Cognitive Architecture of Belief Reasoning in Children and Adults: A Primer on the Two‐Systems Account

Abstract

scenarios involving others' belief-based actions, and (II) belief reasoning is both nonautomatic and automatic. To solve these puzzles, we highlight evidence from cognitive studies of children and adults to survey an exciting approach to the architecture of mindreading suggesting that human beings can be in (at least) two minds about the ways in which others' beliefs cause and rationalize behavior (1, 2).We discuss how 'signature limits' on low-level processes make it possible to differentiate between efficient versus flexible instances of mindreading. We then evaluate a contrasting account suggesting that human beings have a unitary and abstract psychological reasoning system from early in life. PUZZLES IN PEOPLE'S ATTRIBUTION OF BELIEF

(Mind)-Reading Maps

“…Apperly and colleagues claim that efficient and flexible mind-reading are different in respect to the "type of model of mental representation" each system relies on ( [17] p. 185). Systems are not continuous and each relies on different representations.…”

“…2 Belief-like states are characterized as relational attitudes whose contents can be discriminated in a crude way, using relations between objects and locations or other properties, but not involving relations to propositions [12,17]. In particular, registrations are described 2 The sensitivity to other agents' mental states as propositional attitudes comes later with development of the flexible system that enables full-blown mind-reading [12].…”

“…Belief-reasoning researchers refer to the fact that beliefs represent a given object under some guises but not others as "mode of presentation or sense" (above quotation), and they call this feature the "aspectuality" of beliefs (e.g., [17]). 4 This characteristic of beliefs and propositional attitudes, in general, is also known as "referential opacity".…”

“…In particular, as beliefs can represent the same object under distinct guises, different visual experiences may represent the same thing in different ways. Thus, as the ES is ill-equipped to appreciate the "aspectual nature of mental states generally" ( [17], p. 3), it also fails to appreciate the "aspectuality" of perception. In line with this, they contend that there is another signature limit of ES associated with perspective-taking studies.…”

“…Altogether, it is possible to say that the registrations' representational requirements are simple. Another mark of its simplicity is that the efficient process is triggered by direct cues like an agent's line of sight, unlike the FS whose deployment does not depend on the immediate availability of cues about what an agent witnesses [17]. Thus, if an organism employs map-like vehicles in cognitive processing provided that the representational necessities are simple, and efficient mind-reading representational necessities are simple, it is plausible that map-like vehicles are recruited for efficient mind-reading.…”