Browsing by Subject "Theory of Mind"
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Item Open Access Differences in the early cognitive development of children and great apes.(Dev Psychobiol, 2014-04) Wobber, Victoria; Herrmann, Esther; Hare, Brian; Wrangham, Richard; Tomasello, MichaelThere is very little research comparing great ape and human cognition developmentally. In the current studies we compared a cross-sectional sample of 2- to 4-year-old human children (n=48) with a large sample of chimpanzees and bonobos in the same age range (n=42, hereafter: apes) on a broad array of cognitive tasks. We then followed a group of juvenile apes (n=44) longitudinally over 3 years to track their cognitive development in greater detail. In skills of physical cognition (space, causality, quantities), children and apes performed comparably at 2 years of age, but by 4 years of age children were more advanced (whereas apes stayed at their 2-year-old performance levels). In skills of social cognition (communication, social learning, theory of mind), children out-performed apes already at 2 years, and increased this difference even more by 4 years. Patterns of development differed more between children and apes in the social domain than the physical domain, with support for these patterns present in both the cross-sectional and longitudinal ape data sets. These results indicate key differences in the pattern and pace of cognitive development between humans and other apes, particularly in the early emergence of specific social cognitive capacities in humans.Item Open Access Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy.(Dev Cogn Neurosci, 2012-01) Decety, Jean; Svetlova, MargaritaThe ontogeny of human empathy is better understood with reference to the evolutionary history of the social brain. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. In this paper, we argue that it is essential to consider empathy within a neurodevelopmental framework that recognizes both the continuities and changes in socioemotional understanding from infancy to adulthood. We bring together neuroevolutionary and developmental perspectives on the information processing and neural mechanisms underlying empathy and caring, and show that they are grounded in multiple interacting systems and processes. Moreover, empathy in humans is assisted by other abstract and domain-general high-level cognitive abilities such as executive functions, mentalizing and language, as well as the ability to differentiate another's mental states from one's own, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.Item Open Access Why Do Young Children Fail in False Belief Tasks: Linguistic Representations and Implicit Processing(2009) Yi, LiDespite recent evidence that infants under one year of age have implicit understanding of theory of mind, three-year-old children repeatedly fail in traditional false belief tasks. A serious of 4 studies investigated two possible sources of errors. First, children's comprehension of theory of mind questions was tested in an elicited imitation task. Second, their understanding of mental events was measured using anticipatory eye movements in non-verbal tasks. Results showed that young children's performance in verbal false belief tasks is limited by their understanding of linguistic representations of beliefs and their ability to monitor mental states in real-time. This implies the limitations of young children in keeping track of complex social events in real time and in understanding language conventions in real time.