Reasoning about Instrumental and Communicative Agency in Human Infancy

Gergely, György; Jacob, Pierre

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-397919-3.00003-4

Cited by 59 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…And as argued by Sperber and Wilson (1986), intentional communication necessarily conveys relevance to the recipient of a communicative act. Building on this insight, Csibra, Gergely, and their colleagues (Csibra, 2010;Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Csibra & Shamsudheen, 2015;Gergely & Jacob, 2012) have argued that humans are evolutionarily adapted to recognize cues to intentional communication. Moreover, they argue that young children are biased to expect information that is intentionally communicated to them to be relevant, important, and generalizable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

Butler¹

2018

Preprint

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In learning about the world, we must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. In three experiments (N=96), we found that in some cases young children only revise their causal beliefs when conflicting evidence is explicitly demonstrated for them.Four-and 5-year-old children inferred a rule about what objects had causal powers, and then saw evidence conflicting with that initial inference. Critically, the conflicting evidence was produced either instrumentally and intentionally, or demonstrated communicatively and pedagogically.Only when evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them did children revise their initial hypothesis and use a subtle clue to infer the correct rule.Keywords: belief revision; categorization; pedagogy; social cognition; conceptual development Pedagogy and counterevidence 3 Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidenceAs humans, we live in a world of unfathomable uncertainty, yet assume that within that noise there are signals that will help us derive meaning and order. We search for meaningful patterns that help explain the structure of the world (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014), and we both strive to and succeed in identifying those patterns and using them to organize our knowledge, actions, judgments, and decisions across a wide variety of contexts (Gelman, 2003;Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Keil, 1989;Markman, 1989). And yet, as should be expected when drawing uncertain inferences from minimal data, much of the time the initial inferences that we make are wrong. We infer that the earth is flat, that the sun orbits the earth, that invisible entities determine everyday events, that moving objects have a hidden force inside them.Given that the evidence available to us is insufficient to ensure accuracy, and frequently leads to incorrect conclusions and common misconceptions, the capacity to revise our initial inferences based on of new and conflicting evidence is critical to constructing a coherent understanding of the world. And though this is undoubtedly true throughout the lifespan, it is especially true for children forming the initial causal theories that will frame their subsequent learning. Even very young children are sensitive to surprising or unexpected evidence, at least when it presents a clear conflict (Legare, 2012;Stahl & Feigenson, 2015). But relevant counterevidence may often be subtle and easily overlooked unless there is reason to think it might be particularly important. In making inferences, children use others as a source of knowledge to help guide inductive inferences in the face of uncertainty and to gauge the importance of new information. The current research aims to bring this work to bear on the critical process of hypothesis revision in the face of counterevidence. We asked whether children Pedagogy and counterevidence 4 might be more likely to make use of counterevidence in revising their initial hypotheses, when...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

Butler¹

2018

Preprint

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“…As has been demonstrated in a series of experiments involving infants and preschoolers, children tend to give more credit to information derived from ostensive communication than to information obtained via direct experience (Csibra & Gergely 2006;Gergely et al 2007;Csibra 2010;Futó et al 2010;Gergely & Jacob 2012;Butler & Markman 2014). This is what makes the transmission of generic knowledge between generations possible.…”

Section: The Notion Of Ostension In Relevance Theory and In Natural Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Kiss

Zétényi

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper calls attention to a methodological problem of acquisition experiments. It shows that the economy of the stimulus employed in child language experiments may lend an increased ostensive effect to the message communicated to the child. Thus, when the visual stimulus in a sentence-picture matching task is a minimal model abstracting away from the details of the situation, children often regard all the elements of the stimulus as ostensive clues to be represented in the corresponding sentence. The use of such minimal stimuli is mistaken when the experiment aims to test whether or not a certain element of the stimulus is relevant for the linguistic representation or interpretation. The paper illustrates this point by an experiment involving quantifier spreading. It is claimed that children find a universally quantified sentence like Every girl is riding a bicycle to be a false description of a picture showing three girls riding bicycles and a solo bicycle because they are misled to believe that all the elements in the visual stimulus are relevant, hence all of them are to be represented by the corresponding linguistic description. When the iconic drawings were replaced by photos taken in a natural environment rich in accidental details, the occurrence of quantifier spreading was radically reduced. It is shown that an extra object in the visual stimulus can lead to the rejection of the sentence also in the case of sentences involving no quantification, which gives further support to the claim that the source of the problem is not (or not only) the grammatical or cognitive difficulty of quantification but the unintended ostensive effect of the extra object.

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“…Los editores no se responsabilizan de los contenidos de los autores. Dirigir las consultas sobre derechos y autorizaciones a ceir@psicoterapiarelacional.es Jacob, 2012). Primero, siguiendo a Freud, el desarrollo psicosexual y la agresión han sido colocadas en el centro del escenario en las anteriores explicaciones psicoanalíticas (Cohen, 1991).…”

Section: Los Instintos Humanos Y Los Modelos Psicodinámicos De Los Trunclassified

“…aquellas que son utilizadas para crear otras herramientas deseables), ni su propósito, ni las intenciones del usuario, son transparentes, entonces la necesidad para comunicarse se vuelve primordial. La capacidad para comunicarse -tanto emitiendo como recibiendo-provee una envolvente ventaja selectiva en relación con el uso apropiado y totalmente funcional de los instrumentosv(multipropósitos) (Engels, 1876;Gergely & Jacob, 2012).…”

Section: El Uso De Herramientasunclassified

“…Estamos claramente en ventaja si, en vez de "sacarlo adelante", podríamos simplemente "asumir que es así" porque la fuente de información es conocida para nosotros y es evocada y evaluada como un originador de conocimiento fiable y digno de confianza en general o en este contexto específicamente. Semejante conocimiento "respetuosamente transmitido" (Recanati, 1997) es tomado por ser conocimiento en común, compartido entre los miembros de la comunidad a la que pertenecemos por ciertos rasgos característicos de la comunicación, los cuales levantan la barrera de la vigilancia epistémica y anima al aprendiz humano a incorporar esa forma de conocimiento tan conocida y compartida por todos los que pertenecen a su grupo (Gergely & Jacob, 2012).…”

Section: Confianza Epistémica Y Creencias Transmitidas Culturalmenteunclassified

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Petrificación epistémica y la restauración de la confiabilidad epistémica: Una nueva conceptualización del trastorno límite de la personalidad y su tratamiento psicosocial

Fonagy¹,

Luyten²,

Allison³

2016

CeIR

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Derechos reservados/Copyright de Clínica e investigación Relacional y los autores. Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial sin autorización expresa. Este material es para uso científico y profesional exclusivamente y puede contener información clínica sensible. Los editores no se responsabilizan de los contenidos de los autores. Dirigir las consultas sobre derechos y autorizaciones a ceir@psicoterapiarelacional.es Un nuevo modelo evolutivo para el trastorno límite de la personalidad (TLP) y su tratamiento ha avanzado en base a consideraciones evolutivas que implican el rol del apego, la mentalización y de la confiabilidad epistemológica en el desarrollo de la psicopatología. Nosotros proponemos que la vulnerabilidad a una psicopatología, por lo general, está relacionada con deficiencias en la confiabilidad epistemológica que provocan una interrupción en el proceso de la salutogénesis, es decir, de los efectos positivos asociados con la capacidad de beneficiarse del ambiente social. El TLP es quizá el trastorno por excelencia que ilustra este punto de vista. Nosotros argumentamos que esta conceptualización es coherente con la presencia de una marcada rigidez e inestabilidad en el TLP y que cuenta con implicaciones sumamente accesibles para las intervenciones. Palabras clave: Mentalización, Confianza epistémica, Trastorno de Personalidad LímiteA new developmental model of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and its treatment is advanced based on evolutionary considerations concerning the role of attachment, mentalizing, and epistemic trust in the development of psychopathology. We propose that vulnerability to psychopathology in general is related to impairments in epistemic trust, leading to disruptions in the process of salutogenesis, the positive effects associated with the capacity to benefit from the social environment. BPD is perhaps the disorder par excellence that illustrates this view. We argue that this conceptualization makes sense of the presence of both marked rigidity and instability in BPD, and has far-reaching implications for intervention.

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Reasoning about Instrumental and Communicative Agency in Human Infancy

Cited by 59 publications

References 90 publications

Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Petrificación epistémica y la restauración de la confiabilidad epistémica: Una nueva conceptualización del trastorno límite de la personalidad y su tratamiento psicosocial

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