The Path to Fully Representational Theory of Mind: Conceptual, Executive, and Pragmatic Challenges

Pesch, Annelise; Semenov, Andrei D.; Carlson, Stephanie M.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581117

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The effect was weaker, giving a bit more assurance that the mean (.52) represents the true state of affairs, and that the variation might largely reflect random fluctuations and, in the case of Study 7, perhaps regression to the mean. In their 3‐option contents task, Pesch et al, ( 2020 ) found a higher proportion (.76) than we did of 4½‐year‐olds who chose the false‐belief option among those who avoided the reality option. It might have been difficult for children to remember the irrelevant option object in Pesch et al's contents task (which included both 3‐option and 4‐option versions), as suggested by their finding that working memory was associated only with performance on the 3‐option contents task.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 75%

“…This difference could be explained by the look‐first test question prompting children to not only avoid the reality location but also choose the location where the object was placed first. Pesch et al ( 2020 ) recently found similar results using 3‐option false‐belief tasks. In their location task, they used the I‐FB‐R order, and the proportion of 4½‐year‐olds who chose the false‐belief option among those who avoided the reality option was .32.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…The protagonist's return (Hypothesis 2A), and inconsequential object movement in the protagonist's absence (Hypothesis 2E) were both hypothesized to elicit PAR by signaling that the situation had changed. Pesch, et al ( 2020 ) recently also found poor performance in a true‐belief return condition among 4½‐year‐olds ( M = 0.50) and 5½‐year‐olds ( M = 0.65), consistent with the U‐shaped pattern. The look‐first question (Hypothesis 2C) was hypothesized to elicit PAR via the implicature (Grice, 1989 ) that the protagonist will get it wrong.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

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Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

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An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false‐belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false‐belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false‐belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false‐belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true‐belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true‐ and false‐belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true‐belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true‐belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English‐speakers. Children were recruited from university‐sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. ...

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 75%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

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Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

Self Cite

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“…Pushing against behaviourist and empiricist accounts of newborn's mind as a 'blank state' , ToM suggests a hardwired social cognition module that from birth computes mental representations about other people's beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, etc. (Scholl and Leslie, 1999;Gerrans, 2002;Stone and Gerrans, 2006;Wellman, 2018;Heyes et al, 2020;Pesch et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference

Hipólito

2022

Front. Psychol.

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This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind (ToM). Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that (1) social cognition reduces to mental representation and (2) social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in (1). The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions (1) and (2), the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation.

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“…It may be that mentally conceptualizing the world as represented by another is sufficiently taxing of cognitive flexibility to reveal individual differences on its own, without the need to resolve a FB conflict per se. While this is plausible, we treat this interpretation cautiously as it is uncommon to find associations between true-belief data and EF (e.g., Pesch et al, 2020;Phillips et al, 2011), and indeed these associations to EF were weaker for first-order than for second-order ToM. More evidence will be needed to obtain a clearer picture of the links between these two constructs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Representing Minds Representing Minds: An Examination of the Association between Recursive Mental State Attributions and Executive Processes.

Peloquin¹

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Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Functioning (EF) are two pillars of human social cognition often studied in conjunction, but rarely considered together beyond childhood. Adults routinely undertake ToM activities of higher levels, such as those that require reasoning recursively through other individuals’ presumed reasoning about others (e.g., she believes that he believes that this is difficult to grasp). The possibility of links between EF and these special kinds of representations, termed second-order ToM, is explored for the first time in the work presented herein, and documented in two ways. First, the research plan and hypotheses at the basis of this dissertation were informed in large part by a meta-analytic review of the extant literature linking EF to second-order ToM (Study 1). We employed multilevel modelling techniques to estimate the pooled effect size of over 80 correlation coefficients, extracted from both school-age children and adult samples (N = 2584). While the developmental literature provided evidence of second-order ToM-EF linkage in children, the adult findings were weaker and more difficult to interpret for a variety of methodological reasons. Hence, in Studies 2 and 3, we introduced a new age-adapted methodological paradigm, and conducted an extensive mapping of the adult capacity for second-order ToM reasoning in relation to EF. Across the two studies, we found that individual differences in both working memory and cognitive flexibility correlated with second-order ToM performance, irrespective of variance accounted for by factors such as verbal ability (Study 2) and non-verbal ability (Study 3). In Study 3 we explored the relation between second-order ToM and EF with greater specificity. We replicated the findings of Study 2 and found that the manipulation component of working memory (but not the storage component) and the task-switching component of cognitive flexibility (but not the set-shifting component) were central to the relation. The broader theoretical implications of our findings were then discussed, along with suggestions for potential ways forward in the study of the relation between second-order ToM and EF in adulthood.

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The Path to Fully Representational Theory of Mind: Conceptual, Executive, and Pragmatic Challenges

Cited by 7 publications

References 24 publications

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference

Representing Minds Representing Minds: An Examination of the Association between Recursive Mental State Attributions and Executive Processes.

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