Lecture 8

Question 1

What is social cognition?

Answer 1

social cognition is how we think about and process other people. One important area in social cognition is theory of mind or how we think about people as having mental states and how this might guide behaviour.

Question 2

Do people with downsyndrome struggle with theory of mind?

Answer 2

No. neurotypical and downsyndrome people have similar theory of mind abilities

Question 3

do people with autism struggle with theory of mind?

Answer 3

Yes

Question 4

Does theory of mind develop over time?

Answer 4

Theory of mind does also continue to develop as we get older. Throughout development, there are these individual differences. Some people tend to think about mental states more often and more accurrately than others.

• # of siblings
• Pretend play
• Parenting
• Language
• Autism

Question 5

Why is theory of mind important? What sort of things do we use this skill for?

Answer 5

Prosocial skills: helping, sharing, cooperating

Peer relationships

Empathy

Academic success

Question 6

How are theory of mind and lying related?

Answer 6

• Lying starts to show up around
  age 2, but shows major
  increases/maturity between
  ages 3-7
• Proposed to be explained in
  part via theory of mind
  development!
• Need to understand that you can
  create a false belief in another
  person

theory of mind might be useful for lying. Kids often start to lie at age 2 but they aren’t good at it yet. This is the exact same time period we talk about as being a time period where there is a huge improvement in theory of mind and false belief.

if you are going to lie to someone well, you have to create a false belief.

Question 7

what is the Ding et al paper about?

Answer 7

theory of mind training

Question 8

What are the components of a research paper?

Answer 8

• Abstract → A short summary of the paper
• Introduction → Explains what is already known on the
  topic, and what isn’t (the gap in knowledge). Provides the
  research question.
• Methods → Explains how the study was conducted (skim this)
• Results → Describes the findings (statistics) (skim this)
• Discussion → Summarizes and interpre

Question 9

Explain the Ding et al study. What were the results?

WATCH THIS PART OF THE VIDEO

Answer 9

Ding et al. (2015)
* Does development of theory of
mind cause developments in lying
* Experimental design:
- 3-year-old children identified to not
lie in a deception task
* Randomly assigned for training phase
(11 days):
- Theory of mind training
- Control: Conservation training

• Tested again on whether children
  used deception → 3 days after
  training, 4-10 days after training, 35
  days after training

When given theory of mind
training, children were
increasingly likely to start using
deception! (is this good or bad?)

they used a deception task. The experimenter gives the kid 2 cups and they are told if you win this game 10 times you will get a sticker. How the kid wins is if the kid hides something and the experimenter finds it. They asked the kid where they hid the candy. If the kid lies, the experiment loses and the kid wins and vice versa.

they found that the kids who got the theory of mind training are better at the theory of mind tasks so the training seems to work.

they looked at mental state vocabulary

Question 10

what social groups might exist in a classroom?

Answer 10

• Gender
• Race
• Age
• Religion
• Nationality
• Grade Level
• Career
• Major
• Etc.