Gendered pathways to socioemotional competencies in very young children.

Parent-child and teacher-child relationship closeness have been shown to be crucial for children's development of socioemotional competencies from preschool to school-age stages. However, less is known about the importance of developing close relationships with young infants and toddlers attending childcare group settings for their early socioemotional development. The current study aimed to address this gap and to explore how child gender may influence the associations.

Intensionality is more cognitively demanding than false belief in adults: evidence from a non-inferential sentence-reading task.

Children are said to understand false belief if they can appreciate an agent's wrong description of an object as a result of misinformation, and intensionality if they can appreciate and switch between alternative descriptions from different epistemic viewpoints. Most previous studies have investigated the developmental trajectories of these capacities in the age range from 3 to 10 years aiming to discern their conceptual nature. The present research examines whether intensionality incurs lower performance accuracies and longer response times than false belief in adults, using a task in which participants read sentences that explicitly state an agent's beliefs.

Irrelevant information enhances a sense of knowledge and curses our understanding of other minds.

This study shows that exposure to topic-related but irrelevant information enhances both estimates of peer knowledge and our own sense of knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants were more confident in their answers to general knowledge questions and gave higher estimates of peer knowledge when such questions were accompanied by short paragraphs containing topic-related yet nondiagnostic information than when they were not. The inflated peer knowledge estimates were independent of the classic curse of knowledge.

P300 as a correlate of false beliefs and false statements.

Introduction: This study investigates P300 as a component for false belief and false statement processing with and without a communicative context. The purpose is to understand why P300 has been shown to be commonly involved in false belief and lie processing.

Methods: Participants were presented with a story in which the protagonist holds a true belief and makes a true statement of it (true belief), holds a false belief and makes a true statement (false belief), or holds a true belief and makes a false statement (false statement) while electroencephalograms were recorded.

Visuospatial perspective-taking in social-emotional development: enhancing young children's mind and emotion understanding via block building training.

Background: Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to represent one's own and others' mental states, and emotion understanding involves appropriately comprehending and responding to others' emotional cues in social interactions. Individual differences in mind and emotion understanding have been associated strongly with verbal ability and interaction and, as such, existing training for children's ToM and emotion understanding is mostly language-based. Building on the literature on embodied cognition, this study proposes that mind and emotion understanding could be facilitated by one's visuospatial experience in simulating other's frames of reference.

Spatial Ability and Theory of Mind: A Mediating Role of Visual Perspective Taking.

This research tests the role of visual perspective taking (VPT) in mediating the relation between spatial ability and theory of mind (ToM). Study 1 demonstrated such mediation correlationally in seventy 3.5- to 4-year olds.

Effect of Twinning on Chinese and English Vocabulary Knowledge.

Vocabulary knowledge was tested in a native (Cantonese-Chinese) and foreign (English) language in 150 twins and 150 singletons aged 6-11 years, matched on age, gender, grade level, nonverbal intelligence, parents' education, family income, and number of siblings and household members. The singletons clearly outperformed the twins on the native vocabulary, but this "twinning effect" was much less noticeable for the foreign vocabulary. The effect on English vocabulary was further reduced after exposure to English at home was controlled.

Feedback-related negativity (FRN) and theta oscillations: Different feedback signals for non-conform and conform decisions.

The current study investigated if feedback-related negativity (FRN) and mid-frontal theta oscillations would respond differently during the outcome evaluations of conformity decisions, which were consistent with self vs. others' opinions. Participants first performed a perceptual judgment task, then saw the majority opinion prior to submitting their final decision, and subsequently learned whether their final decision was correct.

Cross-modal association between vowels and colours: A cross-linguistic perspective.

Previous studies showed similar mappings between sounds and colours for synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike, and proposed that common mechanisms underlie such cross-modal association. The findings between vowels and colours, and between pitch and lightness, were investigated separately, and it was also unknown how language background would influence such association. The present study investigated the cross-modal association between sounds (vowels and pitch) and colours in a tone language using three groups of non-synaesthetes: Cantonese (native), Mandarin (foreign, tonal), and English (foreign, non-tonal).

Time perspective, control, and affect mediate the relation between regulatory mode and procrastination.

This study examines the roles of time perspective, affect, and locus of control in mediating the relationship between regulatory mode and procrastination. Participants filled out the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Scale, Multidimensional Locus of Control Inventory, Locomotion and Assessment Scale, and Lay's General Procrastination scale. Results showed that procrastination was negatively related to locomotion orientation but positively associated with assessment orientation.

Mental Rotation in False Belief Understanding.

This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation (EET) in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective taking such as false belief reasoning may also involve EET because of what has been widely reported in the embodied cognition literature, showing that our processing of abstract, propositional information is often grounded in concrete bodily sensations which are not apparently linked to higher cognition.

Linguistic asymmetry, egocentric anchoring, and sensory modality as factors for the observed association between time and space perception.

Temporal and spatial representations have been consistently shown to be inextricably intertwined. However, the exact nature of time-space mapping remains unknown. On the one hand, the conceptual metaphor theory postulates unilateral, asymmetric mapping of time onto space, that is, time is perceived in spatial terms but the perception of space is relatively independent of time.

Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.

Emerging evidence has indicated infants' early sensitivity to acoustic cues in music. Do they interpret these cues in emotional terms to represent others' affective states? The present study examined infants' development of emotional understanding of music with a violation-of-expectation paradigm. Twelve- and 20-month-olds were presented with emotionally concordant and discordant music-face displays on alternate trials.

Emotional experience in music fosters 18-month-olds' emotion-action understanding: a training study.

We examine whether emotional experiences induced via music-making promote infants' use of emotional cues to predict others' action. Fifteen-month-olds were randomly assigned to participate in interactive emotion training either with or without musical engagement for three months. Both groups were then re-tested with two violation-of-expectation paradigms respectively assessing their sensitivity to some expressive features in music and understanding of the link between emotion and behaviour in simple action sequences.

Effect of lie labelling on children's evaluation of selfish, polite, and altruistic lies.

This study investigates how 5- and 6-year-olds' evaluations of selfish, polite, and altruistic lies change as a result of whether these false statements are explicitly labelled as lies. We are also interested in how interpretive theory of mind may correlate with such evaluations with and without a lie label. Our results showed that labelling lowered children's evaluations for the polite and altruistic lies, but not for the selfish lies.

The roles of liar intention, lie content, and theory of mind in children's evaluation of lies.

This study found that 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and young adults identified prosocial lies as lies less frequently and evaluated them less negatively than selfish lies (liar intention effect); lies about opinions were identified as lies less frequently and evaluated less negatively than those about reality (lie content effect). The lie content effect was more pronounced in the prosocial lies than in the selfish lies for both identification and evaluation. Overall, the older participants considered liar intention more than the younger participants in lie evaluation.

Two mentalizing capacities and the understanding of two types of lie telling in children.

This study examined the interrelationships among second-order belief, interpretive theory of mind, inhibitory control, and the understanding of strategic versus white lies in 54 children approximately 5 years 7 months old. Results showed that second-order belief was associated with strategic-lie understanding, whereas interpretive theory of mind predicted white-lie understanding. The current findings suggest that different aspects of mentalizing are involved in understanding strategic versus white lies.

Twelve-month-olds' understanding of intention transfer through communication.

Do infants understand that intention can be transferred through communication? We answered this question by examining 12-month-olds' looking times in a violation-of-expectation paradigm with two human agents. In familiarization, the non-acting agent spoke, clapped her hands, read aloud a book, or remained silent before the acting agent grasped one (the target) of two objects. During test only the non-actor remained, grasping either the target or distractor.

Cultural effect on perspective taking in Chinese-English bilinguals.

Some recent evidence has suggested that perspective taking skills in everyday life situations may differ across cultural groups. In the present study, we investigated this effect via culture priming in a group of Chinese-English bilingual adults in the context of a communication game. Results showed that the participants made more perspective taking errors when interpreting the game instruction under the Western than the Chinese primes.

Do false belief and verb non-factivity share similar neural circuits?

The present study investigates whether the complement falsity elicited by strong non-factive verbs and the false belief activated by a standard nonverbal false belief task produce similar electrophysiological activities in the brain. The hypothesis is based on the notion that both complement falsity and false belief involve decoupling a false mental representation from reality. Some previous studies have reported a behavioral correlation between children's false belief reasoning and interpretation of strong non-factive verbs together with their false complements, but a neural basis for this correlation has not been found.

False belief and verb non-factivity: a common neural basis?

Using fMRI, the present study compares the brain activation underlying false belief thinking induced by pictorial, nonverbal material to that instigated by strong non-factive verbs in a sample of adult Chinese speakers. These verbs obligatorily negate their complements which describe the mind content of the sentence agent, and thus may activate part of the false belief network. Some previous studies have shown a behavioral correlation between verb non-factivity/false complementation and conventional false belief but corresponding neural evidence is lacking.

Early difficulties of Chinese preschoolers at familial risk for dyslexia: deficits in oral language, phonological processing skills, and print-related skills.

The present study examined some early performance difficulties of Chinese preschoolers at familial risk for dyslexia. Seventy-six high-risk (40 good and 36 poor readers) and 25 low-risk Chinese children were tested on oral language, reading-related cognitive skills (e.g.

Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children.

Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children's false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children's false belief understanding.