Mindreading: a Developmental Puzzle

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

The first puzzle concerns apparently conflicting findings about when and how humans acquire awareness of others’ beliefs.

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Notes

A model is a way the world could logically be, or a set of ways the world could logically be.

An A-Task is any false belief task that children tend to fail until around three to five years of age.

A Puzzle

Children fail A-tasks because they rely on a model of minds and actions that does not incorporate beliefs.

Children pass non-A-tasks by relying on a model of minds and actions that does incorporate beliefs.

At any time, the child has a single model of minds and actions.

For adults (and children who can do this), representing perceptions and beliefs as such—and even merely holding in mind what another believes, where no inference is required—involves a measurable processing cost (Apperly, Back, Samson, & France, 2008; Apperly et al., 2010), consumes attention and working memory in fully competent adults \citealp{Apperly:2009cc, lin:2010_reflexively, McKinnon:2007rr}, may require inhibition (Bull, Phillips, & Conway, 2008) and makes demands on executive function (Apperly, Samson, Chiavarino, & Humphreys, 2004; Samson, Apperly, Kathirgamanathan, & Humphreys, 2005).

References

Apperly, I. A., Back, E., Samson, D., & France, L. (2008). The cost of thinking about false beliefs: Evidence from adults’ performance on a non-inferential theory of mind task. Cognition, 106(3), 1093–1108.

Apperly, I. A., Carroll, D. J., Samson, D., Humphreys, G. W., Qureshi, A., & Moffitt, G. (2010). Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults’ ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(6), 1201–1217.

Apperly, I. A., Samson, D., Chiavarino, C., & Humphreys, G. W. (2004). Frontal and temporo-parietal lobe contributions to theory of mind: Neuropsychological evidence from a false-belief task with reduced language and executive demands. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(10), 1773–1784.

Bull, R., Phillips, L. H., & Conway, C. A. (2008). The role of control functions in mentalizing: Dual-task studies of theory of mind and executive function. Cognition, 107(2), 663–672.

Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2007). “This way!”, “No! That way!”—3-year olds know that two people can have mutually incompatible desires. Cognitive Development, 22(1), 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2006.08.002

Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Kathirgamanathan, U., & Humphreys, G. W. (2005). Seeing it my way: A case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective. Brain, 128(5), 1102–1111.