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Assessing true and false belief in young children with cerebral palsy through anticipatory gaze behaviours: a pilot
Michael T Clarke1, Deborah Loganathan, John Swettenham
1Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom. m.clarke@ucl.ac.uk
Insights
This study explored implicit theory of mind in children with cerebral palsy (CP) using eye-tracking. Findings suggest action anticipation tasks can reveal false belief understanding, even with limited speech.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Clinical Child Psychology
Background:
- Children with cerebral palsy (CP) often exhibit co-occurring cognitive and sensory challenges alongside motor impairments.
- Social communication difficulties are prevalent in some children with CP, yet their theory of mind abilities remain under-researched.
- Traditional theory of mind assessments may be unsuitable for children with CP due to physical and cognitive demands.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the utility of an action anticipation task and eye-tracking for assessing implicit true and false belief understanding.
- To examine implicit social cognition in young children with quadriplegic cerebral palsy and limited speech.
- To compare performance with a language-matched child with Down syndrome.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a novel action anticipation task combined with eye-tracking technology.
- Assessed implicit understanding of true and false beliefs in children with quadriplegic cerebral palsy and Down syndrome.
- Focused on anticipatory gaze behaviors as indicators of belief attribution.
Main Results:
- All children consistently showed anticipatory gaze in the true belief task.
- One child with CP and the child with Down syndrome exhibited gaze patterns suggesting false belief understanding.
- Eye-tracking and action anticipation proved viable for assessing implicit social cognition.
Conclusions:
- Action anticipation tasks with eye-tracking offer a promising method for evaluating implicit theory of mind in children with communication impairments.
- This approach can overcome limitations of traditional tasks for children with cerebral palsy.
- Findings support the application of these paradigms in research and clinical settings for understanding social cognition in developmental disorders.
Abstract:
Children with a clinical description of cerebral palsy (CP) commonly experience cognitive and sensory difficulties that co-occur with motor impairment, and for some children this can include impairments in social communication. While research has begun to examine theory of mind abilities in children with CP, relatively little is known about social communication difficulties in this population. Assessing theory of mind abilities in children with CP using traditional procedures such as the classic Sally-Anne task can be problematic if performance is affected by physical difficulties in signalling responses and/or by cognitive and language demands inherent to the task itself. The central aim of this study therefore was to examine the potential of using a new action anticipation task and eye-tracking technique to assess implicit true and false belief understanding in four developmentally young children with quadriplegic cerebral palsy who had little or no functional speech, and one language age matched child with Down syndrome who did not have severe motor impairment. All children in this study consistently demonstrated anticipatory gaze behaviours in the context of the true belief task. One child with CP and the child with Down syndrome demonstrated anticipatory gaze behaviours indicative of an ability to attribute false belief. The findings are discussed in relation to the application of action anticipation and eye-tracking paradigms in research and clinical practice.
