Realism,instrumentalism, and the intentional stance

One of Dennett's principal arguments for an instrumentalistic construal of intentional attributions (e.g., attributions of belief, etc.) is that such attributions are environment relative. I argue that one can and should adopt a realist perspective toward such attributions, but accommodate their environmental relativity by treating intentional properties as relational properties. By doing so one acquires a useful perspective on experimental cognitive psychology; in particular, one can overcome the temptation to treat ecological accounts and information processing accounts as incompatible alternatives and come to see them as mutually supportive. Treating intentional properties as relational may be counter-intuitive, but I provide examples of how other sciences have had to treat what seem to be intrinsic properties as relational.     

Children's discrimination of oblique lines.

In three experiments using delayed-matching tasks with 5-year-old children (one of which also included 7-year-olds) no support was found for the hypothesis that children code for line orientation using a match-mismatch strategy. The hypothesis that errors in discrimination of obliques can be attributed mainly to confusion over the left-right direction of tilt was rejected in a fourth experiment. It was concluded that young children do not spontaneously encode orientation in relation to a matching environmental cue and that there is no evidence that memory for the direction of obliquity is inferior to memory for the degree of obliquity.     

Change in selectivity of infant social behavior between 15 and 30 weeks

Six infants were filmed at 15 and 30 weeks of age while alone as well as in the presence of an adult (mother or stranger) who interacted with the infant or remained passive. Judges viewing samples of infant behavior tried to identify the social context in which episodes of behavior had occurred. Signal detection analysis of ratings made by the judges showed that infant behavior at both ages varied in accord with whether or not an adult was present. The identity and interactional style of the adult had only limited influence on infant behavior at 15 weeks, but judges could readily establish from the behavior of 30-week infants whether the adult was interactive or passive. Mothers were no more accurate in their ratings of social context than other judges were, even when they were observing the behavior of their own infant. Measurement of specific infant behaviors showed that the presence of the adult at both ages and the interactional style of the adult at 30 weeks exerted selective influence over rates of looking and smiling by infants. Signal detection classification was more sensitive to social context variables than microanalysis, possibly because observers had access to complex behavioral configurations.     

Surface dyslexia: A regression effect?

Although the disorder of acquired surface dyslexia is considered as a pathological syndrome in the psycholinguistic and neuropsychological literature, it may also be conceived of as part of a general regression in functioning consequent upon brain damage. Data on some of the identified features of surface dyslexia were obtained from normal children learning to read and adult subjects, in order to examine the hypothesis that the symptoms are similar to the behavior of unskilled readers, suggesting regression as a more parsimonious explanation for the disorder. Attention is also drawn to problems in quantifying its major feature--the "regularity" effect.