Theories and illusions

Classroom Discourse: What Is Conveyed Through Educational Interpretation

When a deaf or hard-of-hearing child enters a classroom with an interpreter, the goal, and sometimes the assumption, is that they will be granted full access to the classroom experience. This study focuses on the clarity and completeness with which critical elements of classroom discourse are conveyed through the interpretations of 40 educational interpreters. Elements studied include conveyance of main ideas, directions for assignments, relevance strategies, orienting commentary, participation solicitation, mental state reference, and semantic organization. The interpretations clearly and completely conveyed approximately one-third to two-thirds of the information (M = 48.6%) related to these elements of classroom discourse. Frequent omissions and alterations rendered large parts of the message markedly different. Results suggest a need to improve training of educational interpreters, increase communication between teachers and interpreters, provide students supplementary services, and heighten awareness that the interpretation process is fallible in ways that can impact access to classroom discourse.

Are the classic false belief tasks cursed? Young children are just as likely as older children to pass a false belief task when they are not required to overcome the curse of knowledge

The question of when children understand that others have minds that can represent or misrepresent reality (i.e., possess a 'Theory of Mind') is hotly debated. This understanding plays a fundamental role in social interaction (e.g., interpreting human behavior, communicating, empathizing). Most research on this topic has relied on false belief tasks such as the 'Sally-Anne Task', because researchers have argued that it is the strongest litmus test examining one's understanding that the mind can misrepresent reality. Unfortunately, in addition to a variety of other cognitive demands this widely used measure also unnecessarily involves overcoming a bias that is especially pronounced in young children-the 'curse of knowledge' (the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when considering less-informed perspectives). Three- to 6-year-old's (n = 230) false belief reasoning was examined across tasks that either did, or did not, require overcoming the curse of knowledge, revealing that when the curse of knowledge was removed three-year-olds were significantly better at inferring false beliefs, and as accurate as five- and six-year-olds. These findings reveal that the classic task is not specifically measuring false belief understanding. Instead, previously observed developmental changes in children's performance could be attributed to the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge. Similarly, previously observed relationships between individual differences in false belief reasoning and a variety of social outcomes could instead be the result of individual differences in the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge, highlighting the need to re-evaluate how best to interpret large bodies of research on false belief reasoning and social-emotional functioning.

Narrative, Time and the Emergence of the Encultured Self

It is argued here that ‘the encultured self’ emerges in early to later childhood from the earlier experiential self that is differentiated from other persons and other objects in infancy and early childhood. The later sense of self is derived largely from verbal exchanges with significant others, both narrative and explanatory, about shared and unshared experiences, and about the stories, histories and myths of the embedding culture. These enable the child to achieve a continuing sense of self in time with relations to other times and places beyond personal experience.

Outcome Knowledge and False Belief

Virtually every social interaction involves reasoning about the perspectives of others, or ‘theory of mind (ToM).’ Previous research suggests that it is difficult to ignore our current knowledge when reasoning about a more naïve perspective (i.e., the curse of knowledge). In this Mini Review, we discuss the implications of the curse of knowledge for certain aspects of ToM. Particularly, we examine how the curse of knowledge influences key measurements of false belief reasoning. In closing, we touch on the need to develop new measurement tools to discern the mechanisms involved in the curse of knowledge and false belief reasoning, and how they develop across the lifespan.

Affective cognition: Exploring lay theories of emotion

Humans skillfully reason about others' emotions, a phenomenon we term affective cognition. Despite its importance, few formal, quantitative theories have described the mechanisms supporting this phenomenon. We propose that affective cognition involves applying domain-general reasoning processes to domain-specific content knowledge. Observers' knowledge about emotions is represented in rich and coherent lay theories, which comprise consistent relationships between situations, emotions, and behaviors. Observers utilize this knowledge in deciphering social agents' behavior and signals (e.g., facial expressions), in a manner similar to rational inference in other domains. We construct a computational model of a lay theory of emotion, drawing on tools from Bayesian statistics, and test this model across four experiments in which observers drew inferences about others' emotions in a simple gambling paradigm. This work makes two main contributions. First, the model accurately captures observers' flexible but consistent reasoning about the ways that events and others' emotional responses to those events relate to each other. Second, our work models the problem of emotional cue integration-reasoning about others' emotion from multiple emotional cues-as rational inference via Bayes' rule, and we show that this model tightly tracks human observers' empirical judgments. Our results reveal a deep structural relationship between affective cognition and other forms of inference, and suggest wide-ranging applications to basic psychological theory and psychiatry.

Infants' understanding of intention from 10 to 14 months: Interrelations among violation of expectancy and imitation tasks

The present study examined infants' understanding of other people's intentional actions. The primary goal was to investigate whether infants' performances on visual attention and imitation tasks that have been designed to tap understanding of intentional actions were interrelated. Infants completed a goal-detection task and an action-parsing task at 10 months. At 14 months, infants completed a behavioral re-enactment task and a selective action imitation task that required infants to differentiate intentional from accidental actions. Infants' concurrent performances on visual attention tasks were linked; however, no association was found between their performances on imitation tasks. Importantly, infants' behaviors on the visual attention tasks predicted their performance on the imitation tasks at 14 months. These findings provide the first evidence that there is developmental continuity in infants' understanding of intentional action from 10 to 14 months.

Emerging selves: representational foundations of subjectivity

A hypothetical evolutionary scenario is offered meant to account for the emergence of mental selves. According to the scenario, mental selves are constructed to solve a source-attribution problem. They emerge when internally generated mental contents (e.g., thoughts and goals) are treated like messages arising from external personal sources. As a result, mental contents becomes attributed to the self as an internal personal source. According to this view, subjectivity is construed outward-in, that is, one's own mental self is derived from, and is secondary to, the mental selves perceived in others. The social construction of subjectivity and selfhood relies on, and is maintained in, various discourses on subjectivity.

Video reminders in a representational change task: memory for cues but not beliefs or statements

Two experiments investigated the effect of video reminders on 3-year-olds' performance in a representational change task. In Experiment 1, children in a video support condition viewed videotapes of their initial incorrect statements about a misleading container prior to being asked to report their initial belief. Children in a control condition viewed an irrelevant videotape. Despite reporting what they had said on the videotape, children in the video support condition typically failed the representational change task. Experiment 2 replicated the main findings from Experiment 1 and also revealed that a video reminder failed to increase the likelihood that children would correctly report what they had said about the object. Results are discussed in terms of the processes whereby mnemonic cues might affect performance on tasks assessing theory of mind.

Interpreting self-ascriptions

I argue that the same general principles apply in ascribing mental states and their contents to self and to others. Nevertheless Goldman is right that there is such a thing as FPA (First Person Authority). But Gopnik is right that FPA cannot be explained by reference to a special way of knowing or a special land of knowledge.

The epistemological illusion

I argue against the mentalist view that commonsense psychology (CSP) is about the intrinsic properties of the mind, and in particular against the notion that the evidence privately or publicly available to the CS psychologists confirms the mentalist view. I suggest that the internal phenomenology of mental attitudes merely provides access to a body of procedural knowledge, and that the propositional forms of the attitudes normally summarize extensive units of procedural knowledge.

Speaking of beliefs: Reporting or constituting mental entities?

Gopnik's argument that instead of having privileged access we must develop a theory about our minds is criticized. First, the theory metaphor is too vague, and scientific concepts of what a theory is are left unexploited. Second, the studies Gopnik interprets as showing that children must develop a theory about their mental states are also compatible with the view that children have to develop these states.

Epistemology, two types of functionalism, and first-person authority

My target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between contentinclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has some extremely odd consequences.

Two kinds of representational functionalism: Defusing the combinatorial explosion

Alvin Goldman (1993) presents three arguments against the psychological plausibility of representational functionalism (RF) as a theory of how subjects self-ascribe mental predicates. Goldman appears to construe RF as an account of attitude type self-ascription. His “combinatorial explosion” argument, however, proves devastating only to an implausible construal of RF as an account of attitude content self-ascription.

How to understand beliefs

In this response various possible objections to the critique of first-person-authority in Gopnik (1993), are considered. The heart of all three objections is that “beliefs” and other notions of commonsense psychology should not be construed as attempts to describe the functional character of our minds. Rather, they are 1) an evolutionarily determined technique for dealing with our conspecifics (Bogdan) or 2) the result of interpretation (Van Brakel) or 3) self-constitutive entities which exist only when we have the concept of their existence (Greve and Buchner). While the word belief might be construed in all these ways, they do not correspond either to the construals of our commonsense psychology or of a scientific psychology.