current study used an age-matched cross-sectional sample to contrast 56 Japanese and 56 Scottish 3-6-year-old's metacognition, ToM and inhibitory control skills. We replicated the expected cultural patterns for ToM (Scotland > Japan) and inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland). Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that inhibitory control and metacognition predict theory of mind competence in Scotland. However, these variables cannot be used to predict Japanese ToM. This confirms that individualistic mechanisms do not capture the developmental mechanism underlying ToM in Japan, highlighting a bias in our understanding of ToM development. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We replicate an independent cultural advantage for theory of mind (Scotland > Japan) and interdependent advantage for inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland). From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind and inhibitory control. Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that the development of inhibitory control mediates the link between metacognition and theory of mind in Scotland. However, this model does not predict Japanese theory of mind, highlighting an individualistic bias in our mechanistic understanding of theory of mind development.

Understanding of spatial correspondence does not contribute to representational understanding: Evidence from the model room and false belief tasks.

We examine the long-standing claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding. Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, United Kingdom, examined the use of a scale model comparing performances on a "copy" task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement ability, and the false belief task. Consistent with previous studies, younger children performed well in scale model trials when objects were unique (e.g., one cupboard) but poorly at distinguishing objects using spatial layout (one of three identical chairs). Performance was specifically associated with Copy task but not False Belief performance. Emphasizing the representational relation between the model and the room was ineffective. We find no evidence for understanding relational correspondence as a general component of representational understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The extended development of mapping spatial demonstratives onto space.

Spatial demonstratives (this and that in English) convey distance relative to speaker (within reach vs. out of reach) and object characteristics such as ownership. Previous studies indicate that object characteristics affect adult demonstrative choice, for example, greater use of this for owned objects. Here, production of spatial demonstratives was studied developmentally to identify when demonstrative production is sensitive to both distance and ownership. In two experiments, 7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults completed an object location memory task, and a language task eliciting this or that to indicate an object. Results indicate that adult-like demonstrative production starts around 7 years of age and continues to develop beyond 11 years. Nonlinguistic spatial memory did not vary significantly across age groups. Spatial demonstratives encode both semantic and spatial object characteristics throughout development, revealing the fundamental importance of semantic factors for demonstrative production.

Piecing Together the Puzzle of Pictorial Representation: How Jigsaw Puzzles Index Metacognitive Development.

Jigsaw puzzles are ubiquitous developmental toys in Western societies, used here to examine the development of metarepresentation. For jigsaw puzzles this entails understanding that individual pieces, when assembled, produce a picture. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) completed jigsaw puzzles that were normal, had no picture, or comprised noninterlocking rectangular pieces. Pictorial puzzle completion was associated with mental and graphical metarepresentational task performance. Guide pictures of completed pictorial puzzles were not useful. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 52) completed a simplified task, to choose the correct final piece. Guide-use associated with age and specifically graphical metarepresentation performance. We conclude that the pragmatically natural measure of jigsaw puzzle completion ability demonstrates general and pictorial metarepresentational development at 4 years.

Acquisition of Demonstratives in English and Spanish.

The present work re-evaluates the long-standing claim that demonstratives are among infants' earliest and most common words. Although demonstratives are deictic words important for joint attention, deictic gestures and non-word vocalizations could serve this function in early language development; the role of demonstratives may have been overestimated. Using extensive data from the CHILDES corpora (Study 1, N = 66, 265 transcripts) and McArthur-Bates CDI database (Study 2, N = 950), the language production of 18- to 24-month-old Spanish- and English-speaking children was analyzed to determine the age and order of acquisition, and frequency of demonstratives. Results indicate that demonstratives do not typically appear before the 50th word and only become frequent from the two-word utterance stage. Corpus data show few differences between Spanish and English, whereas parental report data suggest much later acquisition for demonstratives in English. These findings expand our knowledge of the foundations of deictic communication, and of the methodological challenges of assessing early production of function words.

Are developments in mental scanning and mental rotation related?

The development and relation of mental scanning and mental rotation were examined in 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-year old children and adults (N = 102). Based on previous findings from adults and ageing populations, the key question was whether they develop as a set of related abilities and become increasingly differentiated or are unrelated abilities per se. Findings revealed that both mental scanning and rotation abilities develop between 4- and 6 years of age. Specifically, 4-year-olds showed no difference in accuracy of mental scanning and no scanning trials whereas all older children and adults made more errors in scanning trials. Additionally, the minority of 4-year-olds showed a linear increase in response time with increasing rotation angle difference of two stimuli in contrast to all older participants. Despite similar developmental trajectories, mental scanning and rotation performances were unrelated. Thus, adding to research findings from adults, mental scanning and rotation appear to develop as a set of unrelated abilities from the outset. Different underlying abilities such as visual working memory and spatial coding versus representing past and future events are discussed.

Effects of Culture and the Urban Environment on the Development of the Ebbinghaus Illusion.

The development of visual context effects in the Ebbinghaus illusion in the United Kingdom and in remote and urban Namibians (UN) was investigated (N = 336). Remote traditional Himba children showed no illusion up until 9-10 years, whereas UK children showed a robust illusion from 7 to 8 years of age. Greater illusion in UK than in traditional Himba children was stable from 9 to 10 years to adulthood. A lesser illusion was seen in remote traditional Himba children than in UN children growing up in the nearest town to the traditional Himba villages across age groups. We conclude that cross-cultural differences in perceptual biases to process visual context emerge in early childhood and are influenced by the urban environment.

Metacognitive developments in word learning: Mutual exclusivity and theory of mind.

This project examined the flexibility with which children can use pragmatic information to determine word reference. Extensive previous research shows that children choose an unfamiliar object as referent of a novel name-the disambiguation effect. We added a pragmatic cue indirectly indicating a familiar object as intended referent. In three experiments, preschool children's ability to take this cue into account was specifically associated with false belief understanding and the ability to produce familiar alternative names (e.g., rabbit, animal) for a given referent. The association was predicted by the hypothesis that all three tasks require an understanding of perspective (linguistic or mental). The findings indicate that perspectival understanding is required to take into account indirect pragmatic information to suspend the disambiguation effect. Implications for lexical principles and sociopragmatic theories of word learning are discussed.

How Visuo-Spatial Mental Imagery Develops: Image Generation and Maintenance.

Two experiments examined the nature of visuo-spatial mental imagery generation and maintenance in 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-year old children and adults (N = 211). The key questions were how image generation and maintenance develop (Experiment 1) and how accurately children and adults coordinate mental and visually perceived images (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 indicated that basic image generation and maintenance abilities are present at 4 years of age but the precision with which images are generated and maintained improves particularly between 4 and 8 years. In addition to increased precision, Experiment 2 demonstrated that generated and maintained mental images become increasingly similar to visually perceived objects. Altogether, findings suggest that for simple tasks demanding image generation and maintenance, children attain adult-like precision younger than previously reported. This research also sheds new light on the ability to coordinate mental images with visual images in children and adults.

Developmentally distinct gaze processing systems: luminance versus geometric cues.

Two experiments examined how the different cues to gaze direction contribute to children's abilities to follow and make explicit judgements about gaze. In each study participants were shown blurred images of faces containing only luminance cues to gaze direction, line-drawn images containing only fine-grained detail supporting a geometric analysis of gaze direction, and unmanipulated images. In Experiment 1a, 2- and 3-year olds showed gaze-cued orienting of attention in response to unmanipulated and blurred faces, but not line-drawn faces. Adult participants showed cueing effects to line drawn faces as well as the other two types of face cue in Experiment 1b. In Experiment 2, 2-year-olds were poor at judging towards which of four objects blurred and line-drawn faces were gazing, whereas 3- and 4-year-olds performed above chance with these faces. All age groups performed above chance with unmanipulated images. These findings are consistent with an early-developing luminance-based mechanism, which supports gaze following, but which cannot initially support explicit judgements, and a later-developing mechanism, additionally using geometric cues in the eye, which supports explicit judgements about gaze.

Creativity, ambiguous figures, and academic preference.

Research suggests that ambiguous figure reversal is associated with creativity, but current evidence relies on subjective self-report that is difficult to quantify (Wiseman, Watt, Gilhooly, Georgiou, 2011 British Journal of Psychology 102 615-622). Using quantifiable measures of both phenomena we confirm this claim. We also find that participants studying science experience much more frequent reversal--a novel and intriguing finding.

Children with autism's perception and understanding of ambiguous figures: evidence for pictorial metarepresentation, a research note.

A large body of autism research over the last 20 years has shown that people with autism have difficulties understanding mental states. This has been conceived of as a metarepresentational deficit. An open question is whether people with autism's metarepresentational deficit is limited to the mental domain. This research explores individuals with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures. With the use of ambiguous figures, where a single stimulus is capable of representing two distinct referents, we compared metarepresentational abilities in the pictorial and mental domains and the perception of pictorial ambiguity. Our findings indicate that individuals with autism are impaired in mental metarepresentation but not in pictorial metarepresentation. These findings suggest that children with autism understand the representational nature of pictures. We conclude that children with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures is in advance of their metarepresentational understanding of mind. Their perception of figure ambiguity is comparable to the typical population.

The Ebbinghaus illusion deceives adults but not young children.

The sensitivity of size perception to context has been used to distinguish between 'vision for action' and 'vision for perception', and to study cultural, psychopathological, and developmental differences in perception. The status of that evidence is much debated, however. Here we use a rigorous double dissociation paradigm based on the Ebbinghaus illusion, and find that for children below 7 years of age size discrimination is much less affected by surround size. Young children are less accurate than adults when context is helpful, but more accurate when context is misleading. Even by the age of 10 years context-sensitivity is still not at adult levels. Therefore, size contrast as shown by the Ebbinghaus illusion is not a built-in property of the ventral pathway subserving vision for perception but a late development of it, and low sensitivity to the Ebbinghaus illusion in autism is not primary to the pathology. Our findings also show that, although adults in Western cultures have low context-sensitivity relative to East Asians, they have high context-sensitivity relative to children. Overall, these findings reveal a gradual developmental trend toward ever broader contextual syntheses. Such developments are advantageous, but the price paid for them is that, when context is misleading, adults literally see the world less accurately than they did as children.

The rapid development of explicit gaze judgment ability at 3 years.

Two studies examined development of the ability to judge what another person is looking at. In Study 1, 54 2- to 4-year-olds judged where someone was looking in real-life, photograph, and drawing formats. A minority of 2-year-olds, but a majority of older children, passed all tasks, suggesting that the ability arises at around 3 years of age. Study 2 examined the fine-grained gaze judgment of 76 3- to 6-year-olds and 15 adults using gaze differences of 10 degrees and 15 degrees . Development of gaze judgment was gradual, from chance at 3 years of age to near adult-level performance at 6 years of age. Although performance was better when a congruent head turn was included, 3-year-olds were still at chance on 10 degrees head turn trials. The findings suggest that the ability to explicitly judge gaze is novel at 3 years of age and develops slowly thereafter. Therefore, the ability does not develop out of earlier gaze following. General implications for the evolution and development of gaze processing are discussed.

The context sensitivity of visual size perception varies across cultures.

There is evidence that East Asian cultures have more context-sensitive styles of reasoning, memory, attention, and scene perception than Western cultures. Lower levels of the perceptual hierarchy seem likely to be similar in all cultures, however, so we compared context sensitivity in Japan with that in the UK using a rigorous psychophysical measure of the effects of centre-surround contrast on size discrimination. In both cultures context sensitivity was greater for females working in the social sciences than for males working in the mathematical sciences. More surprisingly, context sensitivity was also much greater in Japan than in the UK. These findings show that, even at low levels of the visual-processing hierarchy, context sensitivity varies across cultures, and they raise important issues for both vision scientists and cross-cultural psychologists.

The control of attention to faces.

Humans attend to faces. This study examines the extent to which attention biases to faces are under top-down control. In a visual cueing paradigm, observers responded faster to a target probe appearing in the location of a face cue than of a competing object cue (Experiments 1a and 2a). This effect could be reversed when faces were negatively predictive of the likely target location, making it beneficial to attend to the object cues (Experiments 1b and 2b). It was easier still to strategically shift attention to predictive face cues (Experiment 2c), indicating that the endogenous allocation of attention was augmented here by an additional effect. However, faces merely delayed the voluntary deployment of attention to object cues, but they could not prevent it, even at short cue-target intervals. This finding suggests that attention biases for faces can be rapidly countered by an observer's endogenous control.

Children's difficulty in learning homonyms.

Mazzocco (1997) claimed that children have persistent difficulty in learning pseudo-homonyms--words like rope used to refer to a novel object (e.g. spade). Because the novel objects were familiar, the pseudohomonyms in her study were also synonyms (i.e. rope and spade both now mean spade). The results could therefore be due to children's well-known difficulties in learning synonyms. In Experiment 1, 55 six- to ten-year-olds used story context to select referents for pseudo-homonyms from picture sets containing the intended referents, with primary referents amongst the distractors. Children were equally poor when the intended referents were familiar (e.g. spade) as when they were unfamiliar (e.g. tapir)-35 and 38% correct, respectively. This indicates that familiarity of referent does not account for children's difficulties. In Experiment 2, 64 five- to ten-year-olds received instruction about homonymy, then a story set without pictures of the primary referents, in order to make the experimenter's intentions clear. Children were then shown one of the story sets from Experiment 1. Performance was just as poor (38% correct), indicating that misunderstanding of task demands did not account for failure. The conclusion is that Mazzocco's findings represent a psychologically interesting developmental difficulty.

The relation between hiding skill and judgment of eye direction in preschool children.

This study examines J. H. Flavell, S. G. Shipstead, and K. Croft's (1978) finding that 2 1/2-year-old children can hide an object behind a screen but cannot achieve the same result by placing the screen in front of the object. Experiment 1 replicated this finding alongside a task in which children judged what a person in a picture was looking at. Performance on the move-object task approached ceiling; performances on the move-screen and looking-where tasks were highly correlated even after age and control task performance were partialed out (r = .54, p < .01). Experiment 2 examined whether the finding resulted because the object was more interesting to manipulate than the screen. The move-object task remained easier than the move-screen task with an interesting screen and a dull object. The move-screen task again correlated specifically with the looking-where task. Results are explained in terms of engagement, a precursor to a mature understanding of attention.