ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Two systems for thinking about others' thoughts in the developing brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 1 citations in OpenAlex.
- Implicit Mentalizing in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Intentional sadness contagion: Social bonding with neural decoupling.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Grammar acquisition in preschool children is related to white matter maturation of the dorsal language network.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Theory of mind predicts conversational success in early right hemisphere stroke recovery.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The indirect role of working memory in the association between perspective-taking skills and social problem-solving skills in preschool children: an age-sensitive moderated mediation in a Turkish sample.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Functional recruitment and connectivity of the cerebellum is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Visual recursion without recursive language? a case study of a minimally verbal autistic child.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- An fMRI study on alexithymia and affective state recognition in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Dissonant music engages early visual processing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Investigating belief understanding in children in a nonverbal ambiguous displacement and communication setting.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2024Article
- Altered empathy processing in frontotemporal dementia A task-based fMRI study.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Understanding Female and Male Insights in Psychology: Who Thinks What?Journal of lifestyle medicine · 2024Review
- The Interplay of Oxytocin and Attachment in Schizophrenic Patients: An fMRI Study.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Children's syntax is supported by the maturation of BA44 at 4 years, but of the posterior STS at 3 years of age.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- A fronto-insular-parietal network for the sense of body ownership.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Toward reframing brain-social dynamics: current assumptions and future challenges.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Theory of mind tested by implicit false belief: a simple and full-fledged mental state attribution.The FEBS journal · 2022Review
- Maturational Indices of the Cognitive Control Network Are Associated with Inhibitory Control in Early Childhood.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- The Anatomy of Friendship: Neuroanatomic Homophily of the Social Brain among Classroom Friends.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human social interaction crucially relies on the ability to infer what other people think. Referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM), this ability has long been argued to emerge around 4 y of age when children start passing traditional verbal ToM tasks. This developmental dogma has recently been questioned by nonverbal ToM tasks passed by infants younger than 2 y of age. How do young children solve these tests, and what is their relation to the later-developing verbal ToM reasoning? Are there two different systems for nonverbal and verbal ToM, and when is the developmental onset of mature adult ToM? To address these questions, we related markers of cortical brain structure (i.e., cortical thickness and surface area) of 3- and 4-y-old children to their performance in novel nonverbal and traditional verbal TM tasks. We showed that verbal ToM reasoning was supported by cortical surface area and thickness of the precuneus and temporoparietal junction, classically involved in ToM in adults. Nonverbal ToM reasoning, in contrast, was supported by the cortical structure of a distinct and independent neural network including the supramarginal gyrus also involved in emotional and visual perspective taking, action observation, and social attention or encoding biases. This neural dissociation suggests two systems for reasoning about others' minds-mature verbal ToM that emerges around 4 y of age, whereas nonverbal ToM tasks rely on different earlier-developing possibly social-cognitive processes.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.