Theory of Mind
The capacity to understand other people's mental states (e.g., desires, beliefs, intentions). It is an essential cognitive skill that allows individuals to understand and predict the behavior of others, empathize with their emotions, and engage in complex social interactions.
To communicate and cooperate effectively, humans often need to consider the mental perspective of others and imagine how others represent things in the world. Theory of Mind is defined as the psychological reasoning about other people’s mental states including desires, beliefs, and sentiments. Over the past few decades, it has been receiving considerable attention and been explored in diverse aspects.
My research is addressing the following questions:
- What are the scope and limitations of young children's Theory of Mind?
- What is the ontogenetic pathway of Theory of Mind development?
- How do young children rely on tracking others' experiences/encounters to reason about their beliefs and actions?
Related publications:
- Ni, Q., Shoyer, J., Bautista, Z., Raport, A., & Moll, H. (2023). Toddlers’ expressions indicate that they track agent-object interactions but do not detect false object representations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 231, 105639. [Link]
- Moll, H., Ni, Q. & Stekeler-Weithofer, P. (2022). Ontogenetic steps of understanding beliefs: From practical to theoretical. Philosophical Psychology. [Link]
Perspective-Taking
The ability to perceive or view a situation or an object from another person's perspective. Essentially, perspective taking allows individuals to put themselves in someone else's shoes and understand how they might perceive and experience a situation.
The capacity to take others' perspectives pervades human interaction and is key for healthy social development. Communication and cooperation are contexts in which having a sense of the other's perspective is especially important in order to coordinate one's activities with those of one's partner.
Related Work:
- Ni, Q., Fascendini, B., Shoyer, J., & Moll, H. (2022). No signs of automatic perspective-taking or its modulation by joint attention in toddlers using an object retrieval task. Royal Society Open Science. [Link]
Social Learning
Humans have a unique form of sociality that is not found in any other animal species. For example, humans engage in joint attention and share perspectives, ideas, and knowledge with one another. This unique way of engaging with others shapes humans’ cognition from the very beginning of their lives. The question we want to explore here is: How do children learn from/about other people and this social world?
Cognition in Virtural Environments
The mental processes involved in understanding, perceiving, and interacting within digitally created spaces, such as in video games, VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), and XR (Extended Reality). This encompasses how individuals think, learn, remember, make decisions, and solve problems when immersed in these virtual settings. It includes the ways in which users process information, respond to virtual stimuli, and how their mental functions are influenced or altered by the virtual context.
Related Work:
- Jeong, D.C., Javier, M., Ni, Q., … & Miller, L.C. (2024, June). Avatar positivity: Body image disturbance in social VR self-avatar embodiment. The 74th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Gold Coast, Australia.
- Javier, M., Wheeler, S., Ni, Q., …& Jeong, D.C. (2024, June). The alt-self: Investigating the inclusivity of self-avatar representations in Meta Horizon Worlds. The 74th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Gold Coast, Australia.
Additional Research Experiences
Student Research Intern | Brown University
Jul 2018 - Sept 2018
- Advisor: Dr. Oriel FeldmanHall (FeldmanHall Lab)
- Research on social learning, trust building and moral cognition
- Designed and programmed behavioral experiments using MATLAB Psychtoolbox, recruited participants, collected and analyzed data using MATLAB and R
Student Researcher | ECNU
Sept 2016 - Oct 2017
- Advisor: Dr. Juzhe Xi
- Research on the sibling relationships of China's two-child family
- Responsible for research design, interviews, coding, data analysis, presentation and thesis writing
Research Assistant | ECNU & NYU Shanghai
Dec 2016 - May 2019
- Advisor: Dr. Yiji Wang
- Research on influence of maternal depression on children development
- Responsible for conducting tests, mobile app evaluation, data analyses and thesis writing
Founder & Team Leader | ECNU
Jul 2017 - May 2019
- Built collaboration with a rehabilitation center to help families with autistic children
- Conducted in-depth interviews with families and therapists, synthesized findings, designed and distributed 3 popular knowledge manuals to the public
- Awarded the "Best Social Practice Project" in 2017 by ECNU