Lecture 18 - Mindreading

Question 1

Pretend play

Answer 1

-Self-directed: carry out an activity that you are already familiar with. Ex: using an empty spoon and pretending to eat with it.
-Other-directed: giving a property to an object that doesn’t have this property. Ex: make a plastic train go choochoo
-Object substitution: substituting the function of one object for another object. Ex: using a telephone as a banana
-need to decouple understanding of objective reality
-metarepresentation

As early as 13 months

Does your kid play pretend?
If no, can be an early indicator of autism

Representation vs. Metarepresentation
Representation:
-using a phone like a phone represents the object and its properties
-using a banana like a phone does not represent the object and its properties
Metarepresentation:
-using a banana as a phone is a metarepresentation of using a phone like a phone (representation)
It’s a decoupled copy of the primary representation

Pretend play:
There is the world
-Representation = play
-Meta-representation = pretend play

Now if we apply this to mindreading
There is the world
-Representation = my understanding of the world
-Meta-representation = my understanding of Sarah’s understanding of the world

Question 2

False-Belief task (Theory-of-mind) and Autism

Answer 2

False-Belief Task
Puppets in front of a kid
1-sally places her marble in a basket
2-sally exits
3-anne transfers sally’s marble to a box
4-sally re-enters. the experimenter asks: where will sally look for the marble?

Also have to ask to make sure they understand:
“Where was the marble in
the beginning?” (Memory)
“Where is the marble
now?” (Reality)
Experiment by Baron-Cohen et al., 1985)

False-Belief Task Results
● Neurotypical kids (3.5-6) (86% right)
● Down syndrome kids (7-17) (85% right)
● Autism kids (6-16) (only 20% right)

Baron-Cohen’s explanation
“Our results strongly support the hypothesis that autistic
children as a group fail to employ a theory of mind.
We wish to explain this failure as an inability to represent mental
states. (Problems of Meta-representation)
As a result of this, the autistic subjects are unable to impute
beliefs to others
and are thus at a grave disadvantage when having to predict the
behavior of other people”
Problem of Meta-
representation
Pretend play: common diag. indicator for autism

Baron-Cohen - Critique
Language? (what if non-verbal?)
Use: Violation-of-Expectations

Onishi et al. 2005 - Did the same thing but non-verbal
15 month old
Violation of expectations paradigm
See if surprised

Baron-Cohen → explicit understanding
Onishi → implicit understanding

Question 3

The Mindreading
System

Answer 3

Step 1 (Precursors):
0-9 months
Intentionality Detector (ID)
Eye-Direction Detector (ED)
The Emotion Detector (TED)

Necessary:
9-14 months
Shared-Attention Mechanism
SAM: now share attention to object

Last step:
14 months
The Empathy System (TESS)
TESS: share emotion (empathy)

and

18-48 months
Theory-of-mind-Mechanism
TOMM: mental model of it

cf. psychopathy
??

Question 4

Mirror Neurons

Answer 4

Accidental finding on monkeys
Not sure in humans

Baron-Cohenʼs model → dedicated TOMM module
What if … not?

Regular ol’ Decision-Making
Perception shapes beliefs
Beliefs (about the world) and desires (innate)… go into Decision-Making System… leads to behavior prediction and action/control system

Standard Simulation
aka Reduce Reuse Recycle
Other people’s belief/desire generator
(fake) Beliefs and (fake) Desires…
go into Decision-Making System… leads to behavior prediction and action/control system
* reuse existing decision-making, infer beliefs directly

Radical simulation
Other people’s understanding of the world
(fake) Perception
(fake) Beliefs and (fake) Desires…
go into Decision-Making System… leads to behavior prediction and action/control system
* same but infer world view, which leads to beliefs

Question 5

Neuro-evidence

Answer 5

Testing for TOMM

“Would Christopher
Columbus be able to work
out function of ☎?”

Parts of the brain:
Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)
Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
Posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS)
Anterior superior temporal sulcus (STS)

Testing for Re-use (Low-Level Simulation)
Patient without Amygdala
→ fearless
Dopamine in rats → no
dopamine, high anger
Reduce dopamine in humans
→ canʼt recognize anger😠
Patient with damaged Insula
→ no disgust
Mirror Neurons?

Testing for Re-use (High-Level Sim)
MPFC→fMRI
Is this word written in italics? no activation
Does this word describe you? activation
Does this word describe
person X? activation
*We use MPFC for attribution in self/others

Question 6

Summary

Answer 6

● Pretend-Play (different types)
○ Requires meta-representation
○ Same mechanism as mind-reading
● False-belief task
○ Verbal → explicit
○ Expectation-violation → implicit
○ Doesn’t work with autism → problems with meta-representations
● Baron-Cohenʼs mind reading system
○ Precursors: ID, ED, TED (2-part relationships)
○ Necessary: SAM (3-part relationships)
○ Last step: TESS, TOMM ( (4+)-part relationships)
● Standard simulation: reuse existing decision-making, infer beliefs directly
● Radical sim: same but infer world view, which leads to beliefs
● Neuro evidence:
○ TOMM: MPFC, TPJ, STS
○ Low-level sim evidence: we reuse e.g. amygdala fear in self and others
○ High-level sim evidence: we reuse MPFC for attribution in self/others.