Language and false belief in Korean-speaking and English-speaking children

The link between language and false belief (FB) understanding has been the focus of considerable debate regarding which language component (semantics, general language, or complementation) is necessary for FB development. We examined the relative roles of complementation and receptive vocabulary in FB development in Korean-speaking and English-speaking children. FB understanding, memory for complements involving the verbs think, say and want, and receptive vocabulary were measured at three time points in 59 Korean-speaking children and 72 English-speaking children. A multi-level growth model indicated that the development of receptive vocabulary and separately the development of think understanding uniquely predicted the development of FB understanding. Neither say nor want was associated with FB understanding. The same pattern was found for Korean- and English-speaking children. The results provide evidence for the role of general language in FB understanding and against the unique role of sentential complementation.     

Bounded in a nutshell and a king of infinite space: the embodied self and its intentional world

This paper explores the implications of developments in phenomenological biology for a reconsideration of synchronicity and the self. The enactive approach of Maturana and Varela aims to reformulate the relation between biological organisms and the world in a non‐Cartesian way, breaking down the conceptual division between mind and world so that meaning can be seen as a function of the species‐specific way in which an organism engages with its environment. This leads to a view of the self as inherently embodied and engaged with the particularities of its material, cultural and social worlds, while being infinitely extended through the power of imagination; this enables humans to adapt to many different social and material environments. In order to understand these differences, we need to ‘enter into the world of the other’. Where understanding of other animals requires immersion in their environmental milieux, understanding other humans requires us also to recognize that differences in socio‐cultural milieux create significantly different worlds of meaning and experience.     

The felt presence of other minds: Predictive processing,counterfactual predictions,and mentalising in autism

The mental states of other people are components of the external world that modulate the activity of our sensory epithelia. Recent probabilistic frameworks that cast perception as unconscious inference on the external causes of sensory input can thus be expanded to enfold the brain’s representation of others’ mental states. This paper examines this subject in the context of the debate concerning the extent to which we have perceptual awareness of other minds. In particular, we suggest that the notion of perceptual presence helps to refine this debate: are others’ mental states experienced as veridical qualities of the perceptual world around us? This experiential aspect of social cognition may be central to conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, where representations of others’ mental states seem to be selectively compromised. Importantly, recent work ties perceptual presence to the counterfactual predictions of hierarchical generative models that are suggested to perform unconscious inference in the brain. This enables a characterisation of mental state representations in terms of their associated counterfactual predictions, allowing a distinction between spontaneous and explicit forms of mentalising within the framework of predictive processing. This leads to a hypothesis that social cognition in autism spectrum disorder is characterised by a diminished set of counterfactual predictions and the reduced perceptual presence of others’ mental states.     

Beyond neurophenomenology: A review of Colombetti's The Feeling Body

I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014, 288 pages, $40.00 hardcover). In this book Colombetti draws on the enactive theory of organismic embodiment and its key concept of sense-making in order to critically evaluate various aspects of mainstream affective science, including basic emotions and alternative constructionist approaches, as well as the cognitivist approach to emotion and appraisal theory. She defends and develops a dynamical systems approach to emotions and emphasizes the need for including more first-person methods of consciousness science in mainstream affective neuroscience. These are valuable contributions to affective science, and they also advance enactive theory. Colombetti's proposal goes further than standard neurophenomenology in that she appeals to the bodily basis of feeling, thereby requiring a new sort of neuro-physio-phenomenology. Even more radically, she allows that all living beings are essentially affective beings, even those without a nervous system, and that emotional forms could be co-constituted by more than one person.     

Psychotherapy and its alternatives: Commentary on a critique

In this commentary, Michael Rustin reviews the articles in the symposium, outlining their main aims and arguments. He goes on to provide some critical reflections, asking questions about the key concept of the ‘therapeutic state’. He notes that little attention is given to psychoanalytic or other psychological theories of the mind, as distinct from the biological models which are the main object of criticism in the symposium. He argues that just as it is justifiable and useful to take account of theories of the mind in considering issues of mental health and therapy, so it is desirable also to take account of the structures of society which have responsibility for generating conditions of mental well- or ill-being, and to reflect on how these may be changed. The commentary argues that the counter-cultural and somewhat ‘post-modern’ critical approach which informs the symposium can only form part of a sufficient response to the problems which the symposium identifies.     

Thinking about seeing: Perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults

Blind people’s inferences about how other people see provide a window into fundamental questions about the human capacity to think about one another’s thoughts. By working with blind individuals, we can ask both what kinds of representations people form about others’ minds, and how much these representations depend on the observer having had similar mental states themselves. Thinking about others’ mental states depends on a specific group of brain regions, including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). We investigated the representations of others’ mental states in these brain regions, using multivoxel pattern analyses (MVPA). We found that, first, in the RTPJ of sighted adults, the pattern of neural response distinguished the source of the mental state (did the protagonist see or hear something?) but not the valence (did the protagonist feel good or bad?). Second, these neural representations were preserved in congenitally blind adults. These results suggest that the temporo-parietal junction contains explicit, abstract representations of features of others’ mental states, including the perceptual source. The persistence of these representations in congenitally blind adults, who have no first-person experience with sight, provides evidence that these representations emerge even in the absence of relevant first-person perceptual experiences.     

Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a continuous measure

Recent findings suggest that tracking others’ beliefs is not always effortful and slow, but may rely on a fast and implicit system. An untested prediction of the automatic belief tracking account is that own and others’ beliefs should be activated in parallel. We tested this prediction measuring continuous movement trajectories in a task that required deciding between two possible object locations. We independently manipulated whether participants’ belief about the object location was true or false and whether an onlooker’s belief about the object location was true or false. Manipulating whether or not the agent’s belief was ever task relevant allowed us to compare performance in an explicit and implicit version of the same task. Movement parameters revealed an influence of the onlooker’s irrelevant belief in the implicit version of the task. This provides evidence for parallel activation of own and others’ beliefs.     

Causality as individual essence: its bearing on synchronicity

Causality, time, and number are subjectively lived realities and need to be noticed as such. Fundamental to the wide range of living experience, they are also basic to scientific knowing. In this article I examine causality in relation to an article on synchronicity by Harald Atmanspacher and Wolfgang Fach. My examination is neither scientific nor metaphysical, but rather phenomenological, as it is a clarification of form as individual essence of a thing. This non‐material form of an individual thing in the widest sense of the word ‘thing’ was rejected and so lost during modern seventeenth‐century science but, renewed now, can help describe synchronicity. A commentary by William Willeford follows.     

A teacher‐centered exploration of the relevance of social factors to theory of mind development

Many accounts of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development favor a cognitive explanation, for example, in terms of mental representational improvements at or before 4 years. Here, we investigated whether social factors as rated by a child's teacher, are related to ToM development. We tested 82 children of 3–6 years on each of four ToM tasks, and their class teacher completed a social questionnaire about each child's playing behavior, sharing, talkativeness, confidence, aggressiveness and outgoingness. A measure of task memory and the child's gender were also recorded. Here, children generally passed ToM tasks after 5 years‐old, but no one gender performed reliably better than the other. Teacher‐rated confidence and playing behavior were correlated to ToM. But in a regression analysis, these were replaced by teacher‐rated talkativeness; with age and memory given primacy in both sets of analyses. It is concluded that maturation and cognitive factors may well have primacy but social factors, facilitated during early primary education, must also be given a role in ToM development.     

Understanding of others’ knowledge in French and Japanese children: A comparative study with a disambiguation task on 16–38-month-olds

In order to explain the cultural differences reported in the results of false-belief tasks, we attempted to verify the ‘task bias hypothesis’ suggested by certain studies (e.g. Tardif et al. (2004). Journal of Child Language, 31, 779–800; Rubio-Fernandez & Geurts (2013). Psychological Science, 24(1), 27–33. doi 10.1177/0956797612447819). At the same time, we aimed to observe the theory of mind (ToM) ability of infants and young children under the age of three in verbal communication. To this end, we propose a new protocol to test young children's ToM ability, with particular attention paid to the linguistic aspect of the task. This original disambiguation task using proper nouns (first names) was tested on a total of 32 children aged between 16 and 38 months, in France and Japan. The results revealed that after the age of 30 months children begin to correctly interpret nouns while simultaneously taking into account their partner's knowledge (50% of the French and 29% of the Japanese children were successful), whereas this remains difficult for younger children (no child under 30 months was successful). The analysis of error types has shown that ‘memory bias’ was dominant in younger children in particular and ‘association bias’ was rarely observed across all ages. Given that the results of French and Japanese children did not differ significantly, we assume that this new task design could minimise the influence of cultural difference caused by the characteristics of different languages.