Him Cheung

Most existing training programs designed to enhance children's sociocognitive abilities, such as emotion understanding and theory of mind, rely heavily on language-based approaches. This study investigated the effectiveness of a novel visuospatial-based block-building training protocol compared with traditional language-based training in improving children's understanding of emotions and minds. A total of 106 4.5-year-old children (M_age = 53.77 months, SD = 2.53 months; 53% girls) from Hong Kong participated in a pretest-posttest training study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: (a) block building with verbal cues, (b) block building with visual-verbal cues, or (c) dialogic reading. Each group received 1.5-hr weekly sessions for 6 weeks. Posttraining assessments showed significant gains in visuospatial perspective-taking and social-cognitive abilities, particularly among children in the block-building group with visual-verbal cues. Notably, the visuospatial-based training was as effective as the language-based approach in improving emotion understanding and theory of mind. These findings illuminate the interconnectedness of visuospatial perspective-taking and sociocognitive abilities and suggest that embodied simulation mechanisms may underlie psychological perspective taking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Social information such as a talker's ethnicity, gender, and age are found to affect accent perception and attitudes. While existing research primarily focuses on English-dominant communities, this study aims to fill the gap by examining the impacts of ethnic bias and face on three Cantonese accents in Hong Kong. Nine groups of 20 Hong Kong Cantonese listeners were exposed to three Cantonese accents (i.e., Hong Kong local Cantonese, Mandarin-accented, and English-accented Cantonese) in three conditions of visual cues (i.e., a silhouette, a South Asian face and a White face). For accent identification, seeing a South Asian face in a mismatch condition led to more errors compared to seeing a White face in the same condition. For intelligibility, an enhancement of intelligibility was found when the face and accent were misaligned (e.g., an English accent matched with a South Asian face), supporting the general adaptation mechanism instead of the expectation mechanism. We argue that listeners might perceive South Asian and White faces as the same broad social category “foreigners/outgroup members,” resulting in a similar enhancement effect in the aligned and misaligned conditions. A dual-activation mechanism is proposed to account for the complementary effect of phonological and visual cues on accent perception.

Background and Aims: This study examined how parenting styles influence children's language skills and reading comprehension. Materials and Methods: Six hundred and eighty‐five Chinese‐speaking third graders ( M _age = 9.23 years, SD = .66; 341 girls) were randomly recruited from eight primary schools. We measured students' primary caregivers' parenting styles, parental education, family income, migration status, number of children's extracurricular books in the home and family cohesion at Wave 1 (i.e. grade 3). We also assessed students' reading motivation, language skills (i.e. vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness) and reading comprehension at Wave 2 (i.e. grade 4). Results: The structural equation model analysis revealed that parenting styles indirectly affect language and reading comprehension development, with authoritative and authoritarian parenting exerting different influences on the two outcomes. Specifically, authoritative parenting was positively related to the number of children's books, which in turn was directly, or indirectly through reading motivation, associated with children's language skills and reading comprehension. In contrast, authoritarian parenting was negatively related to family cohesion, which was associated with children's reading motivation, and consequently, their language skills and reading comprehension. The multigroup analysis showed that the indirect pathways varied slightly across parental migration statuses. Discussion and Conclusion: These findings enhance the global understanding of the pathways linking parenting styles to children's language skills and reading comprehension, suggesting that educators and researchers should not overly emphasize the direct role of parenting styles in children's academic performance.

This study investigated how family socioeconomic status (SES), parenting stress, and home learning environment collectively shape children’s early academic learning concurrently and longitudinally. Drawing on the family investment model and the family stress model, we tested mediational models in which family SES predicted children’s early academic skills through parenting stress and home learning environment. Participants were 130 Hong-Kong-Chinese toddlers (76 girls; Mage = 33.09 months). Children’s early language, literacy, and math skills were measured at two timepoints six months apart. Parents reported families’ demographic information, parenting stress, and home learning environment at Time 1. Cross-sectional findings showed that family SES positively predicted children’s concurrent language and math skills through the mediation of home learning environment. Parenting stress negatively predicted children’s concurrent language, literacy, and math abilities through the mediation of home learning environment. Moreover, longitudinal findings indicated that home learning environment mediated the relationship between parenting stress and children’s math skills six months later after controlling for children’s prior level of math skills. However, the chained mediation paths involving both parenting stress and home learning environment as mediators serially between family SES and child outcomes were not significant. This study demonstrates the interwoven effects between family factors on promoting children’s early learning, highlighting the pivotal role of the home learning environment in multiple mediating processes.

This longitudinal study examined how parent-child closeness, teacher-child closeness, and language skills predicted and were predicted by emotion understanding in early years. Participants were 128 Hong-Kong-Chinese toddlers (74 girls; Mage = 33.03 months). Parents and teachers reported their closeness with each child, and children’s oral language and emotion understanding were tested at two timepoints six months apart. Cross-lagged modeling analyses showed a unidirectional link from parent-child closeness predicting emotion understanding, a unidirectional link from emotion understanding predicting teacher-child closeness, and a bidirectional relation between oral language and emotion understanding. This study connects children’s emotion understanding with their own characteristics and their social relationships in the family and classroom settings, providing a fuller picture of early emotional development across multiple contexts.

What mental processes do children spontaneously engage when facing STEM problems? The question is under-researched not only in exceptional children with autism (ASD) and high intelligence (HI) but also in typically developing children with normal intelligence (NI). This study examined some spontaneous mental processes behind STEM problem solving in NI, ASD, and HI students and the association between these processes and performance. One hundred and forty Hong Kong 5th and 6th graders verbalized their thoughts and emotions while doing simple physics experiments in a STEM lesson and were subsequently tested on a physics quiz. Their verbalizations were coded into cognitive, metacognitive, emotional, and task-unrelated processes. Results showed that the HI group used more cognitive strategies and engaged in fewer task-unrelated processes than the NI and ASD groups. They also outperformed their peers on the quiz. The NI and ASD students did not differ in mental processes and quiz performance. Quiz performance correlated positively with the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies and negatively with task-unrelated thought involvement. The present study provides evidence for differential involvements of mental processes among students with diverse backgrounds in solving STEM problems and a general relation between these processes and learning outcome.

This study shows that exposure to topic-related but irrelevant information enhances both estimates of peer knowledge and our own sense of knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants were more confident in their answers to general knowledge questions and gave higher estimates of peer knowledge when such questions were accompanied by short paragraphs containing topic-related yet nondiagnostic information than when they were not. The inflated peer knowledge estimates were independent of the classic curse of knowledge. Experiments 2, 3, 5, and 6 demonstrated that irrelevant information biases knowledge estimation via its semantic relatedness to the test questions; response latencies were measured in Experiments 5 and 6 to examine the possible role of retrieval fluency in the semantic relatedness effect. Experiment 4 attributed the bias to information content (e.g., "it is generally known that keratin is responsible"), not comments on knowledge popularity (e.g., "what is responsible is generally known"). Importantly, the effect of irrelevant information on estimates of peer knowledge was fully mediated by confidence in own knowledge in Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5. Experiment 6 manipulated retrieval fluency and failed to find conclusive evidence for its involvement in the semantic relatedness effect. We conclude that irrelevant information boosts peer knowledge estimation through its semantic relatedness to the problem at hand, and the effect is mostly explained by a corresponding increase in the individual's own sense of knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children are said to understand false belief if they can appreciate an agent’s wrong description of an object as a result of misinformation, and intensionality if they can appreciate and switch between alternative descriptions from different epistemic viewpoints. Most previous studies have investigated the developmental trajectories of these capacities in the age range from 3 to 10 years aiming to discern their conceptual nature. The present research examines whether intensionality incurs lower performance accuracies and longer response times than false belief in adults, using a task in which participants read sentences that explicitly state an agent’s beliefs. Experiment 1 showed that participants were less accurate in rejecting verbal probes that contradicted an agent’s alternative than false thoughts about objects. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this finding using thoughts about object identities but not properties. These results suggest that compared to false belief, intensionality is cognitively demanding for adults to process because of the availability of more than one identity candidate under the agent’s perspective.

Introduction: This study investigates P300 as a component for false belief and false statement processing with and without a communicative context. The purpose is to understand why P300 has been shown to be commonly involved in false belief and lie processing.Methods: Participants were presented with a story in which the protagonist holds a true belief and makes a true statement of it (true belief), holds a false belief and makes a true statement (false belief), or holds a true belief and makes a false statement (false statement) while electroencephalograms were recorded.Results: In Experiment 1, featuring a solitary protagonist, stronger posterior P300 was shown in the false belief condition than the true belief and false statement condition. With the installation of a communicative context by including a second character listening to the protagonist, Experiment 2 showed enhanced frontal P300 in the false statement condition compared to the true belief and false belief condition. A late slow wave was more prominent in the false belief condition than in the other two conditions in Experiment 2.Conclusion: The present results suggest a situation‐dependent nature of P300. The signal captures the discrepancy between belief and reality more readily than that between belief and words under a noncommunicative context. It becomes more sensitive to the discrepancy between belief and words than that between belief and reality in a communicative situation with an audience, which makes any false statement practically a lie.