Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 149 (2016) 1–5
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Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp
Editorial
Theory of mind grows up: Reflections on new
research on theory of mind in middle childhood
and adolescence
In the developmental pathway to acquiring a theory of mind, a key milestone is the ability to attribute mistaken (i.e., false) beliefs. Because this is typically achieved between children’s third and fifth
birthdays, early research in this field focused heavily on the preschool years (for meta-analyses, see
Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Later research saw a shift toward
studies of adults and adolescents to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in theory of mind (for
a review, see Singer, 2006). Recent years have also seen exciting growth in research with infants,
reflecting advances in eye-tracking technology that enable spontaneous markers of infants’ ability
to track others’ mental states to be examined (for two alternative discussions of this field, see
Heyes, 2014; Perner & Roessler, 2012). A recent literature search that combined the terms ‘‘theory
of mind” and ‘‘false belief” with the terms ‘‘adult,” ‘‘infant,” ‘‘preschool,” and ‘‘adolescent” yielded a
total of 6314 hits in Scopus, highlighting the vigor of this research field.
One striking gap in the literature, however, concerns developments in theory of mind in middle
childhood; a parallel literature search for studies of school-aged children produced just 295 hits
(i.e., just 4% of the total). This dearth of research with school-aged children is puzzling for at least
two reasons. First, from both neurological and social perspectives, direct comparisons between
preschoolers and adolescents are problematic; therefore, more work is needed to bridge the gap
between these two developmental periods. Second, the transition to school brings with it a clear
widening of children’s social horizons and is typically accompanied by a dramatic increase in both
the complexity and importance of children’s peer relationships. Both developmental gains and individual differences in children’s understanding of others’ minds in middle childhood, therefore, are
of intrinsic interest both from a theoretical viewpoint and from a more applied perspective. Through
its focus on middle childhood, this special issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology represents a significant contribution to the field.
Equally encouraging is the fact that the studies reported in this special issue were conducted with a
real variety of samples; whereas early work on theory of mind was heavily restricted to Anglo-Saxon
countries, the current set of studies come not only from the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Australia but also from The Netherlands, Italy, and Hong Kong. In addition, the studies include both
typically developing and atypical groups, including children with hearing impairments and children
with autism spectrum disorders. Moreover, in contrast to the relatively small and homogeneous samples that characterized the first wave of research on theory of mind in preschoolers, five of the nine
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.017
0022-0965/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
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Editorial / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 149 (2016) 1–5
studies in this special issue involved more than 100 children, with a pooled total of 1679 participants.
These healthy sample sizes are important for investigating the nature and correlates of individual differences in theory of mind in middle childhood and beyond.
For example, the findings from Wang, Devine, Wong, and Hughes’ (2016) cross-cultural study highlight an interesting within-culture contrast in theory-of-mind performance among children living in
Hong Kong. Echoing findings from studies of preschoolers (e.g., Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh,
2008), children recruited from local schools in Hong Kong lagged behind their Western counterparts
in their ability to reflect on mental states despite showing superior performance on tests of executive
function. In contrast, children recruited from international schools in Hong Kong performed as well as
their Western counterparts on the theory-of-mind task and as well as the children attending local
Hong Kong schools on tests of executive function. These findings suggest that whereas broad cultural
factors are salient for children’s executive functions, specific pedagogical experiences are salient for
children’s theory-of-mind skills.
Children’s school environments also emerged as potentially significant in the study of British 7- to
13-year-olds conducted by Devine and Hughes (2016). Specifically, between-school contrasts in the
proportion of children eligible for ‘‘pupil premium” (i.e., financial support) predicted the level and
accuracy of children’s mentalizing even when effects of age, gender, and verbal ability were all controlled. Interestingly, Weiland and Yoshikawa (2014) reported a similar link between peers’ socioeconomic status (SES) and pre-kindergarten children’s executive functions and language ability. In
discussing this finding, Weiland and Yoshikawa hypothesized that either teachers’ beliefs about children’s capabilities or the additional resources provided by more affluent families may play a mediating role in this association between peers’ SES and children’s cognitive development. In a similar vein,
it is possible that the proportion of pupils from low-income families indirectly affects the richness and
complexity of teachers’ talk about mental states and, hence, is related to variation in mental state reasoning in middle childhood. Given its obvious pedagogical implications, this hypothesis merits further
attention.
Two further articles in this special issue also highlight the importance of children’s communicative
environments. First, building on a previous study by Lecce, Bianco, Devine, Hughes, and Banerjee
(2014), Bianco, Lecce, and Banerjee (2016) conducted a discussion-based training study and showed
that the accuracy (rather than the simple frequency) of mental state talk predicted growth in theory
of mind. That is, adult influences on children’s ability to reason about others’ mental states go beyond
simply drawing children’s attention to others’ mental states to involve direct scaffolding of children’s
mature mentalistic understanding of social situations. Second, in an investigation of how later milestones in understanding others’ minds help children to become effective communicators, Wang, Ali,
Frisson, and Apperley (2016) concluded that, for both 8- and 10-year-olds, linguistic complexity constrained children’s success in taking others’ perspectives into account. In other words, echoing early
work on how grasping the syntax of embedded complements is a prerequisite for children’s understanding of false belief (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 2002), J. Wang and colleagues’ current study demonstrates that long after children master simple visual perspective taking, the complexity of the language
involved limits their ability to use this skill to facilitate communication.
Likewise, the study by Im-Bolter, Agostina, and Owens-Jaffray (2016) indicates that the predictors
of theory of mind change with age , such that in middle childhood theory of mind performance reflects
a complex interplay between cognitive resources and language, whereas by adolescence theory of
mind performance is more simply related to variation in semantic language and in shifting ability.
Alongside such interesting empirical findings, the articles in this special issue also make a clear
methodological contribution to the field. In particular, the measures applied in the current studies
provide a valuable toolkit for future research. One obvious explanation for the scarcity of previous
studies of theory of mind in middle childhood is the lack of developmentally appropriate tasks; in contrast, the tasks and paradigms included in the current studies are both diverse and creative. Interestingly, several of these tasks focus on socioperceptual skills (which one might assume to be fully
developed by middle childhood). For example, Rice, Anderson, Velnoskey, Thompson, and Redcay
(2016) report that even with age and IQ controlled, the perception of biological motion in 7- to 12year-olds is associated with children’s ability to make mental (but not physical) inferences about story
characters and with their performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task. Interestingly, there
Editorial / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 149 (2016) 1–5
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was no association between children’s scores on these two measures of theory of mind. Rice and colleagues conclude that social perception may serve to link distinct facets of theory of mind. Although
this is an interesting hypothesis, more work is needed to establish the psychometric properties of each
of the measures used.
In a study that applied eye-tracking to explore adolescents’ processing of information about mental
states, Symeonidou, Dumontheil, Chow, and Breheny (2016) presented participants with two conditions of a multi-trial visual perspective-taking task (in which the ‘‘director” was present or absent).
Alongside two further studies in this special issue that also involved perspective-taking tasks (see
Begeer et al., 2016, and Wang, Ali, et al., 2016), the findings from Symeonidou and colleagues’ study
reveal that ‘‘egocentric” errors, far from being restricted to the preschool years (as originally thought
by Piagetians; see Kesselring & Müller, 2011), are in fact quite persistent across development. In addition, more detailed analysis of the eye-tracking data revealed that similar (early) processes underpinned perspective taking in the different age groups; the key difference between age groups,
therefore, was in the likelihood rather than the nature of perspective taking.
At the same time, other studies highlighted important developmental progressions in children’s
understanding of mind. For example, Lagattuta, Elrod, and Kramer (2016) demonstrated clear agerelated improvements between 4 and 10 years of age in children’s ability to organize mental states
into coherent sets (e.g., recall of an aversive event is tied to feelings of worry and the decision to avoid
that character/situation). Lagattuta and colleagues also found that, with effects of age and gender controlled, individuals with stronger executive function were more successful in predicting valencealigned mental states. Although meta-analytic findings from the preschool literature indicate that
executive functions support the development of theory of mind (Devine & Hughes, 2014), much less
is known about the relationship between these two constructs beyond the preschool years. The study
by Lagattuta and colleagues, therefore, offers an interesting new paradigm for future investigations.
Likewise, in their separate studies of children aged 7 to 13 years, both Wang, Devine, and
colleagues (2016) and Devine and Hughes (2016) applied the Silent Film task developed by Devine
and Hughes (2013) to chart age-related improvements in children’s ability to detect and accurately
reflect on characters’ motives and feelings. The findings from the current set of theory-of-mind studies, therefore, demonstrate developmental continuities (e.g., with respect to the persistence of egocentric errors and the prevailing importance of executive functions) alongside developmental change
(e.g., in the complexity and coherence of children’s mental state reasoning).
The findings from Devine and Hughes (2016) are also encouraging at a methodological level in that
they demonstrate the feasibility of whole-class assessments of mental state reasoning. This greatly
increases the efficiency of data collection, enabling future studies to include large samples in order
to explore interaction effects. For example, the growth of research on gene–environment interactions
highlights the importance of differential susceptibility (Ellis et al., 2011). In other words, specific environmental factors (e.g., peer SES, exposure to particular forms of pedagogy) are likely to predict
growth in social understanding more strongly for some children than for others. Identifying these
interactions between social and child characteristics is a key step toward constructing an evidence
base for tailoring children’s experiences to maximize the educational gains for all children.
The above point leads us nicely to consider the findings from the two studies in this special issue
that include atypical samples. In the first of these, Begeer and colleagues (2016) used two tasks with
continuous response scales (a modified false-belief task involving a sandbox and a visual hindsight
bias task) to compare the performance of 76 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders
and 113 typically developing children. These particular tasks were selected as being more sensitive
than classic false-belief tasks (which have a categorical pass/fail design) to egocentric bias. Despite
this increased sensitivity, the results of this comparison indicated a clear null effect (which, given
the relatively large numbers in each group, was unlikely to reflect a problem of low power). In short,
echoing the findings reported by Symeonidou and colleagues (2016), the conclusion from this study
was that children with and without autism spectrum disorders show similar egocentric tendencies.
The second study in this special issue to include atypical groups was Peterson, O’Reilly, and
Wellman’s (2016) comparison of theory of mind performance in deaf and hearing children in middle
and late childhood (N = 57). Specifically, applying Wellman and colleagues’ (2001) six-step
theory-of-mind scale, Peterson and colleagues examined associations within each group between
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Editorial / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 149 (2016) 1–5
theory-of-mind performance and teachers’ ratings of children’s peer status, isolation, and leadership.
They found that for deaf children, theory-of-mind performance was positively related to popularity
and negatively related to isolation even when age, gender, and verbal ability were controlled. Interestingly, the social correlates of theory-of-mind performance appeared to be much weaker in the control
group (and were restricted to a weak association with teachers’ ratings of child leadership). In considering this contrast, two points deserve note. First, recent meta-analytic results indicate that among typically developing children the expected effect size for the association between theory-of-mind
performance and peer status is quite small (Slaughter, Imuta, Peterson, & Henry, 2015). Second, time
constraints on the teachers meant that the authors needed to rely on single-item indicators of peer status, isolation, and leadership. Each of these factors is likely to have reduced the power of Peterson and
colleagues’ (2016) study, such that further work is needed to establish whether the social correlates of
theory-of-mind performance in middle childhood are, as the findings from this study suggest, substantially greater in deaf children than in their hearing peers.
Overall, the articles in this special issue mark the start of an exciting new era of research into theory of mind in which the hitherto relatively uncharted waters of middle childhood are beginning to be
mapped. Moreover, the contributors to this special issue are to be applauded for developing new tasks
and methodologies that not only ‘‘join the dots” between the long-established research on preschoolers and more recent work with adolescents but also enable new questions to be addressed. In many
ways, then, the set of articles in this issue provide a valuable platform for exploring the cognitive,
social, and cultural antecedents and sequelae of both developmental change and individual differences
in theory of mind in middle childhood. Future studies that build on this work are eagerly anticipated.
References
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Bianco, F., Lecce, S., & Banerjee, R. (2016). Conversations about mental states and theory of mind development in middle
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Claire Hughes
Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge CB2 3RQ, UK
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online 30 May 2016