Development of cool and hot theory of mind and cool and hot inhibitory control abilities from 3.5 to 6.5 years of age.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Draperi M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8794116 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Previous studies on the development of executive functions (EFs) in middle childhood have traditionally focused on cognitive, or "cool," EFs: working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. However, knowledge of the development of socio-emotional, or "hot," EFs, such as delay of gratification, decision-making and theory of mind, is more limited. The main aims of this systematic review were to characterize the typical development of both the primary cool and hot EFs in middle childhood, and to identify the main tools for evaluating EFs as a whole. We conducted a systematic search on studies of cognitive and socio-emotional EFs published in the last 5 years in Pubmed, PsycInfo, and WoS databases. Of 44 studies selected, we found a variety of tasks measuring cool EFs, while measures of hot EFs were limited. Nevertheless, the available data suggest that cool and hot components follow distinct, but related, developmental trajectories during middle childhood.
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Project description:The aim of the present study is to examine whether in Hot, i.e., affectively charged contexts, or cool, i.e., affectively neutral contexts, inhibitory control capacity increases or decreases under social evaluation in adolescents and adults. In two experiments, adolescents and young adults completed two Stroop-like tasks under either a social evaluation condition or an alone condition. The social evaluation condition comprised the presence of a peer (Experiment 1) or an expert (Experiment 2) playing the role of an evaluator, while under the alone condition, the task was performed alone. In the Cool Stroop task, participants had to refrain from reading color names to identify the ink color in which the words were printed. In the Hot Stroop task, participants had to determine the emotional expression conveyed by faces from the NimStim database while ignoring the emotion word displayed beneath. The results were similar in both experiments. In adolescents, social evaluation by a peer (Experiment 1) or by an expert (Experience 2) facilitated Hot but not cool inhibitory control. In adults, social evaluation had no effect on Hot or cool inhibitory control. The present findings expand our understanding of the favorable influence of socioemotional context on Hot inhibitory control during adolescence in healthy individuals.
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Project description:Background: Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have various theory of mind (ToM) impairments which often predict a poor outcome. However, findings on ToM deficits in MDD are inconsistent and suggest the role of moderating factors. Child abuse and neglect are strong predictors of adult MDD and are often associated with a poorer clinical course trajectory. Objective: Because early-life adversities result in various forms of ToM deficits in clinical and nonclinical samples, our aim was to investigate if they are significant confounding factors of ToM impairments in MDD. Methods: We investigated 60 mildly or moderately depressed, nonpsychotic adult patients with MDD during an acute episode, and 32 matched healthy controls. The mental state decoding subdomain of ToM was examined with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). Childhood adversities were assessed with the childhood trauma questionnaire (CTQ) and the early trauma inventory. Results: There was no difference between the control and MDD groups in RMET performance. However, when we divided the MDD group into two subgroups, one (N = 30) with high and the other (N = 30) with low levels of childhood adversities, a significant difference emerged between the controls and the highly maltreated MDD subgroup in RMET performance. A series of 3 (group) × 3 (valence) mixed-model analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) revealed that childhood emotional and physical neglect had a significant negative impact on the response accuracy in RMET in general, whereas emotional abuse specifically interfered with the accuracy in the positive and negative valences if it co-occurred with early-life neglect. To test the dose-response relationship between the number of childhood adversities and RMET capacities, we subjected RMET data of the MDD group to multiple hierarchical regressions: the number of childhood adversities was a significant predictor of RMET total scores and RMET scores in the negative valence after controlling for age, sex, years of education, and the severity of current depression. Conclusion: Childhood adversities impair ToM capacities in MDD. Exposure to early-life emotional abuse and neglect have a negative impact on the performance in the emotional valences of RMET. Multiple early-life adversities have a dose-dependent association with mental state decoding deficits.
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Project description:Touchscreen use amongst young children has proliferated in recent years, yet little is known about the association between daily touchscreen exposure and inhibitory control in the first year of life. Previous research has found a negative association between the amount of television viewing and inhibitory control in early childhood, but it is unclear whether negative associations with screen use extend to touchscreens. The current study presents an exploratory analysis of the cross-sectional associations between inhibitory control and the amount of touchscreen use amongst 10-month-olds (n = 128-156). Touchscreen exposure was assessed via parent-report. In order to include a range of "hot" and "cool" aspects of inhibitory control, these skills were assessed using lab-based response inhibition and prohibition tasks as well as parent-reported observations of infants' inhibitory control abilities and broader regulatory behaviors. A "Cognitive Executive Function (EEFQ-CEF)" score (encompassing Inhibitory Control, Flexibility, and Working Memory items) was included as a secondary broader executive function construct to examine whether effects showed specificity to inhibitory control rather than executive functions more generally. Correlation analyses indicated no association between touchscreen exposure and the four indices of IC. However, a positive association was found for the amount of touchscreen exposure and EEFQ-CEF once accounting for sociodemographic variables. The implications of these findings and future directions are discussed.
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Project description:Inhibitory control may play an important part in prosocial behavior, such as donating behavior. However, it is not clear at what developmental stage inhibitory control becomes associated with donating behavior and which aspects of inhibitory control are related to donating behavior during development in early to middle childhood. The present study aimed to clarify these issues with two experiments. In Experiment 1, 103 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers completed cool (Stroop-like) and hot (delay of gratification) inhibitory control tasks and a donating task. The results indicated that there were no relationships between cool or hot inhibitory control and donating behavior in the whole group and each age group of the preschoolers. In Experiment 2, 140 elementary school children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 completed cool (Stroop-like) and hot (delay of gratification) inhibitory control tasks and a donating task. The results showed that inhibitory control was positively associated with donating behavior in the whole group. Cool and hot inhibitory control respectively predicted donating behavior in the second and sixth graders. Therefore, the present study reveals that donating behavior increasingly relies on specific inhibitory control, i.e., hot inhibitory control as children grow in middle childhood.
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Project description:Recent studies have focused on the role of the cerebellum in the social domain, including in Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM, or the "mentalizing" process, is the ability to attribute mental states, such as emotion, intentions and beliefs, to others to explain and predict their behavior. It is a fundamental aspect of social cognition and crucial for social interactions, together with more automatic mechanisms, such as emotion contagion. Social cognition requires complex interactions between limbic, associative areas and subcortical structures, including the cerebellum. It has been hypothesized that the typical cerebellar role in adaptive control and predictive coding could also be extended to social behavior. The present study aimed to investigate the social cognition abilities of patients with degenerative cerebellar atrophy to understand whether the cerebellum acts in specific ToM components playing a role as predictive structure. To this aim, an ad hoc social cognition battery was administered to 27 patients with degenerative cerebellar pathology and 27 healthy controls. In addition, 3D T1-weighted and resting-state fMRI scans were collected to characterize the structural and functional changes in cerebello-cortical loops. The results evidenced that the patients were impaired in lower-level processes of immediate perception as well as in the more complex conceptual level of mentalization. Furthermore, they presented a pattern of GM reduction in cerebellar portions that are involved in the social domain such as crus I-II, lobule IX and lobule VIIIa. These areas showed decreased functional connectivity with projection cerebral areas involved in specific aspects of social cognition. These findings boost the idea that the cerebellar modulatory function on the cortical projection areas subtends the social cognition process at different levels. Particularly, regarding the lower-level processes, the cerebellum may act by implicitly matching the external information (i.e., expression of the eyes) with the respective internal representation to guarantee an immediate judgment about the mental state of others. Otherwise, at a more complex conceptual level, the cerebellum seems to be involved in the construction of internal models of mental processes during social interactions in which the prediction of sequential events plays a role, allowing us to anticipate the other person's behavior.
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Project description:The main goal of the current work was to assess the age sensitivity of a novel battery of cool and hot Executive Function (EF) tasks developed for the middle childhood period: the Executive Brain Battery (EBB). To this end, we carried out a first study in which the EBB was administered to six age groups ranging from 6 to 11. Additionally, in a second study, we compared children at the end of middle childhood (age 11 years) and adult performance in the EBB. Results showed that tasks included in the EBB were suitable for all age groups, with more age-related changes being found in cool than hot EF tasks. Moreover, at the end of middle childhood, children reach an adult-like performance in most of these cool and hot tasks. The present findings extend previous research suggesting that cool and hot EFs exhibit different patterns of age-related growth in middle childhood. Additionally, the EEB could become a useful tool for research on EFs during middle childhood that could be adapted for a wide range of populations.
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Project description:Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand that other agents have different beliefs, desires, and knowledge than oneself, has been extensively researched. Theory of mind tasks involve participants dealing with interference between their self-perspective and another agent's perspective, and this interference has been related to executive function, particularly to inhibitory control. This study assessed whether there are individual differences in self-other interference, and whether these effects are due to individual differences in executive function. A total of 142 participants completed two ToM (the director task and a Level 1 visual perspective-taking task), which both involve self-other interference, and a battery of inhibitory control tasks. The relationships between the tasks were examined using path analysis. Results showed that the self-other interference effects of the two ToM tasks were dissociable, with individual differences in performance on the ToM tasks being unrelated and performance in each predicted by different inhibitory control tasks. We suggest that self-other differences are part of the nature of ToM tasks, but self-other interference is not a unitary construct. Instead, self-other differences result in interference effects in various ways and at different stages of processing, and these effects may not be a major limiting step for adults' performance on typical ToM tasks. Further work is needed to assess other factors that may limit adults' ToM performance and hence explain individual differences in social ability.
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Project description:This paper introduces a model of 'theory of mind', namely, how we represent the intentions and goals of others to optimise our mutual interactions. We draw on ideas from optimum control and game theory to provide a 'game theory of mind'. First, we consider the representations of goals in terms of value functions that are prescribed by utility or rewards. Critically, the joint value functions and ensuing behaviour are optimised recursively, under the assumption that I represent your value function, your representation of mine, your representation of my representation of yours, and so on ad infinitum. However, if we assume that the degree of recursion is bounded, then players need to estimate the opponent's degree of recursion (i.e., sophistication) to respond optimally. This induces a problem of inferring the opponent's sophistication, given behavioural exchanges. We show it is possible to deduce whether players make inferences about each other and quantify their sophistication on the basis of choices in sequential games. This rests on comparing generative models of choices with, and without, inference. Model comparison is demonstrated using simulated and real data from a 'stag-hunt'. Finally, we note that exactly the same sophisticated behaviour can be achieved by optimising the utility function itself (through prosocial utility), producing unsophisticated but apparently altruistic agents. This may be relevant ethologically in hierarchal game theory and coevolution.
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Project description:Young children have long been known to act selfishly and gradually appear to become more generous across middle childhood. While this apparent change has been well documented, the underlying mechanisms supporting this remain unclear. The current study examined the role of early theory of mind and executive functioning in facilitating sharing in a large sample (N = 98) of preschoolers. Results reveal a curious relation between early false-belief understanding and sharing behavior. Contrary to many commonsense notions and predominant theories, competence in this ability is actually related to less sharing. Thus, the relation between developing theory of mind and sharing may not be as straightforward as it seems in preschool age children. It is precisely the children who can engage in theory of mind that decide to share less with others.
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