To belief or not belief: Children’s theory of mind

This paper provides a minimalist framework for understanding the development of children’s theory of mind (ToM). First, I provide a critical analysis of rich interpretations of ToM tasks tapping infants’ understanding of perception, goals, intentions, and false beliefs. I argue that the current consensus that infants understand mental states is premature, and instead, that excellent statistical learning skills and attention to human faces and motion enable infants’ very good performance, and reflect an implicit understanding of behavior. Children subsequently develop an explicit understanding of mental states through talk from parents and siblings, their developing language abilities, and their developing distinction between self and other. The paper also examines corollary theories such as the idea that there are subsystems of a theory of mind (ToM), that infants use rules on false belief tasks, that minimalist theory is post hoc, and that parallel onset of success on different ToM tasks indicates an underlying ToM. The paper concludes by considering previous arguments against minimalist interpretations of infant performance.     

Awareness of Infants: What Do They,and We,Seek?

I study the biological foundations of human cultural intelligence, and how they are supported. I observe the development of human motives for agency, the emotions that evaluate what is discovered, and the ways interests and discoveries and feelings may be shared with others. Ed Tronick and I have been privileged to study infants closely over several decades in which ideas of the dynamic powers of the human mind have been transformed, principally by recording how infants act in intimate companionship with their mothers in the first year or two. Here I try to clarify the ways we have, for different purposes and in different environments, taken complementary routes to understanding the meaning of infant life. His responsibilities are clinical and occupied with supporting the mental health of both the infant and the mother, and the building of a strong affectionate trust for life with others. My task has been trying to understand the subtle creativity and aesthetic and moral principles that animate a widening circle of relationships for a child, and that lead to cultural learning that is rich and playful. Ed and I are lucky to be discovering what every infant wants, and privileged to be supporting pride in good company, while striving to guard against causes of despair and shame in young children and their families.     

Empathy and the responsiveness to social affordances

The direct perception theory of empathy claims that we can immediately experience a person’s state of mind. I can see for instance that my neighbour is angry with me in his bodily countenance. I develop a version of the direct perception theory of empathy which takes this perceptual capacity to depend upon recognising in what way the other person is responsive to the affordances the environment provides. By recognising which possibilities for action are relevant to a person, I can thereby understand something about the meaning they give to the world. I come to share something of their perspective on the world, and this allows me to grasp based on my perception of them something about their current state of mind. I argue that shared affect plays a central role in this perceptual capacity. Shared affect allows me to orient my attention to possibilities for action that matter to the other person. I end by briefly discuss the implications of this view of empathy for the disturbances in so-called “cognitive empathy” that are found in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.     

Effects of early sensorimotor disorder on contextual learning in autism

Cognitive explanations of autism often involve higher order cognitive functions developing late in childhood, such as theory of mind, executive functions or central coherence. In home videos of infants later diagnosed with autism, children display early signs of developmental disorders, for example impaired sensorimotor functions, attention to social and non-social stimuli and a lack of circadian regulation. We propose that these early signs need to be understood using a framework of context learning. It is also important to understand the role for context understanding in guiding the maturation of behavior. The role for inhibition in context learning as understood within learning theory provides us with helpful tools for this analysis. Our research aim is not to identify and explain early markers for autism, but to understand the cognitive developmental pathway set into rolling by an early impairment. This will help us understand the seemingly unrelated symptoms that define the complex syndrome of autism.     

The Myth of Reverse Compositionality

In the context of debates about what form a theory of meaning should take, it is sometimes claimed that one cannot understand an intersective modifier-head construction (e.g., ‘pet fish’) without understanding its lexical parts. Neo-Russellians like Fodor and Lepore contend that non-denotationalist theories of meaning, such as prototype theory and theory theory, cannot explain why this is so, because they cannot provide for the ‘reverse compositional’ character of meaning. I argue that reverse compositionality is a red herring in these debates. I begin by setting out some positive arguments for reverse compositionality and showing that they fail. Then I show that the principle of reverse compositionality has two big strikes against it. First, it is incompatible with all theories of meaning on the market, including the denotationalism favored by neo-Russellians. Second, it explains nothing that is not already explained by its venerable predecessor, the principle of (forward) compositionality.     

Counterfactual and prefactual conditionals.

We consider reasoning about prefactual possibilities in the future, for example, "if I were to win the lottery next year I would buy a yacht" and counterfactual possibilities, for example, "if I had won the lottery last year, I would have bought a yacht." People may reason about indicative conditionals, for example, "if I won the lottery I bought a yacht" by keeping in mind a few true possibilities, for example, "I won the lottery and I bought a yacht." They understand counterfactuals by keeping in mind two possibilities, the conjecture, "I won the lottery and I bought a yacht" and the presupposed facts, "I did not win the lottery and I did not buy a yacht." We report the results of three experiments on prefactuals that examine what people judge them to imply, the possibilities they judge to be consistent with them, and the inferences they judge to follow from them. The results show that reasoners keep a single possibility in mind to understand a prefactual.     

心智化社会认知观的演变及发展——来自潜心智化的思考

社会认知的机制一直存在心智化与具身认知观点的争论。前者认为社会认知是对心理状态的推测,而后者则认为社会认知是具身实践活动。虽然,心智化研究者认为具身认知有关灵长类动物和婴儿的社会认知的解释可以兼容于内隐心智化,但内隐心智化在解释社会互动时仍然存在间接性的问题。近期,潜心智化理论旨在挑战上述立场中有关社会认知先天论的预设,该理论将个体的潜心智化视为内隐心智化的替代,通过检验与分析相关研究的构想效度,强调社会认知是从非社会性的一般认知功能中衍生而来的,这种立场在社会认知的领域特殊性与非社会认知的领域一般性之间建立起了纽带,从而挑战了心智化与具身认知的争论。未来研究应设计更为严谨的心智化研究方法并对其进行方法学验证,借助先进的技术手段,尝试在神经科学层面探索一般认知功能与社会认知的关系。     

(Inadvertently) Instructing Missionaries in (Public University) World Religions Courses: Examining a Pedagogical Dilemma,its Dimensions,and a Course Section Solution

In this article, I explore an ethical and pedagogical dilemma that I encounter each semester in my world religions courses: namely, that a great number of students enroll in the courses as part of their missionary training programs, and come to class understanding successful learning to mean gathering enough information about the world's religious “traditions” so as to effectively seduce people out of them. How should we teach world religions – in public university religious studies courses – with this student constituency? What are/ought to be our student learning goals? What can and should we expect to accomplish? How can we maximize student learning, while also maintaining our disciplinary integrity? In response to these questions, I propose a world religions course module, the goal of which is for students to examine – as objects of inquiry – the lenses through which they understand religion(s). With a recognition of their own lenses, I argue, missionary students become more aware of the biases and presumptions about others that they bring to the table, and they learn to see the ways in which these presumptions inform what they see and know about others, and also what they do not so easily see.     

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge‐based selective word learning

Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory‐of‐mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory‐of‐mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non‐epistemic attribute). Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory‐of‐mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory‐of‐mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.     

Teaching the College “Nones”: Christian Privilege and the Religion Professor

Working with undergraduate students invites teachers into relationship and conversation with young people at a time when they are emerging as adults and forming their identities. Faith is one area of identity formation often attended to by scholars, college professors, and their institutions. But within that, little attention has been paid to those who do not identify as religious. Additionally, “the overwhelming presence of Christianity at American institutions maintains it as the spiritual norm on campus. … Those within the spiritual norm gain a level of privilege that is often unconscious” (Seifert 2007, 11). This has an effect not only on nonreligious students but on any student who identifies as anything other than Christian; and it has a unique effect on teaching and learning in the religion classroom. In this article, I will explain what Christian privilege is, why it is a unique problem in the undergraduate religion classroom, and what teachers of religion might do in response to it. In the end, I argue that educators need to better understand the effects of Christian privilege in our classrooms and become allies to the nonreligious in particular by using pedagogies that include and support all students, in their many religious affiliations and unaffiliations.     

A Comparison of Health Communication Models: Risk Learning Versus Stereotype Priming

Health communication research and practice have been strongly influenced by the protection motivation theory (Rogers, 1975, 1983), the health belief model (Becker, Haefner, Kasl, et al., 1977; Becker, Haefner, & Maiman, 1977; Rosenstock, 1974), and similar conceptualizations. I refer to these as risk learning models because the goal is to teach new information about health risks and the behaviors that will minimize those risks. These models have garnered a substantial amount of empirical support and are apparently quite useful to practitioners (Conner & Norman, 1996). The goal of this article is to describe a less familiar, but complementary, approach to persuading people to avoid risky behaviors, which I will refer to as the stereotype priming model (Bargh, 1989; Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack, 1995). The goal is to make salient preexisting social stereotypes about people who do or do not behave as advocated. The stereotype priming model posits that the stereotypes that we possess regarding the personality traits of groups of people (e.g., smokers, drunk drivers, marijuana users, people with suntans) to a large extent govern our behavior. In this view, it is sometimes useful to capitalize on and reinforce preexisting stereotypes in order to encourage healthy, and/or discourage unhealthy, behaviors. This article reviews the traditional risk learning models and evidence that supports them, provides corresponding information for the stereotype priming model, compares and contrasts the models, and discusses how the stereotype priming model might be used to design health communications campaigns.     

The Making of Mind

To understand how human beings come to have the mental faculties that they do, one would do well to consider the making of mind in at least two senses. First, an evolutionary perspective promises to specify what distinguishes Homo sapiens from nonhuman primate kin, and to set whatever is unique against a background of psychological abilities that we share with our ancestral relatives. Second, an account of individuals’ development from infancy onwards should enable one to see how humans’ species-specific biological endowment dovetails with what the environment provides to yield specifically human psychological capacities. In this article, I argue that to arrive at an overarching theoretical explanation, we should set the capacity to identify with the attitudes of other people at the very core of evolutionary and developmental accounts.     

What is “theory of mind”? Concepts,cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.     

What is "theory of mind"? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on "theory of mind" has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.     

It’s in your nature: a pluralistic folk psychology

I suggest a pluralistic account of folk psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of folk psychology is supported by research in developmental and social psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn’t endorse, and so could not serve as the target’s reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our folk psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits—who the person is—rather than by beliefs and desires—what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed.     

Selective social learning in infancy: looking for mechanisms

Although there is mounting evidence that selective social learning begins in infancy, the psychological mechanisms underlying this ability are currently a controversial issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether theory of mind abilities and statistical learning skills are related to infants’ selective social learning. Seventy‐seven 18‐month‐olds were first exposed to a reliable or an unreliable speaker and then completed a word learning task, two theory of mind tasks, and a statistical learning task. If domain‐general abilities are linked to selective social learning, then infants who demonstrate superior performance on the statistical learning task should perform better on the selective learning task, that is, should be less likely to learn words from an unreliable speaker. Alternatively, if domain‐specific abilities are involved, then superior performance on theory of mind tasks should be related to selective learning performance. Findings revealed that, as expected, infants were more likely to learn a novel word from a reliable speaker. Importantly, infants who passed a theory of mind task assessing knowledge attribution were significantly less likely to learn a novel word from an unreliable speaker compared to infants who failed this task. No such effect was observed for the other tasks. These results suggest that infants who possess superior social‐cognitive abilities are more apt to reject an unreliable speaker as informant. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/zuuCniHYzqo     

THE ILLIBERALITY OF ‘LIBERAL EUGENICS’

This essay evaluates the moral logic of ‘liberal eugenics’: the ideal of genetic control which leaves decisions about what sort of people to produce in the hands of individual parents, absent government intervention. I argue that liberal eugenics cannot be justified on the basis of the underlying liberal theory which inspires it. I introduce an alternative to Rawls's social primary goods that might be called natural primary goods: hereditable mental and physical capacities and dispositions that are valued across a range of projects and pursuits. I suggest that reproductive genetic biotechnologies like embryo selection, cellular surgery, and genetic engineering, which aim to enhance ‘general purpose’ traits in offspring are less like childrearing practices a liberal government leaves to the discretion of parents than like practices the state makes compulsory. I argue that if the liberal commitment to autonomy is important enough for the state to mandate childrearing practices such as health care and basic education, that very same interest is important enough for the state to mandate safe, effective, and functionally integrated genetic practices that act on analogous all‐purpose traits such as resistance to disease and general cognitive functioning. I conclude that the liberal case for compulsory eugenics is a reductio against liberal theory.     

From Freud’s dream-work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

Bion moved psychoanalytic theory from Freud's theory of dream-work to a concept of dreaming in which dreaming is the central aspect of all emotional functioning. In this paper, I first review historical, theoretical, and clinical aspects of dreaming as seen by Freud and Bion. I then propose two interconnected ideas that I believe reflect Bion’s split from Freud regarding the understanding of dreaming. Bion believed that all dreams are psychological works in progress and at one point suggested that all dreams contain elements that are akin to visual hallucinations. I explore and elaborate Bion’s ideas that all dreams contain aspects of emotional experience that are too disturbing to be dreamt, and that, in analysis, the patient brings a dream with the hope of receiving the analyst’s help in completing the unconscious work that was entirely or partially too disturbing for the patient to dream on his own. Freud views dreams as mental phenomena with which to understand how the mind functions, but believes that dreams are solely the ‘guardians of sleep,’ and not, in themselves, vehicles for unconscious psychological work and growth until they are interpreted by the analyst. Bion extends Freud's ideas, but also departs from Freud and re-conceives of dreaming as synonymous with unconscious emotional thinking – a process that continues both while we are awake and while we are asleep. From another somewhat puzzling perspective, he views dreams solely as manifestations of what the dreamer is unable to think.