In this paper, we will examine and untangle a conflict mainly between a developmental psychologist, Martin Hoffman and a social psychologist, Daniel Batson. According to Hoffman, empathic distress, a vicarious feeling through empathy, is transformed into an altruistic motivation. Batson and others on the other hand, criticize Hoffman, claiming that empathic altruism has no relation with empathic distress. We will point out some problems with Batson's position by referring to the results of fMRI experiments that suggest empathic distress and empathic altruism share a common basis, and defend Hoffman's argument. This will also offer new insights into the evolution of empathy.
This paper considers methodological problems in animal metacognition studies. After summarizing a variety of experimental designs to study animal metacognition, we review recent literature that were not included in Fujita (2010)'s more comprehensive review. We then examined Carruthers (2008; Carruthers and Rithie 2012)' skeptic argument against animal metacognition. He argued that no experiments thus far successfully exclude the possibility that animals, as well as human infants, elicit "metacognitive" responses without explicitly and consciously monitoring internal representations. We argued that newly developed experimental paradigms to study explicit memory processes could be a key to reject Caruuthers' skeptic argument and thus facilitate understanding how we access to the internal representations. Key words:Metacognition, implicit and explicit processes, self-reflective cognition, philosophy of science 1)総合研究大学院大学先導科学研究科 〒240-0193 神奈川県三浦郡葉山町(湘南国際村)
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