Essays
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The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition - Bialystok, Ellen
In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children's cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset. -
The Neurobiology and Physiology of Emotions: A Developmental Perspective - Kahle, Sarah S.
This essay discusses the physiological and neural activity associated with emotion processes, with a focus on the development of this activity in children. We review some conceptual issues about the distinctions between the components of emotion, including the physiology associated with emotions themselves, attempts to regulate emotions, and trait or state patterns of responding. Foundational work examining autonomic nervous system activity is summarized, and we highlight recent work that attempts to investigate emotion processes in multiple systems. We then suggest that two fruitful avenues of future research include the examination of the neurobiology and physiology of social emotions, and further investigation into the temporal dynamics of emotion processes. -
The Psychological Impacts of Cyberlife Engagement - Kwan, Virginia S. Y.
This essay synthesizes scientific research across two decades on the influence of cyberlife engagement on cognitive processes, mental and physical health, and interpersonal interactions, highlighting the increasingly pervasive presence of digital innovation in society. New possibilities afforded by the integration of technology in commerce, relationships, therapy, and education are discussed, as are prevalent topics of interest within cyberpsychological research. We present an analysis of the positivity with which information and communication technology is portrayed in scientific literature since its emergence in society and discuss important future directions of study as technology's presence and influence continue to grow on an exponential scale. Last, we present current voids in cyberpsychological research, focusing particularly on the question of digital culture, or the impact of cyberlife engagement on global cultures as both geographical and custom‐based barriers are traversed with increasing ease. -
The Reading Brain: The Canary in the Mind - Wolf, Maryanne
The development of the seemingly simple cultural invention of reading alters the brain of each literate individual, propulses the intellectual development of the species, and provides human beings with a history of past knowledge as a foundation for future thought. Understanding how this happened in the species provides unexpected lessons for how children learn, how teachers teach, and how the brain learns anything new. Understanding the intrinsic plasticity of the reading brain circuit provides a cautionary tale for examining the cognitive impact of different media on how we read and how we think. -
Theory of Mind - Wellman, Henry
Humans are a social species. We not only live socially, but also think socially, accumulating myriad thoughts and knowledge about our social world. A hallmark of this human social cognition is an everyday theory of mind––our ordinary human understanding that persons (self and others) have internal mental states––desires, beliefs, feelings, hopes—that crucially shape their actions and lives. I review classic and current knowledge on the nature and importance of theory of mind. Theory of mind is achieved and changes over human development; so, I emphasize that we must understand its development. Fortunately, development of this everyday theory of mind is an intriguing story in its own right, and a great portion of the research on theory of mind is developmental research with typical and atypical infants and children. -
Theory of Mind and Behavior - Brandone, Amanda C.
The capacity to understand and reason about the unobservable mental states (e.g., thoughts, desires, and beliefs) of oneself and others, known as theory of mind (ToM), is central to human social cognition. Multidisciplinary interest in ToM stems from its potentially unique human nature, the role it plays in our ability to engage in complex social interactions, and its impairment in psychiatric and developmental disorders, such as autism. Through more than 30 years of research, we have learned a great deal about how and when children come to reason about others in terms of their mental states. This essay reviews foundational research on the development of ToM reasoning during childhood; outlines cutting‐edge findings on the infant origins and neural correlates of ToM; and finally discusses key issues for future research, including reconciling infant competence with evidence of protracted conceptual development in early childhood, expanding our neuroscientific understanding of ToM and its development, and shedding light on the use and individual variability of ToM in everyday life. Pursuing these goals will address important theoretical questions and provide critical new insight into the origins, development, neural basis, and social and behavioral consequences of ToM. -
Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding - Low, Jason
Theory‐of‐mind research reveals a puzzling pattern of young children showing implicit “mindreading” success in indirect false‐belief tasks well before they can pass explicit tasks where they are asked to make direct predictions about the mistaken agent's belief or behavior. Relevant theorizing has either boosted indirect responses (e.g., eye movements) as showcasing infants' and young children's innate psychological reasoning system or scoffed at indirect responses as reflecting only a shallow causal understanding of behavior. This essay describes new theorizing suggesting that we have not one but two mindreading systems—an implicit efficient system (shared by infants, children, and adults) that supports spontaneous responses such as eye gazing and an explicit flexible system (constructed from age 4 onward) that supports direct verbal responses. This view has inspired cutting‐edge research documenting signature limits on the kinds of input that the efficient mindreading system processes. New research shows that the efficient system is set to help young children and adults minimally track facts relating to agents and objects, but not relations between agents and propositions. The flexible system—supporting understanding of belief as such—guides children's direct verbal inferences in a wide range of perspective‐taking situations that include ascribing how people interpret a particular object. Future research into the question of how human beings mindread in fast‐moving situations will need insight into whether there are systematic patterns of limits on implicit understanding that converge across age groups, multiple paradigms, and diverse populations. -
Understanding Biological Motion - van Boxtel, Jeroen J. A.
The ultimate goal of biological motion perception is to be able to understand actions so as to provide an answer to the question, “Who did what to whom and why?” This inference capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior in order to successfully interact with others and with the environment. In addition to its functional importance, understanding biological motion bridges several major fields, including perception, reasoning, and social cognition. However, despite its paramount role in human perception and cognition, only limited progress has so far been made in understanding biological motion. After reviewing the relevant literature, this essay argues that future research needs to identify the contributions of three basic processes involved in understanding biological motion: perception of animacy, causality, and intention. The involvement of these basic processes needs to be investigated both in the typical healthy population as well as in populations with mental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. We also suggest that a productive research approach should focus on more interactive actions of the sort often observed in the natural social environment, rather than solely using the single‐actor displays that have been typical in previous work. It is further emphasized that there is a need for a theoretical and computational framework within which these different types of processing can be united. We propose that the predictive coding framework provides a good candidate.