A longitudinal study of theory of mind and listening comprehension: Is preschool theory of mind important?

Theory of mind has been shown to be important for listening comprehension for children at a range of ages. However, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence for a relationship between early theory of mind and later listening comprehension. The aim of this study was to examine whether preschool theory of mind has a longitudinal direct effect on later listening comprehension over and above the effects of concurrent theory of mind. A total of 147 children were tested on measures of theory of mind, working memory, vocabulary, and grammatical knowledge at Time 1 (mean age = 4;1 [years;months]) and Time 2 (mean age = 5;11). In addition, at Time 2 listening comprehension, comprehension monitoring, and inference making measures were taken. Data were fitted to concurrent and longitudinal models of listening comprehension. Concurrent findings at Time 2 showed theory of mind to have a direct effect on listening comprehension. However, longitudinal findings showed that earlier theory of mind in preschool (Time 1) did not have a direct effect on listening comprehension 22 months later; instead, there was only an indirect effect of earlier theory of mind on later listening comprehension via concurrent theory of mind (Time 2). Taken together, the results give further support for the importance of theory of mind for listening comprehension but show that there are limited additional benefits of early theory of mind acquisition. Implications for the development of children's listening comprehension are discussed.

Theory of mind in emerging reading comprehension: A longitudinal study of early indirect and direct effects.

The relation between children's theory of mind (ToM) and emerging reading comprehension was investigated in a longitudinal study over 2.5years. A total of 80 children were tested for ToM, decoding, language skills, and executive function (EF) at Time 1 (mean age=3;10 [years;months]). At Time 2 (mean age=6;03), children's word reading efficiency, language skills, and reading comprehension were measured. Mediation analysis showed that ToM at Time 1, when children were around 4years old, indirectly predicted Time 2 reading comprehension, when children were 6years old, via language ability after controlling for age, nonverbal ability, decoding, EF, and earlier language ability. Importantly, ToM at 4years also directly predicted reading comprehension 2.5years later at 6years. This is the first longitudinal study to show a direct contribution of ToM to reading comprehension in typical development. Findings are discussed in terms of the simple view of reading (SVR); ToM not only supports reading comprehension indirectly by facilitating language but also contributes to it directly over and above the SVR. The potential role of metacognition is considered when accounting for the direct contribution of early ToM to later reading comprehension.

Extracting semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics: stop-lists, stemming, and SVD.

In a previous article, we presented a systematic computational study of the extraction of semantic representations from the word-word co-occurrence statistics of large text corpora. The conclusion was that semantic vectors of pointwise mutual information values from very small co-occurrence windows, together with a cosine distance measure, consistently resulted in the best representations across a range of psychologically relevant semantic tasks. This article extends that study by investigating the use of three further factors--namely, the application of stop-lists, word stemming, and dimensionality reduction using singular value decomposition (SVD)--that have been used to provide improved performance elsewhere. It also introduces an additional semantic task and explores the advantages of using a much larger corpus. This leads to the discovery and analysis of improved SVD-based methods for generating semantic representations (that provide new state-of-the-art performance on a standard TOEFL task) and the identification and discussion of problems and misleading results that can arise without a full systematic study.

Inclined to see it your way: Do altercentric intrusion effects in visual perspective taking reflect an intrinsically social process?

It has been suggested that some aspects of mental state understanding recruit a rudimentary, but fast and efficient, processing system, demonstrated by the obligatory slowing down of judgements about what the self can see when this is incongruent with what another can see. We tested the social nature of this system by investigating to what extent these altercentric intrusions are elicited under conditions that differed in their social relevance and, further, how these related to self-reported social perspective taking and empathy. In Experiment 1, adult participants were asked to make "self" or "other" perspective-taking judgements during congruent ("self" and "other" can see the same items) or incongruent conditions ("self" and "other" cannot see the same items) in conditions that were social (i.e., involving a social agent), semisocial (an arrow), or nonsocial (a dual-coloured block). Reaction time indices of altercentric intrusion effects were present across all conditions, but were significantly stronger for the social than for the less social conditions. Self-reported perspective taking and empathy correlated with altercentric intrusion effects in the social condition only. In Experiment 2, the significant correlations for the social condition were replicated, but this time with gaze duration indices of altercentric intrusion effects. Findings are discussed with regard to the degree to which this rudimentary system is socially specialized and how it is linked to more conceptual understanding.

Limiting factors for mapping corpus-based semantic representations to brain activity.

To help understand how semantic information is represented in the human brain, a number of previous studies have explored how a linear mapping from corpus derived semantic representations to corresponding patterns of fMRI brain activations can be learned. They have demonstrated that such a mapping for concrete nouns is able to predict brain activations with accuracy levels significantly above chance, but the more recent elaborations have achieved relatively little performance improvement over the original study. In fact, the absolute accuracies of all these models are still currently rather limited, and it is not clear which aspects of the approach need improving in order to achieve performance levels that might lead to better accounts of human capabilities. This paper presents a systematic series of computational experiments designed to identify the limiting factors of the approach. Two distinct series of artificial brain activation vectors with varying levels of noise are introduced to characterize how the brain activation data restricts performance, and improved corpus based semantic vectors are developed to determine how the word set and model inputs affect the results. These experiments lead to the conclusion that the current state-of-the-art input semantic representations are already operating nearly perfectly (at least for non-ambiguous concrete nouns), and that it is primarily the quality of the fMRI data that is limiting what can be achieved with this approach. The results allow the study to end with empirically informed suggestions about the best directions for future research in this area.

Sensitivity of 'mu' rhythm modulation to the relevance of an observed movement but not to goal congruency.

There is some dispute over whether the primary role of a system that processes both performed and observed actions (the mirror neuron system) is action understanding or the coordination of action with others. We present behavioural and EEG data from a motor priming task that shed some light on this debate. Participants are asked to make one of two simple actions whilst watching video clips of movements that differ in terms of their visuospatial overlap with, and goal-related relevance to, the required performed action. The reaction time data appear to support a direct matching account where visuospatial overlap is prioritised over relevance. However, the EEG data appear to reflect a system that is sensitive to the relevance of the observed movement and suggest an action prediction role for a mirror neuron system.

Sex and individual differences in induced and evoked EEG measures of action observation.

We used two established methods for analysing the EEG response of the neurotypical adult human brain to examine the execution and observation of simple motor actions. In one, execution or observation of a button-press in response to a tone caused a decrease in the power at 8-13 Hz ("mu") frequencies. In the other, the response preparation (or the inferred response preparation when these actions are observed in another person) was measured by the averaged response time-locked potentials measured over motor cortex--the "readiness potential". Results indicated that the mirrored readiness potentials were bilaterally generated. We found sex differences for both measures. However, whereas females showed a greater degree of response for the mu power measure during the observation of movement only, males showed larger readiness potentials during both movement performance and observation. Both measures have been claimed to be neural correlates of mirror systems in the brain where processes responsible for actions are linked to the perception of such actions. Such mirror systems have also been implicated in higher order social cognition such as empathy. However, we found no correlations between either of our EEG measures and self-report scales of social cognition. The results imply sex differences in the measured systems and for mirroring that are not directly related to social cognition. We suggest that the results may indicate two dissociable motor mirroring systems that can be measured by induced and evoked EEG.

Extracting semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics: a computational study.

The idea that at least some aspects of word meaning can be induced from patterns of word co-occurrence is becoming increasingly popular. However, there is less agreement about the precise computations involved, and the appropriate tests to distinguish between the various possibilities. It is important that the effect of the relevant design choices and parameter values are understood if psychological models using these methods are to be reliably evaluated and compared. In this article, we present a systematic exploration of the principal computational possibilities for formulating and validating representations of word meanings from word co-occurrence statistics. We find that, once we have identified the best procedures, a very simple approach is surprisingly successful and robust over a range of psychologically relevant evaluation measures.