Research Topic "Theory of Mind in Relation to Other Cognitive Abilities", Volume 2

Ann Dowker^1*Douglas Frye^2*

• ¹Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
• ²University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

development. However, there is still much debate as to how it should be defined and even as to whether it is a single entity. In particular, there is controversy as to the extent to which it should be seen as a specific cognitive module, or rather as dependent on, or mutually developing with, other cognitive abilities and characteristics, such as language, metacognition, executive function, and cognitive and perceptual styles that emphasize gist versus detail ('strong' versus 'weak' central coherence). It is also possible that the theory of mind itself has several different components, which may be related to different degrees, different cognitive abilities and characteristics. Any relations between the theory of mind and other cognitive characteristics may also vary with age, and may differ between typically developing children and those with autism and other atypical conditions.Gaining a greater understanding of these issues is important for increasing our understanding of theory of mind itself, the nature of cognitive development, the similarities and differences between typically and atypically developing children, and The articles in this Research Topic can be divided into three broad groups: the nature, correlates and predictors of theory of mind in children; the nature, correlates and predictors of theory of mind in adults; and the role of theory of mind difficulties in disorders.With regard to theory of mind in children, Esra Ünlüer investigated whether preschool (4-and 5-year-old) children's theory of mind skills and peer relationships predicted their subsequent school adjustment. There did indeed turn out to be significant relationships. Theory of mind significantly predicted school adjustment as a whole (positively predicting liking for school and negatively predicting school avoidance, while prosocial and aggressive behaviour toward peers specifically predicted liking for school.The other articles on children in this Research Topic look at characteristics that predict and may contribute to theory of mind, rather than those that follow on from it. Both of these articles suggest that certain language skills are important predictors.Jill de Villiers and Peter de Villiers studied 258 children between 3 and 5 years over few months and tested them on three occasions on false belief reasoning and on the possible contributory factors of general language development, complement syntax, vocabulary, and inhibitory control. Cross-sectional and longitudinal regressions showed that all these factors contributed significantly to false belief reasoning, but that by time 3, the major proximal contribution was the child's comprehension of syntactic complements. The authors conclude that, as suggested by their earlier training studies, complement syntax makes an important specific contribution to false belief reasoning, but that vocabulary and executive function skills also form pathways to it.Honglan Li and Man-Tak Leung assessed the language skills, executive functions and first-order and second-order false belief reasoning in 150 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers and early primary school children. They found that language was a significant independent predictor of both first-order and second-order false belief reasoning. Executive function predicted first-order false belief reasoning after controlling for age, but not after also controlling for language skills. However, it did continue to be an independent significant predictor of second-order theory of mind even after controlling for both age and language skills. With regard to theory of mind in adults, one study, like that of Li and Leung with children, looked at the possible predictive roles of language and executive function.Derek Montgomery, Virginia Tompkins and Xin Feng investigated adults' theory of mind and its possible relation to language and executive function. They gave 207 adults a battery of advanced theory of mind tasks as well as tests of vocabulary and executive function. They found that the Strange Stories, Higher-Order False Belief, and Frith-Happé Animation tasks, though relatively weakly correlated, all loaded onto a common factor (?), which they considered to involve perspective-taking, within a narrative context, to represent a protagonist's mental state and to use it to predict and explain their actions. This factor was related more closely to vocabulary than to executive function .Florence Mayrand, Francesca Cappozzi and Jelena Ristic carried out a rather different type of study, looking at adults' interpretation of the information communicated by gaze.They investigated how spatially dissociated versus spatially combined effects of gaze (i.e., cases where an agent's inferred mental content implied by gaze is discrepant with the directional information communicated by gaze, versus cases where the two types of cue give concordant information) influence participants' target performance. They found that that performance was worse when cue direction and mental content were discordant than when they were concordant. This effect was more marked when a social avatar served as a cue than when a comparison arrow was the cue. The findings suggest that a typical gaze communicates information both about what a person is attending to and about the location where they are attending.Other studies looked at theory of mind in relation to disorders. The disorder that has received most study over the years with regard to associated limitations in theory of mind is autistic spectrum disorder; and this was reflected in the articles in this Research Topic.Fu-Qiang Qiao and colleagues conducted a comprehensive review of the literature over the past 30 years on the broader autism phenotype. They first used the Web of Science Core Collection database to find articles published between 1994 and 2024 on the autism phenotype in general. They then used the CiteSpace and VOS viewer software to visualize and analyze the citations further. They found a total of 1,075 articles about the broader autism phenotype. The annual number of publications on the subject has been rising over the 30-year period. The largest number of publications came from the United States, followed by England and Canada. The United States also came first with regard to the extent to which its publications were cited .Meng-Jung Liu used photographs of social scenes to compare adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and controls on their ability to reason and make inferences about people's intentions. The adolescents with ASD performed significantly less well than the controls in making inferences about intentions. However, their ability to make physical causal inferences was unimpaired. Liu also investigated relations between performance on these tasks and performance on tests of working memory and attention. Among individuals with ASD, working memory predicted physical causal inference, while divided attention predicted inferences about intention.