Simulation, Theory and Collapse

Recent philosophical discussions of our capacity to attribute mental states to other human beings, and to produce accurate predictions and informative explanations of their behavior which make reference to the content of those states have focused on two apparently contrasting ways in which we might hope to account for these abilities. The first is that of regarding our competence as being under-girded by our grasp of a tacit psychological theory. The second builds on the idea that in trying to get a grip on the mental lives of others we might be able to draw on the fact that we are ourselves subjects of mental states in order to simulate their mental processes. Call these the theory view and the simulation view. In this paper I wish to discuss an argument—which I shall call Collapse—to the effect that if our capacities can be explained in the way that the simulationist supposes then they can also be explained along lines that the advocate of the theory view favours. I am not the first person with simulationist sympathies to have addressed this argument. However, my response is somewhat less concessive than others in the literature: while they attempt to soften its force by attempting to reformulate the simulationist view in a way that evades the conclusion of the argument, I attempt to meet it head on and to show that it does not even succeed in refuting the version of simulationism which it takes as its target.

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Treaters or punishers? The ethical role of mental health clinicians in sex offender programs

Clinicians in sex offender treatment programs are forced to breach traditional mental health ethical principles in order to successfully achieve their outcomes. These breaches include placing the community's interest ahead of those of the offender, restricting confidentiality, and the imposition of involuntary treatment. Unlike breaches in other treatment settings, they are not exceptions to general rules of non-maleficence or beneficence but, rather, must be carried out routinely and universally. Such programs thus take on the characteristics of punishment, rather than treatment, and, unsurprisingly, traditional codes of mental health ethics fail to give any real guidance to clinicians providing them. It is argued that ethical principles justifying and limiting punishment will be of more value in limiting the harms which might be inflicted on offenders participating in these programs while maintaining the integrity of the clinicians working with them.     

Midlife women's generativity and authoritarianism: marriage, motherhood, and 10 years of aging

Generativity and authoritarianism assessed at age 52 were correlated with criterion variables assessed at age 62 in a sample of well-educated women (N = 81). Results indicated that generativity predicted positive personality characteristics, satisfaction with marriage and motherhood, and successful aging. By contrast, although authoritarianism is linked in the literature to endorsing traditional gender roles, authoritarianism was uncorrelated in the current study with happiness about marriage and was negatively related to perceptions of motherhood. Furthermore, authoritarianism was correlated with neuroticism later in life. These data suggest that midlife authoritarianism may be problematic as women transition from their 50s to their 60s. Midlife generativity, in contrast, seems to offer one path to life satisfaction.     

Exploring mental-state reasoning as a social-cognitive mechanism for social loafing in children

The authors explored mental-state reasoning ability among 72 preschoolers (ages 3-5 years) as a possible developmental mechanism for the well-known social loafing effect: diminished individual effort in a collaborative task. The authors expected that older children would outperform young children on standard mental-state reasoning tests and that they would display greater social loafing than younger children. In addition, we hypothesized that the ability to infer the mental states of others would be predictive of social loafing, but that the ability to reason about one's own knowledge would not. The authors gave children three standard false-belief tasks and participated in a within-subjects balloon inflation task that they performed both individually and as part of a group. Results indicated that 3-year-olds performed significantly below older preschoolers on mental-state reasoning tasks. Only 4- and 5-year-olds displayed diminished individual effort. Multiple regression analysis indicated that only the ability to reason about others' false beliefs accounted for a significant amount of variance in social loafing; age (in months) and own false-belief reasoning did not. The authors discussed theoretical and pedagogical implications.     

Perception and its objects

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.

Can Virtuous Actions be Both Habitual and Rational?

Virtuous actions seem to be both habitual and rational. But if we combine an intuitive understanding of habituality with the currently predominant paradigm of rational action, these two features of virtuous actions are hard to reconcile. Intuitively, acting habitually is acting as one has before in similar contexts, and automatically, that is, without thinking about it. Meanwhile, contemporary philosophers tend to assume the truth of what I call the reasons theory of rational action, which states that all rational actions are actions for reasons. Whilst interpretations of this phrase are disputed, I argue that neither of the two leading views – which I call reasons internalism and reasons externalism – makes room for habitual actions to count as actions for reasons; by the reasons theory, they cannot be rational either. I suggest one way of effecting the reconciliation which, whilst it allows us to keep the reasons theory, requires us to conceive of reasons as even more radically external than current externalists believe them to be.     

Different types of environmental enrichment have discrepant effects on spatial memory and synaptophysin levels in female mice

Environmental enrichment paradigms that incorporate cognitive stimulation, exercise, and motor learning benefit memory and synaptic plasticity across the rodent lifespan. However, the contribution each individual element of the enriched environment makes to enhancing memory and synaptic plasticity has yet to be delineated. Therefore, the current study tested the effects of three of these elements on memory and synaptic protein levels. Young female C57BL/6 mice were given 3h of daily exposure to either rodent toys (cognitive stimulation) or running wheels (exercise), or daily acrobatic training for 6 weeks prior to and throughout behavioral testing. Controls were group housed, but did not receive enrichment. Spatial working and reference memory were tested in a water-escape motivated radial arm maze. Levels of the presynaptic protein synaptophysin were then measured in frontoparietal cortex, hippocampus, striatum, and cerebellum. Exercise, but not cognitive stimulation or acrobat training, improved spatial working memory relative to controls, despite the fact that both exercise and cognitive stimulation increased synaptophysin levels in the neocortex and hippocampus. These data suggest that exercise alone is sufficient to improve working memory, and that enrichment-induced increases in synaptophysin levels may not be sufficient to improve working memory in young females. Spatial reference memory was unaffected by enrichment. Acrobat training had no effect on memory or synaptophysin levels, suggesting a minimal contribution of motor learning to the mnemonic and neuronal benefits of enrichment. These results provide the first evidence that different elements of the enriched environment have markedly distinct effects on spatial memory and synaptic alterations.     

The L-type calcium channel blocker nifedipine impairs extinction, but not reduced contingency effects, in mice

We recently reported that fear extinction, a form of inhibitory learning, is selectively blocked by systemic administration of L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (LVGCC) antagonists, including nifedipine, in mice. We here replicate this finding and examine three reduced contingency effects after vehicle or nifedipine (40 mg/kg) administration. In the first experiment, contingency reduction was achieved by adding USs to the training protocol (degraded contingency), a phenomenon thought to be independent of behavioral inhibition. In the second experiment, contingency reduction was achieved by varying the percentage of CS-US pairing, a phenomenon thought to be weakly dependent on behavioral inhibition. In the third and fourth experiments, contingency reduction was achieved by adding CSs to the training protocol (partial reinforcement), a phenomenon thought to be completely dependent on behavioral inhibition. We found that none of these reduced contingency effects was impaired by nifedipine. In a final experiment, we found that extinction conducted 1 or 3 h post-acquisition, but not immediately, was LVGCC-dependent. Taken together, the results suggest that reduced contingency effects and extinction depend on different molecular mechanisms and that LVGCC dependence of behavioral inhibition develops with time after associative CS-US learning.