Knowledge of Mind

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

The challenge is to explain the emergence of awareness of others’ mental states; here we focus on awareness of others’ beliefs.

• stream
• slides only

Notes

Our Question

How do humans first come to know facts about others’ mental states? How, for instance, do they come to know that Ayesha believes, falsely, that she and Beatrice will still be able to catch a bus home even if they delay leaving the party?

Mindreading

Mindreading is the process of identifying a mental state as a mental state that some particular individual, another or yourself, has. To say someone has a theory of mind is another way of saying that she is capable of mindreading.¹

False Belief Tasks

Wimmer & Perner (1983) set out to determine when humans can know facts about others’ beliefs. They told children a story like this:

‘Maxi puts his chocolate in the BLUE box and leaves the room to play. While he is away (and cannot see), his mother moves the chocolate from the BLUE box to the GREEN box. Later Maxi returns. He wants his chocolate.’

They then asked the children, ‘Where will Maxi look for his chocolate?’

The core feature of a standard false belief task is this:

‘[t]he subject is aware that he/she and another person [Maxi] witness a certain state of affairs x. Then, in the absence of the other person the subject witnesses an unexpected change in the state of affairs from x to y’ (Wimmer & Perner, 1983, p. \ 106).

The task is designed to measure the subject’s sensitivity to the probability that Maxi will falsely believe x to obtain.

Models of Minds and Actions

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

We can contrast a fact model of minds and actions with a belief model.

On the fact model, it is facts about where things are which explain an agents’ actions.

On the belief model, it is an agents’ beliefs about where things are which explain her actions.

False belief tasks can be used to distinguish the hypothesis that a subject is using a fact model from the hypothesis that she is using a belief model of minds and actions.

Findings

Three-year-olds systematically fail to predict actions (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and desires (Astington & Gopnik, 1991) based on false beliefs; they similarly fail to retrodict beliefs (Wimmer & Mayringer, 1998) and to select arguments suitable for agents with false beliefs (Bartsch & London, 2000). They fail some low-verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks Call & Tomasello, 1999; Low, 2010; Krachun, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2009; Krachun, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2010; they fail whether the question concerns others’ or their own (past) false beliefs (Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991); and they fail whether they are interacting or observing (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989).

Cultural Variation

Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh (2008) observe a difference of around 2 years in when children pass false belief tasks depending on childrens’ geographical locations, although they note that this may be due in part to differences in socio-economic status.

Fujita, Devine, & Hughes (2022) do control for differences in socio-economic status (among other factors; see their figure 1). They do find differences between children in Japan and the UK with the UK children, noting that overall ‘Japanese children showed delayed mastery of ToM understanding but advanced EF’ (p. 9). However, differences in performance on false belief tasks were more complicated (p. 10).

There is also some evidence that children pass false belief tasks much later in childhood in communities where anthropologists report hearing it said that others’ mental states cannot, or should not, be understood. In particular, there seems to be a difference between urban and rural children, with rural children of the same age less likely to pass false belief tasks (Mayer & Träuble, 2012; Dixson, Komugabe-Dixson, Dixson, & Low, 2018).

As Stengelin, Hepach, & Haun (2020) note, there is also cultural variation in which factors enhance performance on theory of mind tasks.

References