Mental Files: an Introduction

Intensionality is more cognitively demanding than false belief in adults: evidence from a non-inferential sentence-reading task

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.

The pupillometry of the possible: an investigation of infants' representation of alternative possibilities

Contrasting possibilities has a fundamental adaptive value for prediction and learning. Developmental research, however, has yielded controversial findings. Some data suggest that preschoolers might have trouble in planning actions that take into account mutually exclusive possibilities, while other studies revealed an early understanding of alternative future outcomes based on infants' looking behaviour. To better understand the origin of such abilities, here we use pupil dilation as a potential indicator of infants' representation of possibilities. Ten- and 14-month-olds were engaged in an object-identification task by watching video animations where three different objects with identical top parts moved behind two screens. Importantly, a target object emerged from one of the screens but remained in partial occlusion, revealing only its top part, which was compatible with a varying number of possible identities. Just as adults' pupil diameter grows monotonically with the amount of information held in memory, we expected that infants' pupil size would increase with the number of alternatives sustained in memory as candidate identities for the partially occluded object. We found that pupil diameter increased with the object's potential identities in 14- but not in 10-month-olds. We discuss the implications of these results for the foundation of humans' capacities to represent alternatives. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Exploring the Representations of Individual Entities in the Brain Combining EEG and Distributional Semantics

Semantic knowledge about individual entities (i.e., the referents of proper names such as Jacinta Ardern) is fine-grained, episodic, and strongly social in nature, when compared with knowledge about generic entities (the referents of common nouns such as politician). We investigate the semantic representations of individual entities in the brain; and for the first time we approach this question using both neural data, in the form of newly-acquired EEG data, and distributional models of word meaning, employing them to isolate semantic information regarding individual entities in the brain. We ran two sets of analyses. The first set of analyses is only concerned with the evoked responses to individual entities and their categories. We find that it is possible to classify them according to both their coarse and their fine-grained category at appropriate timepoints, but that it is hard to map representational information learned from individuals to their categories. In the second set of analyses, we learn to decode from evoked responses to distributional word vectors. These results indicate that such a mapping can be learnt successfully: this counts not only as a demonstration that representations of individuals can be discriminated in EEG responses, but also as a first brain-based validation of distributional semantic models as representations of individual entities. Finally, in-depth analyses of the decoder performance provide additional evidence that the referents of proper names and categories have little in common when it comes to their representation in the brain.

Anchoring Utterances

For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that utterance. Doing this takes coordination. Producers must index each of these entities for their addressees, and addressees must identify each of the entities the producers are indexing. When people are face to face, they have a battery of resources for doing this-speech, gestures of all kinds, and interactive strategies. But when addressees are separated from producers in space, time, or worlds, as on the telephone or in print, the available resources are more limited. The problem is that research on comprehension, production, and communication has often ignored, disguised, or distorted anchoring. As a result, accounts of these processes are often incomplete, misleading, or incorrect.