44 research outputs found
Infants' representations of causation
It is consistent with the evidence in The Origin of Concepts to conjecture that infants' causal representations, like their numerical representations, are not continuous with adults', so that bootstrapping is needed in both cases
Joint action and development
Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining
how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action
be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratmanâs, says it is. For
on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions
and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of
minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to
joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different
kind of joint action, an account compatible with the premise about
development. The new account is no replacement for the leading
account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action.
Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account
involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of
joint action involving shared goals
Goals and targets : a developmental puzzle about sensitivity to othersâ actions
Sensitivity to othersâ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infantsâ sensitivity to othersâ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infantsâ goal tracking appear to be limited by their abilities to represent the observed action motorically at the time it occurs? And why does their sensitivity to action sometimes manifest itself differently in dishabituation, pupil dilation and anticipatory looking? Solving these twin puzzles is critical for understanding humansâ earliest sensitivity to othersâ actions. After introducing the puzzles, this paper argues that solving them may require identifying multiple, distinct processes for tracking the targets and goals of actions
Perceiving expressions of emotion : what evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states?
What evidence could bear on questions about whether humans ever perceptually experience any of another's mental states, and how might those questions be made precise enough to test experimentally? This paper focusses on emotions and their expression. It is proposed that research on perceptual experiences of physical properties provides one model for thinking about what evidence concerning expressions of emotion might reveal about perceptual experiences of others' mental states. This proposal motivates consideration of the hypothesis that categorical perception of expressions of emotion occurs, can be facilitated by information about agents' emotions, and gives rise to phenomenal expectations. It is argued that the truth of this hypothesis would support a modest version of the claim that humans sometimes perceptually experience some of another's mental states. Much available evidence is consistent with, but insufficient to establish, the truth of the hypothesis. We are probably not yet in a position to know whether humans ever perceptually experience others' mental states
Tracking and representing othersâ mental states
Few things matter more than the mental states of those nearby. Their ignorance defines limits on cooperation and presents opportunities to exploit in competition. (If sheâs seen where you stashed those mealworms sheâll pilfer them when youâre gone, leaving you without breakfast. And you wonât get that grape if he hears you sneaking past.) What others feel, see and know can also provide information about events otherwise beyond your ken. Itâs no surprise, then, that abilities to track othersâ mental states are widespread. Many animals, including scrub jays (Clayton, Dally and Emery 2007), ravens (Bugnyar, Reber and Buckner 2016), goats (Kaminski, Call and Tomasello 2006), dogs (Kaminski et al. 2009), ring-tailed lemurs (Sandel, MacLean and Hare 2011), monkeys (Hattori, Kuroshima and Fujita 2009) and chimpanzees (Karg et al. 2015), reliably vary their actions in ways that are appropriate given facts about anotherâs mental states. What underpins such abilities to track othersâ mental states
Is goal ascription possible in minimal mindreading?
In this response to the commentary by Michael and Christensen, we first explain how minimal mindreading is compatible with the development of increasingly sophisticated mindreading behaviours that involve both executive functions and general knowledge, and then sketch one approach to a minimal account of goal ascription
Mindreading in the balance : adults' mediolateral leaning and anticipatory looking foretell others' action preparation in a false-belief interactive task
Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivableâ where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasksâ for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N = 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwardsâ rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated
Visibly constraining an agent modulates observers' automatic false-belief tracking
Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations is that they can be disrupted by constraints on an observed agent's action capacities. We therefore used a `mummification' technique to manipulate whether the agent in a visual ball-detection task was free to act or whether he was visibly constrained from acting. Adults' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs only when the agent was free to act on the ball and not when the agent was visibly constrained from acting. Furthermore, it was the agent's constrained action capabilities, rather than any perceptual novelty, that determined whether adult observers' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs. These findings signal that our motor system may underpin more of social cognition than previously imagined, and, in particular, that motor representations may underpin automatic false-belief tracking
Motor representation in acting together
People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor representation. If we are right, motor representation plays a central role in the story of acting together
Effort-based decision making in joint action : evidence of a sense of fairness
As humans, we are unique with respect to the flexibility and scope of our cooperative behavior. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to investigating the psychological mechanisms which support this. One key finding is that people frequently calibrate their effort level to match a cooperation partner's effort costs - although little is known about exactly why they do so. We hypothesized that people calibrate with the ultimate goal of attracting and keeping good collaboration partners, with the proximal psychological motive being a preference for fairness. Across four lab-based, pre-registered experiments (N = 142), we found support for these hypotheses, and distinguished them from plausible alternative explanations, such as the conjecture that people may use their partner's effort costs as information to infer the value of opportunities afforded by their environment, and the conjecture that people may calibrate their effort investment in order to appear competent