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Woo BM, Chisholm GH, Spelke ES. Do toddlers reason about other people's experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning. Cognition 2024; 246:105760. [PMID: 38447359 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105760] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2022] [Revised: 01/09/2024] [Accepted: 02/24/2024] [Indexed: 03/08/2024]
Abstract
Human social life requires an understanding of the mental states of one's social partners. Two people who look at the same objects often experience them differently, as a twinkling light or a planet, a 6 or a 9, and a random cat or Cleo, their pet. Indeed, a primary purpose of communication is to share distinctive experiences of objects or events. Here, we test whether toddlers (14-15 months) are sensitive to another agent's distinctive experiences of pictures when determining the goal underlying the agent's actions in a minimally social context. We conducted nine experiments. Across seven of these experiments (n = 206), toddlers viewed either videotaped or live events in which an actor, whose perspective differed from their own, reached (i) for pictures of human faces that were upright or inverted or (ii) for pictures that depicted a rabbit or a duck at different orientations. Then either the actor or the toddler moved to a new location that aligned their perspectives, and the actor alternately reached to each of the two pictures. By comparing toddlers' looking to the latter reaches, we tested whether their goal attributions accorded with the actor's experience of the pictured objects, with their own experience of the pictured objects, or with no consistency. In no experiment did toddlers encode the actor's goal in accord with his experiences of the pictures. In contrast, in a similar experiment that manipulated the visibility of a picture rather than the experience that it elicited, toddlers (n = 32) correctly expected the actor's action to depend on what was visible and occluded to him, rather than to themselves. In a verbal version of the tasks, older children (n = 35) correctly inferred the actor's goal in both cases. These findings provide further evidence for a dissociation between two kinds of mental state reasoning: When toddlers view an actor's object-directed action under minimally social conditions, they take account of the actor's visual access to the object but not the actor's distinctive experience of the object.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brandon M Woo
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
| | - Gabriel H Chisholm
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
| | - Elizabeth S Spelke
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
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Barone P, Gomila A. Infants' performance in the indirect false belief tasks: A second-person interpretation. WILEY INTERDISCIPLINARY REVIEWS. COGNITIVE SCIENCE 2020; 12:e1551. [PMID: 33319503 PMCID: PMC9285846 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1551] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/06/2020] [Revised: 11/13/2020] [Accepted: 11/16/2020] [Indexed: 11/22/2022]
Abstract
Research in the last 15 years has challenged the idea that false belief attribution develops at 4 years of age. Studies with indirect false belief tasks contend to provide evidence of false belief attribution in the second year of life. We review the literature on indirect false belief tasks carried out in infants using looking and active helping paradigms. Although the results are heterogeneous and not conclusive, such tasks appear to capture a real effect. However, it is misleading to call them “false belief” tasks, as it is possible to pass them without making any false belief attribution. Infants need to keep track of the object's and agent's positions, trajectories, and focus of attention, given an intentional understanding of the agent, to pass these new tasks. We, therefore, argue that the evidence can be better explained in terms of second‐person attributions, which are transparent, extensional, nonpropositional, reciprocally contingent, and implicit. Second‐person attributions can also account for primates' mentalizing abilities, as revealed by similar indirect tasks. This article is categorized under:Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition
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Affiliation(s)
- Pamela Barone
- Department of Psychology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain.,Human Evolution and Cognition Group (EvoCog), University of the Balearic Islands, Illes Balears, Spain
| | - Antoni Gomila
- Department of Psychology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain.,Human Evolution and Cognition Group (EvoCog), University of the Balearic Islands, Illes Balears, Spain
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Horschler DJ, MacLean EL, Santos LR. Do Non-Human Primates Really Represent Others' Beliefs? Trends Cogn Sci 2020; 24:594-605. [PMID: 32593501 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2020.05.009] [Citation(s) in RCA: 24] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/05/2020] [Revised: 04/28/2020] [Accepted: 05/21/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Over two decades of research have produced compelling evidence that non-human primates understand some psychological states in other individuals but are unable to represent others' beliefs. Recently, three studies employing anticipatory looking (AL) paradigms reported that non-human primates do show hints of implicitly understanding the beliefs of others. However, measures of AL have been increasingly scrutinized in the human literature owing to extensive replication problems. We argue that new reports of belief representation in non-human primates using AL should be interpreted cautiously because of methodological and theoretical challenges paralleling trends in the human literature. We explore how future work can address these challenges, and conclude by identifying new evolutionary questions raised by the prospect that non-human primates implicitly represent others' beliefs without an explicit belief representation system that guides fitness-relevant behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Daniel J Horschler
- School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA; Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA.
| | - Evan L MacLean
- School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA; Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA; College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA
| | - Laurie R Santos
- Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
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Aival-Naveh E, Rothschild‐Yakar L, Kurman J. Keeping culture in mind: A systematic review and initial conceptualization of mentalizing from a cross‐cultural perspective. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY-SCIENCE AND PRACTICE 2019. [DOI: 10.1111/cpsp.12300] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Affiliation(s)
| | | | - Jenny Kurman
- Department of Psychology University of Haifa Israel
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Burnside K, Ruel A, Azar N, Poulin-Dubois D. Implicit false belief across the lifespan: Non-replication of an anticipatory looking task. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2018. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.08.006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/18/2022]
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Children exhibit different performance patterns in explicit and implicit theory of mind tasks. Cognition 2018; 173:60-74. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.01.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/16/2017] [Revised: 12/19/2017] [Accepted: 01/03/2018] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
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Dixson HGW, Komugabe-Dixson AF, Dixson BJ, Low J. Scaling Theory of Mind in a Small-Scale Society: A Case Study From Vanuatu. Child Dev 2017; 89:2157-2175. [DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12919] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
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Edwards K, Low J. Reaction time profiles of adults' action prediction reveal two mindreading systems. Cognition 2016; 160:1-16. [PMID: 28024170 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/16/2016] [Revised: 12/06/2016] [Accepted: 12/12/2016] [Indexed: 11/17/2022]
Abstract
Human beings are able to quickly step into others' shoes to predict peoples' actions. There is little consensus over how this cognitive feat might be accomplished. We tested the hypotheses that an efficient, but inflexible, mindreading system gives rise to appropriate reaction time facilitation in a standard unexpected transfer task, but not in a task involving an identity component. We created a new behavioural paradigm where adults had to quickly select whether an actor would reach, or not reach, for an object based on the actor's false belief about the object's location. By manipulating the type of object we compared participants' responding behaviour when they did and did not have to take the actor's perspective into account. While the overall accuracy reflected a high level of flexible belief reasoning across both tasks, the pattern of response times across conditions revealed a limit in the processing scope of an efficient mindreading system. Thus, we show, for the first time, that there are indeed different profiles of reaction times for object-location scenarios and for object-identity scenarios. The results elevate growing evidence that adult humans have not one, but two mindreading systems for dealing with mental states that underlie action.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Jason Low
- Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
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Low J, Apperly IA, Butterfill SA, Rakoczy H. Cognitive Architecture of Belief Reasoning in Children and Adults: A Primer on the Two-Systems Account. CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES 2016. [DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12183] [Citation(s) in RCA: 58] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
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Surtees A, Samson D, Apperly I. Unintentional perspective-taking calculates whether something is seen, but not how it is seen. Cognition 2016; 148:97-105. [PMID: 26752604 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 61] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/05/2014] [Revised: 11/27/2015] [Accepted: 12/12/2015] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
A long established distinction exists in developmental psychology between young children's ability to judge whether objects are seen by another, known as "level-1" perspective-taking, and judging how the other sees those objects, known as "level-2" perspective-taking (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981a; Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Wilcox, 1981b). Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, and Bodley Scott (2010) provided evidence that there are two routes available to adults for level-1 perspective-taking: one which is triggered relatively automatically and the other requiring cognitive control. We tested whether both these routes were available for adults' level-2 perspective-taking. Explicit judgements of both level-1 and level-2 perspectives were subject to egocentric interference, suggesting a need for cognitive control. Evidence of unintentional perspective-taking was limited to level-1 judgements.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrew Surtees
- University catholique de Louvain, Belgium; University of Birmingham, UK.
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