Developmental differences in the control of action selection by social information

Our everyday actions are often performed in the context of a social interaction. We previously showed that, in adults, selecting an action on the basis of either social or symbolic cues was associated with activations in the fronto-parietal cognitive control network, whereas the presence and use of social versus symbolic cues was in addition associated with activations in the temporal and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) social brain network. Here we investigated developmental changes in these two networks. Fourteen adults (21–30 years of age) and 14 adolescents (11–16 years) followed instructions to move objects in a set of shelves. Interpretation of the instructions was conditional on the point of view of a visible “director” or the meaning of a symbolic cue (Director Present vs. Director Absent) and the number of potential referent objects in the shelves (3-object vs. 1-object). 3-object trials elicited increased fronto-parietal and temporal activations, with greater left lateral prefrontal cortex and parietal activations in adults than adolescents. Social versus symbolic information led to activations in superior dorsal MPFC, precuneus, and along the superior/middle temporal sulci. Both dorsal MPFC and left temporal clusters exhibited a Director × Object interaction, with greater activation when participants needed to consider the directors' viewpoints. This effect differed with age in dorsal MPFC. Adolescents showed greater activation whenever social information was present, whereas adults showed greater activation only when the directors' viewpoints were relevant to task performance. This study thus shows developmental differences in domain-general and domain-specific PFC activations associated with action selection in a social interaction context

Interacting mindreaders

Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader's target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition

What’s Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production

Of all the things we could say, what determines what is worth saying? Greenfield’s principle of informativeness states that, right from the onset of language, humans selectively comment on whatever they find unexpected. We quantify this tendency using information theoretic measures, and test the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that are low frequency given the context because these will be most informative. Using corpora of child directed speech, we identified adjectives that varied in how informative (i.e., unexpected) they were given the noun they modified. Three-year-olds (N=31, replication N=13) heard an experimenter use these adjectives to describe pictures. The children’s task was then to describe the pictures to another person. As the information content of the experimenter’s adjective increased, so did children’s tendency to comment on the feature that adjective had encoded. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that children balance this informativeness with a competing drive to ease production

Is It Rational to Assume that Infants Imitate Rationally? A Theoretical Analysis and Critique

It has been suggested that preverbal infants evaluate the efficiency of others' actions (by applying a principle of rational action) and that they imitate others' actions rationally. The present contribution presents a conceptual analysis of the claim that preverbal infants imitate rationally. It shows that this ability rests on at least three assumptions: that infants are able to perceive others' action capabilities, that infants reason about and conceptually represent their own bodies, and that infants are able to think counterfactually. It is argued that none of these three abilities is in place during infancy. Furthermore, it is shown that the idea of a principle of rational action suffers from two fallacies. As a consequence, is it suggested that it is not rational to assume that infants imitate rationally. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

On deflationary accounts of human action understanding

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition