{"pk":26487,"title":"Think Fast! Mental-state Language is Related to the Speed of False-belief Reasoning\nin Adulthood","subtitle":null,"abstract":"When tested appropriately, infants appear to demonstrate\nfalse-belief understanding in the first year of life. Some have\nargued that this is inconsistent with the well-established\nrelationship between social experience and preschoolers’\nfalse-belief performance. We argue that these two sets of\nfindings are not inconsistent because the ability to attribute\nfalse beliefs to others is necessary but not sufficient for false-\nbelief performance, and we propose several ways that one\nsocial factor, hearing and using mental-state language, might\nrelate to false-belief performance throughout the lifespan. We\ntested this account by examining the relationship between\nadults’ use of mental-state language and their false-belief\nunderstanding. Participants’ use of mental-state language was\nrelated to how quickly they could accurately predict the\nbehavior of agents on the basis of desires and beliefs. These\nfindings provide the first evidence that mental-state talk and\nfalse-belief performance are related into adulthood.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"false-belief understanding; theory of mind;\nmental-state reasoning; social cognition"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20k770m7","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Erin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Roby","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Califonia, Merced","department":""},{"first_name":"Rose","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Scott","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Califonia, Merced","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26487/galley/16123/download/"}]}