Evidence for goal- and mixed evidence for false belief-based action prediction in 2- to 4-year-old children: A large-scale longitudinal anticipatory looking replication study.

Unsuccessful replication attempts of paradigms assessing children's implicit tracking of false beliefs have instigated the debate on whether or not children have an implicit understanding of false beliefs before the age of four. A novel multi-trial anticipatory looking false belief paradigm yielded evidence of implicit false belief reasoning in 3- to 4-year-old children using a combined score of two false belief conditions (Grosse Wiesmann, C., Friederici, A. D., Singer, T., & Steinbeis, N. [2017]. Developmental Science, 20(5), e12445). The present study is a large-scale replication attempt of this paradigm. The task was administered three times to the same sample of N = 185 children at 2, 3, and 4 years of age. Using the original stimuli, we did not replicate the original finding of above-chance belief-congruent looking in a combined score of two false belief conditions in either of the three age groups. Interestingly, the overall pattern of results was comparable to the original study. Post-hoc analyses revealed, however, that children performed above chance in one false belief condition (FB1) and below chance in the other false belief condition (FB2), thus yielding mixed evidence of children's false belief-based action predictions. Similar to the original study, participants' performance did not change with age and was not related to children's general language skills. This study demonstrates the importance of large-scaled replications and adds to the growing number of research questioning the validity and reliability of anticipatory looking false belief paradigms as a robust measure of children's implicit tracking of beliefs.

Understanding of Goals, Beliefs, and Desires Predicts Morally Relevant Theory of Mind: A Longitudinal Investigation.

Developmental continuity between infants' understanding of intentional agency (goals, beliefs, and desires) and young children's attributions of moral intentions were studied in a 4-year longitudinal study (N = 77 children). First, goal encoding at the age of 7 months and implicit false belief understanding at 18 months were predictive of children's understanding of an accidental transgressor's moral intentions at the age of 5 years. Second, 24-month-olds' understanding of subjective desires was predictive of children's ability to understand an accidental transgressor's false belief at 5 years. These correlations remained significant when controlling for gender and verbal IQ. These findings support the theory that an early understanding of intentional agency is foundational for moral cognition in childhood.

"I know what's inside because you showed me": Training 33-month-old children to attribute knowledge and ignorance to themselves and others.

The present study investigated the role of language in two-year-old children's early understanding of knowledge and ignorance. An intense microgenetic training consisting of 12 to 14 training sessions within six to seven weeks was conducted between 33 and 36 months. One training group experienced and participated in discourse about epistemic states in theoretically relevant situations which highlighted, for instance, the relation between seeing and knowing or contrasts between different people's knowledge states. The other training group was trained on complement syntax using sentence repetition tasks. An age-matched control group received no training. The complement syntax training was not effective in improving complement syntax competence more than in the other two groups. In contrast, the mental state training led to higher improvements in the mental state training group than in the other two groups on tasks assessing comprehension of the targeted concepts (e.g., comprehension of the seeing-knowing relation). The mental state training also had an effect on children's metacognitive awareness of their own ignorance which was, however, not independent of complement syntax competence assessed at 33 months. No effect was obtained on epistemic perspective-taking skills. Our findings indicate that the use of mental state language in discourse promotes children's acquisition of epistemic concepts even before their third birthday.

A question of morals? The role of moral identity in support of the youth climate movement Fridays4Future.

In the past year, an unprecedented climate movement has risen among European youth, so-called "Fridays4Future" (F4F). Thousands of pupils skip school every Friday to protest for better climate politics. The public debate on the protests contains highly mixed reactions, including praise as well as condemnation. Recent theoretical accounts propose that people's engagement in community service and actions towards a greater good could be related to their moral identity. Moral identity (MI) is defined as the extent to which being moral is important to the personal identity. The current preregistered study investigates the link between moral identity and participants' support for F4F in an online survey (N = 537). Results confirm the association between participants' moral identity and their support for F4F, with the internalization scale predicting passive forms of support and the symbolization scale predicting active forms of support. Additionally, risk perception was found to play an important role. Thus, this study confirms the role of moral identity in people's pro-environmental engagement and offers new insights in the context of an important and timely issue.

Knowing minds: Linking early perspective taking and later metacognitive insight.

Recent metacognitive research using a partial knowledge task indicates that a firm understanding of 'knowing about knowing' develops surprisingly late, at around 6 years of age. To reveal the mechanisms subserving this development, the partial knowledge task was used in a longitudinal study with 67 children (33 girls) as an outcome measure at 5;9 (years;months). In addition, first- and second-order false belief was assessed at 4;2, 5;0, and 5;9. At 2;6, perspective taking and executive abilities were evaluated. Metacognition at 5;9 was correlated with earlier theory of mind and perspective taking - even when verbal intelligence and executive abilities were partialled out. This highlights the importance of perspective taking for the development of an understanding of one's own mind.

Does syntax play a role in Theory of Mind development before the age of 3 years?

Language plays an important role in Theory of Mind development. Specifically, longitudinal and training studies indicate that the acquisition of complement syntax has an effect on three- to five-year-old children's mastery of the concept of false belief. There is evidence for both a beginning explicit understanding of the mind and mastery of complement syntax in children before their third birthday. In the present study, we investigated longitudinally whether an early sensitivity to complement syntax is related to early development of Theory of Mind abilities in a sample of N = 159 German-speaking 27- to 36-month-old children. Children's sensitivity to formal properties of complement syntax at 33 months was associated with their perspective-taking skills and their metacognition of own ignorance three months later. This relation remained significant when controlling for the effects of general language abilities. Furthermore, children's sensitivity to complement syntax was concurrently related to their early false belief understanding. These findings support the view that complement syntax shares representational demands with an understanding of epistemic states and that language begins to support the acquisition of epistemic concepts earlier than was previously thought.

Theory of Mind and diverse intelligences in 4-year-olds: Modelling associations of false beliefs with children's numerate-spatial, verbal, and social intelligence.

Theory of Mind (ToM) and the structure of intelligence were investigated in 115 4-year-olds. Specifically, we asked whether children's intelligence involves both general and specific aspects and whether standard ToM measures of false belief can serve as indicators of social intelligence. Psychometric intelligence and children's domain-specific understanding of number concepts and of mental states (false belief) were measured in the laboratory; communication and social skills were assessed through mothers' report. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed poor fit for a one-factor model, but good fit for a model with three correlated factors, suggesting that children's intelligence involves both general and specific aspects. Numerate-spatial and verbal intelligence were correlated (.70), and social intelligence correlated to a stronger degree with verbal (.66) than with numerate-spatial intelligence (.37). Laboratory assessment of false belief and mothers' reports about children's social skills loaded on a single factor, pointing to real-world consequences of ToM abilities. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? The structure of intelligence in 4-year-olds comprises domain-general and domain-specific dimensions. Some domain-specific dimensions are numerate-spatial, verbal, and social intelligence. What does this study add? Theory of Mind emerges as an aspect of children's social intelligence. Social intelligence (including Theory of Mind) is related to children's numerate-spatial abilities.

Declarative joint attention as a foundation of theory of mind.

Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief understanding). Thereby, declarative, but not imperative, point production predicted false-belief understanding at 50 months. Predictive relations, which remained significant beyond the influence of child gender and language abilities, and were unrelated to child temperament and emotion recognition, were not mediated by mirror self-recognition or Level 1 visual perspective taking, which were both related to joint attention. These findings conform to theoretical predictions and provide empirical support for conceptual continuity in the social domain.

A longitudinal study of the emerging self from 9 months to the age of 4 years.

The aim of this study was to investigate if children's early responsiveness toward social partners is developmentally related to their growing concept of self, as reflected in their mirror self-recognition (MSR) and delayed self-recognition (DSR). Thus, a longitudinal study assessed infants' responsiveness (e.g., smiling, gaze) toward social partners during the still-face (SF) task and a social imitation game and related it to their emerging MSR and DSR. Thereby, children were tested at regular time points from 9 months to 4 years of age. Results revealed significant predictive relations between children's responsiveness toward a social partner in the SF task at 9 months and their MSR at 24 months. Further, interindividual differences in children's awareness of and responsiveness toward being imitated in a social imitation game at 12 months proved to be the strongest predictor of children's DSR at 4 years, while some additional variance was explained by MSR at 24 months and verbal intelligence. Overall, findings suggest a developmental link between children's early awareness of and responsiveness toward the social world and their later ability to form a concept of self.