Models and Processes

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

One of the puzzles about development is this: Why are there dissociations in nonhuman apes’, human infants’ and human adults’ performance on belief-tracking tasks? In order to answer this question, we first need to recognise a problem: ’the conception of mindreading that dominates the field … is too underspecified’ (Heyes, 2015, p. 321).

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Notes

After claiming that ‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge,’ Call & Tomasello (2008) qualify their claim:

‘chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology’ (Call & Tomasello, 2008, p. 191).

This is plausible. The emergence in human development of the most sophisticated abilities to represent mental states probably depends on rich social interactions involving conversation about the mental (Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996; Peterson & Slaughter, 2003; Moeller & Schick, 2006), on linguistic abilities,¹ and on capacities to attend to, hold in mind and inhibit things (Benson, Sabbagh, Carlson, & Zelazo, 2013; Devine & Hughes, 2014). These are all scarce or absent in chimpanzees and other nonhumans. So it seems unlikely that the ways humans at their most reflective represent mental states will match the ways nonhumans represent mental states. Reflecting on how adult humans talk about mental states is no way to understand how others represent them.

Heyes offers a diagnosis:

‘the core theoretical problem in contemporary research on animal mindreading is that … the conception of mindreading that dominates the field … is too underspecified to allow effective communication among researchers, and reliable identification of evolutionary precursors of human mindreading through observation and experiment’ (Heyes, 2015, p. 321).

But how can we more fully specify mindreading?

References

Benson, J. E., Sabbagh, M. A., Carlson, S. M., & Zelazo, P. D. (2013). Individual differences in executive functioning predict preschoolers’ improvement from theory-of-mind training. Developmental Psychology, 49(9), 1615–1627. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031056

Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(5), 187–192.

Devine, R. T., & Hughes, C. (2014). Relations between false belief understanding and executive function in early childhood: A meta-analysis. Child Development, 85(5), 1777–1794. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12237

Heyes, C. M. (2015). Animal mindreading: What’s the problem? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(2), 313–327. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0704-4

Kovács, Á. M. (2009). Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning. Developmental Science, 12(1), 48–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00742.x

Milligan, K., Astington, J. W., & Dack, L. A. (2007). Language and theory of mind: Meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development, 78(2), 622–646. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01018.x

Moeller, M. P., & Schick, B. (2006). Relations between maternal input and theory of mind understanding in deaf children. Child Development, 77(3), 751–766. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00901.x

Peterson, C., & Slaughter, V. (2003). Opening windows into the mind: Mothers’ preferences for mental state explanations and children’s theory of mind. Cognitive Development, 18(3), 399–429. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(03)00041-8

Slaughter, V., & Gopnik, A. (1996). Conceptual coherence in the child’s theory of mind: Training children to understand belief. Child Development, 67, 2967–2988.

See Moeller & Schick (2006, p. 760): ‘Our results provide support for the concept that access to conversations about the mind is important for deaf children’s ToM development, in that there was a significant relationship between maternal talk about mental states and deaf children’s performance on verbal ToM tasks.’ See also Milligan, Astington, & Dack (2007); Kovács (2009). ↩