Shared social groups or shared experiences? The effect of shared knowledge on children's perspective-taking.

Although the ability to consider others' visual perspectives to interpret ambiguous communication emerges during childhood, people sometimes fail to attend to their partner's perspective. Two studies investigated whether 4- to 6-year-olds show a "closeness-communication bias" in their consideration of a partner's perspective in a communication task. Participants played a game that required them to take their partner's visual perspective in order to interpret an ambiguous instruction. If children, like adults, perform worse when they overestimate the extent to which their perspective is aligned with that of a partner, then they should make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a socially close partner compared with a more socially distant partner. In Study 1, social closeness was based on belonging to the same social group. In Study 2, social closeness was based on caregiving, a long-standing social relationship with a close kinship bond. Although social group membership did not affect children's consideration of their partner's perspective, children did make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a close caregiver compared with a novel experimenter. These findings suggest that close personal relationships may be more likely to lead children to overestimate perspective alignment and hinder children's perspective-taking than shared social group membership, and they highlight important questions about the mechanisms underlying the effects of partner characteristics in perspective-taking tasks.

Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs.

Music commonly appears in behavioral contexts in which it can be seen as playing a functional role, as when a parent sings a lullaby with the goal of soothing a baby. Humans readily make inferences, based on the sounds they hear, regarding the behavioral contexts associated with music. These inferences tend to be accurate, even if the songs are in foreign languages or unfamiliar musical idioms; upon hearing a Blackfoot lullaby, a Korean listener with no experience of Blackfoot music, language, or broader culture is far more likely to judge the music's function as "used to soothe a baby" than "used for dancing". Are such inferences shaped by musical exposure or does the human mind naturally detect links between musical form and function of these kinds? Children's developing experience of music provides a clear test of this question. We studied musical inferences in a large sample of children recruited online (N = 5,033), who heard dance, lullaby, and healing songs from 70 world cultures and who were tasked with guessing the original behavioral context in which each was performed. Children reliably inferred the original behavioral contexts with only minimal improvement in performance from the youngest (age 4) to the oldest (age 16), providing little evidence for an effect of experience. Children's inferences tightly correlated with those of adults for the same songs, as collected from a similar online experiment (N = 98,150). Moreover, similar acoustical features were predictive of the inferences of both samples. These findings suggest that accurate inferences about the behavioral contexts of music, driven by universal links between form and function in music across cultures, do not always require extensive musical experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Do face-to-face interactions support 6-month-olds' understanding of the communicative function of speech?

Infants by 6 months recognize that speech communicates information between third parties. We investigated whether 6-month-olds always expect speech to communicate or whether they also consider social features of communication, like how interlocutors engage with one another. A small sample of infants watched an actor (the Speaker) choose one of two objects to play with (the target). When the Speaker could no longer reach her target object, she turned to a new actor (the Listener) and said a nonsense word. During speech, the actors were either face-to-face, the Speaker was facing away from the Listener, or the reverse. When the actors had been face-to-face, infants looked longer when the Listener selected the non-target object compared to the target. Infants looked equally regardless of what the Listener chose when either actor had been disengaged. Area-of-interest gaze coding suggests that infants were similarly interested in the interaction across conditions, but their pattern of attention to Speaker and Listener differed when the Listener was disengaged during speech. Although these experiments should be replicated with a larger sample, the findings provide initial evidence that 6-month-olds do not expect speech alone to communicate, but also attend to the social context in which speech is produced.

Chronic ethanol consumption exacerbates future stress-enhanced fear learning, an effect mediated by dorsal hippocampal astrocytes.

BACKGROUND: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are highly comorbid, yet there is a lack of preclinical research investigating how prior ethanol (EtOH) dependence influences the development of a PTSD-like phenotype. Furthermore, the neuroimmune system has been implicated in the development of both AUD and PTSD, but the extent of glial involvement in this context remains unclear. A rodent model was developed to address this gap in the literature. METHODS: We used a 15-day exposure to the 5% w/v EtOH low-fat Lieber-DeCarli liquid diet in combination with the stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) paradigm to investigate the effects of chronic EtOH consumption on the development of a PTSD-like phenotype. Next, we used a reverse transcription quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to quantify mRNA expression of glial cell markers GFAP (astrocytes) and CD68 (microglia) following severe footshock stress in EtOH-withdrawn rats. Finally, we tested the functional contribution of dorsal hippocampal (DH) astrocytes in the development of SEFL in EtOH-dependent rats using astrocyte-specific Gi designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (Gi -DREADD). RESULTS: Results demonstrate that chronic EtOH consumption and withdrawal exacerbate future SEFL. Additionally, we found significantly increased GFAP mRNA expression in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus and amygdalar complex following the severe stressor in EtOH-withdrawn animals. Finally, the stimulation of the astroglial Gi -DREADD during EtOH withdrawal prevented the EtOH-induced enhancement of SEFL. CONCLUSIONS: Collectively, results indicate that prior EtOH dependence and withdrawal combined with a severe stressor potentiate future enhanced fear learning. Furthermore, DH astrocytes significantly contribute to this change in behavior. Overall, these studies provide insight into the comorbidity of AUD and PTSD and the potential neurobiological mechanisms behind increased susceptibility to a PTSD-like phenotype in individuals with AUD.

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures.

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.

Actual knowledge.

This response argues that when you represent others as knowing something, you represent their mind as being related to the actual world. This feature of knowledge explains the limits of knowledge attribution, how knowledge differs from belief, and why knowledge underwrites learning from others. We hope this vision for how knowledge works spurs a new era in theory of mind research.

Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies.

Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N = 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures.

Knowledge before belief.

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind - one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

When Children Treat Condemnation as a Signal: The Costs and Benefits of Condemnation.

Condemnation is ubiquitous in the social world and adults treat condemnation as a costly signal. We explore when children begin to treat condemnation as a signal by presenting 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 435) with stories involving a condemner of stealing and a noncondemner. Children were asked to predict who would be more likely to steal as well as who should be punished more harshly for stealing. In five studies, we found that 7- to 9-year-old children treat condemnation as a signal-thinking that a condemner is less likely to steal and should be punished more harshly if caught hypocritically stealing later. We discuss the implications of these results for children's emerging understanding of signaling and moral condemnation.

Belief Representation in Great Apes.

A new study by Kano and colleagues shows that great apes use their own visual experience to attribute perceptions and beliefs to another agent. Their results suggest that the way apes understand behavior is more similar to human understanding than was previously thought, and may be driven by representations of mental states.

Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants' goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech.

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record

What Cognitive Representations Support Primate Theory of Mind?

Much recent work has examined the evolutionary origins of human mental state representations. This work has yielded strikingly consistent results: primates show a sophisticated ability to track the current and past perceptions of others, but they fail to represent the beliefs of others. We offer a new account of the nuanced performance of primates in theory of mind (ToM) tasks. We argue that primates form awareness relations tracking the aspects of reality that other agents are aware of. We contend that these awareness relations allow primates to make accurate predictions in social situations, but that this capacity falls short of our human-like representational ToM. We end by explaining how this new account makes important new empirical predictions about primate ToM.

What You Want Versus What's Good for You: Paternalistic Motivation in Children's Helping Behavior.

Children help others to complete their goals. Yet adults are sometimes motivated to help others in a "paternalistic" way, overriding a recipient's desires if they conflict with the recipient's best interests. Experiments investigated whether 5-year-olds (n = 100) consider a recipient's desire, and the consequences of fulfilling this desire, when helping. Children overrode a request for chocolate in favor of giving fruit snacks, if chocolate would make the recipient sick. Children did not override a request for chocolate in favor of carrots, even if chocolate would make the recipient sick, but they gave carrots if the recipient requested them. By age 5, children balance different motivations when helping, considering the recipient's desires, consequences of fulfilling them, and alternative forms of helping available.

Beyond good and evil: what motivations underlie children's prosocial behavior?

Researchers have proposed different accounts of the development of prosocial behavior in children. Some have argued that behaviors like helping and sharing must be learned and reinforced; others propose that children have an initially indiscriminate prosocial drive that declines and becomes more selective with age; and yet others contend that even children's earliest prosocial behaviors share some strategic motivations with the prosociality of adults (e.g., reputation enhancement, social affiliation). We review empirical and observational research on children's helping and sharing behaviors in the first 5 years of life, focusing on factors that have been found to influence these behaviors and on what these findings suggest about children's prosocial motivations. We use the adult prosociality literature to highlight parallels and gaps in the literature on the development of prosocial behavior. We address how the evidence reviewed bears on central questions in the developmental psychology literature and propose that children's prosocial behaviors may be driven by multiple motivations not easily captured by the idea of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and may be selective quite early in life.

Do 6-month-olds understand that speech can communicate?

Adults and 12-month-old infants recognize that even unfamiliar speech can communicate information between third parties, suggesting that they can separate the communicative function of speech from its lexical content. But do infants recognize that speech can communicate due to their experience understanding and producing language, or do they appreciate that speech is communicative earlier, with little such experience? We examined whether 6-month-olds recognize that speech can communicate information about an object. Infants watched a Communicator selectively grasp one of two objects (target). During test, the Communicator could no longer reach the objects; she turned to a Recipient and produced speech (a nonsense word) or non-speech (coughing). Infants looked longer when the Recipient selected the non-target than the target object when the Communicator spoke but not when she coughed - unless the Recipient had previously witnessed the Communicator's selective grasping of the target object. Our results suggest that at 6 months, with a receptive vocabulary of no more than a handful of commonly used words, infants possess some abstract understanding of the communicative function of speech. This understanding may provide an early mechanism for language and knowledge acquisition.

Understanding the role of mirror neurons in action understanding will require more than a domain-general account.

Cook et al. propose that mirror neurons emerge developmentally through a domain-general associative mechanism. We argue that experience-sensitivity does not rule out an adaptive or genetic argument for mirror neuron function, and that current evidence suggests that mirror neurons are more specialized than the authors' account would predict. We propose that future work integrate behavioral and neurophysiological techniques used with primates to examine the proposed functions of mirror neurons in action understanding.

The origins of belief representation: monkeys fail to automatically represent others' beliefs.

Young infants' successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)'s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species--the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)--is automatically influenced by another agent's beliefs when tracking an object's location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple's movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys' belief (true or false) and agent's belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys' expectations were not influenced by another agent's beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans.

When kids know better: paternalistic helping in 3-year-old children.

Helping others is often more complicated than fulfilling their requests, for instance, when an individual requests something that is not suited to achieving her or his ultimate goal. Are children indiscriminate helpers, responding to any object-directed action or request, or do their helping actions prioritize ultimate goals over specific requests? We examined how 3-year-olds would provide help to an experimenter whose verbal requests were incompatible with the tasks she was trying to accomplish, a situation in which the best way to help was to deny the request and provide an alternative. In Study 1, children were less likely to give the experimenter a requested object when it was dysfunctional and could not allow the experimenter to complete her task than when it was functional. In Study 2, we found that children did not simply prefer functional objects, as they were willing to give the experimenter requested objects regardless of their functionality when the task was to throw objects in the trash. In Study 3, children denied a request for a dysfunctional object when the task could only be achieved using a functional object, but not when the task could be achieved with either object. We also found in Study 3 that children proactively warned an experimenter attempting to use an object not suited to her goal. Our studies show that by at least age 3, children prioritize ultimate goals when helping others, rather than fulfilling any object request.

Own-gender imitation activates the brain's reward circuitry.

Imitation is an important component of human social learning throughout life. Theoretical models and empirical data from anthropology and psychology suggest that people tend to imitate self-similar individuals, and that such imitation biases increase the adaptive value (e.g., self-relevance) of learned information. It is unclear, however, what neural mechanisms underlie people's tendency to imitate those similar to themselves. We focused on the own-gender imitation bias, a pervasive bias thought to be important for gender identity development. While undergoing fMRI, participants imitated own- and other-gender actors performing novel, meaningless hand signs; as control conditions, they also simply observed such actions and viewed still portraits of the same actors. Only the ventral and dorsal striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala were more active when imitating own- compared to other-gender individuals. A Bayesian analysis of the BrainMap neuroimaging database demonstrated that the striatal region preferentially activated by own-gender imitation is selectively activated by classical reward tasks in the literature. Taken together, these findings reveal a neurobiological mechanism associated with the own-gender imitation bias and demonstrate a novel role of reward-processing neural structures in social behavior.