Evaluations Versus Expectations: Children's Divergent Beliefs About Resource Distribution

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four‐ to 10‐year‐old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which resource distribution actions were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions.     

Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints

We present a dynamical systems account of how simple social information influences perspective-taking. Our account is motivated by the notion that perspective-taking may obey common dynamic principles with perceptuomotor coupling. We turn to the prominent HKB dynamical model of motor coordination, drawing from basic principles of self-organization to describe how conversational perspective-taking unfolds in a low-dimensional attractor landscape. We begin by simulating experimental data taken from a simple instruction-following task, in which participants have different expectations about their interaction partner. By treating belief states as different values of a control parameter, we show that data generated by a basic dynamical process fits overall egocentric and other-centric response distributions, the time required for participants to enact a response on a trial-by-trial basis, and the action dynamics exhibited in individual trials. We end by discussing the theoretical significance of dynamics in dialog, arguing that high-level coordination such as perspective-taking may obey similar dynamics as perceptuomotor coordination, pointing to common principles of adaptivity and flexibility during dialog.     

What Does Children's Spatial Language Reveal About Spatial Concepts? Evidence From the Use of Containment Expressions

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor‐like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English‐ and Greek‐speaking 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds used containment expressions (e.g., English into, Greek mesa) for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.     

Spatial numerical associations in preschoolers

ABSTRACT

Three-to-five-year-old French children were asked to add or remove objects to or from linear displays. The hypothesis of a universal tendency to represent increasing number magnitudes from left to right led to predict a majority of manipulations at the right end of the rows, whatever children's hand laterality. Conversely, if numbers are not inherently associated with space, children were expected to favour laterality-consistent manipulations. The results showed a strong tendency to operate on the right end of the rows in right-handers, but no preference in left-handers. These findings suggest that the task elicited a left-to-right oriented representation of magnitudes that counteracted laterality-related responses in left-handed children. The young age of children and the lack of a developmental trend towards right preference weaken the hypothesis of a cultural origin of this oriented representation. The possibility that our results are due to weaker brain lateralisation in left-handers compared to right-handers is addressed in Discussion section.     

Making too many enemies: Hutto and Myin’s attack on computationalism†

We analyse Hutto & Myin's three arguments against computationalism [Hutto, D., E. Myin, A. Peeters, and F. Zahnoun. Forthcoming. “The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation In Its Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, edited by M. Sprevak, and M. Colombo. London: Routledge.; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]. The Hard Problem of Content targets computationalism that relies on semantic notion of computation, claiming that it cannot account for the natural origins of content. The Intentionality Problem is targeted against computationalism using non-semantic accounts of computation, arguing that it fails in explaining intentionality. The Abstraction Problem claims that causal interaction between concrete physical processes and abstract computational properties is problematic. We argue that these arguments are flawed and are not enough to rule out computationalism.     

Tolerant enactivist cognitive science

Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is that the very idea of ascribing representational content to internal, sub-personal processes is a theoretical confusion. This paper criticises some of the arguments made by Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017) for the stronger anti-representational claim and suggests that the default Enactivist view should be the weaker non-representational position.     

Computational model of enactive visuospatial mental imagery using saccadic perceptual actions

From the onset of cognitive revolution, the concept of mental imagery has been given different, many times opposing, theoretical accounts. Mental imagery appears to be a ubiquitous, yet wholly individual, easy to explain experience on the one hand, being hard to deal with scientifically on the other hand. The focus of this research is on an enactive approach to visuospatial mental imagery, inspired by Sima’s perceptual instantiation theory. We designed a hybrid computational model, composed of a forward model, an inverse model, both implemented as neural networks, and a memory/controller module, that grounds simple mental concepts, such as a triangle and a square, in perceptual actions, and is able to reimagine these objects by performing the necessary perceptual actions in a simulated humanoid robot. We tested the model on three tasks – salience-based object recognition, imagination-based object recognition and object imagination – and achieved very good results showing, as a proof of concept, that perceptual actions are a viable candidate for grounding the visuospatial mental concepts as well as the credible substrate of visuospatial mental imagery.