Week 12

Question 1

By the end of this week you should be able to:

Explain the concept of theory of mind and describe different approaches and what they suggest about the way we understand others.

Outline what a false belief is and explore how false belief tasks have been used to study theory of mind.

Describe the idea of a ‘cheater detection’ module and discuss why it is might be important.

Describe the Wason card sorting task and discuss, with examples, the effect of context and content on performance in this task.

Answer 1

1

Question 2

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Answer 2

Is the intuitive understanding of one’s own and other people’s minds or mental states - including thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, knowledge, intentions, desires, and emotions - and of how those mental states influence behaviour.

Question 3

Having an appreciation for the workings of another person’s mind is considered a prerequisite for:

Answer 3

Natural language acquisition strategic social interaction, reflexive thought, and moral judgment.

Capacity develops from infant to adult. Developed 2 million years ago.

Question 4

We rely on the theory of mind in social situations to:

Answer 4

infer what others are thinking and feeling. Among other things, this capability helps us work successfully in teams.

Question 5

People’s theory of mind thus frames and interprets perceptions of human behaviour in a particular way—a

Answer 5

s perceptions of agents who can act intentionally and who have desires, beliefs, and other mental states that guide their actions

Question 6

Individuals with autism can have a harder time using the theory of mind because?

Answer 6

It involves processing facial expressions and inferring people’s intentions. A look that might convey a lot of meaning to most people conveys little or nothing to someone with autism.

Question 7

Some of the major tools of theory of mind:

Answer 7

With the bottom showing simple, automatic, early developing, and evolutionarily old processes, and the top showing complex, more deliberate, late developing, and evolutionarily recent processes.

Question 8

The agent category:

Answer 8

Allows humans to identify those moving objects in the world that can act on their own. Features that even very young children take to be indicators of being an agent include being self-propelled, having eyes, and reacting systematically to the interaction partner’s behaviour, such as following gaze or imitating.

Question 9

The process of recognizing goals builds on this agent category:

Answer 9

because agents are characteristically directed toward goal objects, which means they seek out, track, and often physically contact said objects. Even before the end of their first year, infants recognize that humans reach toward an object they strive for even if that object changes location or if the path to the object contains obstacles.

Question 10

Humans learn to pick out behaviours that are intentional.

Answer 10

The concept of intentionality is more sophisticated than the goal concept. For one thing, human perceivers recognize that some behaviours can be unintentional even if they were goal-directed—such as when you unintentionally make a fool of yourself even though you had the earnest goal of impressing your date.

Question 11

A subtle, automatic form of imitation is called and when people mutually mimic one another they can reach a state of synchrony.

Answer 11

mimicry,

Question 12

A subtle, automatic form of imitation is called?

Answer 12

Mimicry

Question 13

When people mutually mimic one another they can reach a state of?

Answer 13

Synchrony

Question 14

Synchrony can happen even at very low levels, such as negative physiological arousal.

Answer 14

Women’s’ menstruation cycle.

Question 15

In monkeys, highly specialized so-called mirror neurons fire both when?

Answer 15

The monkey sees a certain action and when it performs that same action.

Question 16

Automatic empathy

Answer 16

A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behaviour and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.

Mimic

It builds on imitation and synchrony in a clever way. If Bill is sad and expresses this emotion in his face and body, and if Elena watches or interacts with Bill, then she will subtly imitate his dejected behaviour and, through well-practiced associations of certain behaviours and emotions, she will feel a little sad as well.

Question 17

The agent category

Answer 17

Allows humans to identify those moving objects in the world that can act on their own. Features that even very young children take to be indicators of being an agent include being self-propelled, having eyes, and reacting systematically to the interaction partner’s behaviour, such as following gaze or imitating.

Question 18

What it means to recognize goals is:

Answer 18

to see the systematic and predictable relationship between a particular agent pursuing a particular object across various circumstances.

Question 19

Intentional behaviours

Answer 19

Through learning to recognize the many ways by which agents pursue goals, humans learn to pick out behaviours that are intentional.

Question 20

Visual perspective taking

Answer 20

Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).

Question 21

Simulation—

Answer 21

Is a tool to understand the other’s thoughts or feelings.

Eg, what would it be like to sit across from an interrogator? I would feel scared.

Question 22

Social projection:

Answer 22

An even simpler form of such modelling is the assumption that the other thinks, feels, wants what we do—which has been called the “like-me” assumption or the inclination toward social projection.

Question 23

Joint attention

Answer 23

Both looking at an object. Engaging with other people’s mental states.

Question 24

Visual perspective taking:

Answer 24

You are sitting at a dinner table and advise another person on where the salt is—do you consider that it is to her left even though it is to your right? When we overcome our egocentric perspective this way, we imaginatively adopt the other person’s spatial viewpoint and determine how the world looks from their perspective. We mentally “rotate” toward the other’s spatial location, because the farther away the person sits (e.g., 60, 90, or 120 degrees away from you) the longer it takes to adopt the person’s perspective.

Question 25

Explicit Mental State Inference

Answer 25

The ability to truly take another person’s perspective requires that we separate what we want, feel, and know from what the other person is likely to want, feel, and know. To do so humans make use of a variety of information. For one thing, they rely on stored knowledge—both general knowledge (“Everybody would be nervous when threatened by a man with a gun”) and agent-specific knowledge (“Joe was fearless because he was trained in martial arts”).

Question 26

False-belief test

Answer 26

An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
alse-belief test

Question 27

Like-me” assumption or the inclination toward social projection.

Answer 27

In a sense, this is an absence of perspective taking, because we assume that the other’s perspective equals our own. This can be an effective strategy if we share with the other person the same environment, background, knowledge, and goals, but it gets us into trouble when this presumed common ground is in reality lacking.

Question 28

We have seen that the human understanding of other minds relies on many tools.

Answer 28

People process such information as motion, faces, and gestures and categorize it into such concepts as agent, intentional action, or fear.

They rely on relatively automatic psychological processes, such as imitation, joint attention, and projection.

They rely on more effortful processes, such as simulation and mental-state inference. These processes all link behaviour that humans observe to mental states that humans infer. If we call this stunning capacity a “theory,” it is a theory of mind and behaviour.

Question 29

Folk explanations of behaviour

Answer 29

People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviours).

Why is the policeman suddenly friendly, why is she wearing a short skirt in winter? Why did the murderer kill someone?

Question 30

For an agent to perform a behaviour intentionally, she must have:

Answer 30

A desire for an outcome (what we had called a goal), beliefs about how a particular action leads to the outcome, and an intention to perform that action; if the agent then actually performs the action with awareness and skill, people take it to be an intentional action. To explain why the agent performed the action, humans try to make the inverse inference of what desire and what beliefs the agent had that led her to so act, and these inferred desires and beliefs are the reasons for which she acted.

Question 31

For a child to develop the theory of mind capacity:

Answer 31

It takes years. It took our species a few million years to evolve it.

Question 32

People with autism will not understand the theory of mind.

Answer 32

Cannot mind read.

Question 33

Intention

Answer 33

An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.

Question 34

Intentionality

Answer 34

The quality of an agent’s performing a behaviour intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).

Question 35

Joint attention

Answer 35

Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.

Question 36

Mimicry

Answer 36

Copying others’ behaviour, usually without awareness.

Question 37

Mirror neurons

Answer 37

Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.

Question 38

Projection

Answer 38

A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.

Question 39

Simulation

Answer 39

The process of representing the other person’s mental state.

Question 40

Synchrony

Answer 40

Two people displaying the same behaviours or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).

Question 41

Theory of mind

Answer 41

The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).

Question 42

Visual perspective taking

Answer 42

Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).

Question 43

Theory-theory

Answer 43

Theory-theorists surmise our knowledge about the mind as an everyday ‘framework’ or ‘foundational’ theory of how people think. While this everyday framework is not as rigorous as a scientific theory, it is more like an informal theory about the way things work. The three properties of this theory are as follows:

The theory must specify a set of entities or processes that are found in its domain of application and not in others (modularity).

• All aspects of a theory of mental states must be directly related to thinking.
• The theory must use causal principles that are likewise unique to the domain of mental states. This domain doesn’t need principles for how inanimate objects move. In comparison, a theory in the domain of physics does.
• The body of knowledge informing the theory must comprise a system of interrelated concepts and beliefs about mental states (as opposed to a collection of unrelated contents).

Question 44

Theory-theory

Answer 44

Theory-theorists surmise our knowledge about the mind as an everyday ‘framework’ or ‘foundational’ theory of how people think. While this everyday framework is not as rigorous as a scientific theory, it is more like an informal theory about the way things work. The three properties of this theory are as follows:

The theory must specify a set of entities or processes that are found in its domain of application and not in others (modularity).

• All aspects of a theory of mental states must be directly related to thinking.
• The theory must use causal principles that are likewise unique to the domain of mental states. This domain doesn’t need principles for how inanimate objects move. In comparison, a theory in the domain of physics does.
• The body of knowledge informing the theory must comprise a system of interrelated concepts and beliefs about mental states (as opposed to a collection of unrelated contents).

Question 45

Modularity theory

Answer 45

In contrast, modularity theory proposes that young children do not acquire a theory about mental states and mental representations at all. Instead, they acquire three domain-specific and modular mechanisms for dealing with agents, versus non-agent objects:

Theory of body mechanisms emerge in the first year. This allows babies to recognise that agents have an internal source of energy that allows them to move on their own.
Theory of mind mechanisms (I) begin to emerge late in the first year. This allows infants to construe people and other agents as part of the environment and as pursuing goals.
Theory of mind mechanisms (II) emerge in the second year. This allows children to represent agents as holding attitudes and propositions (e.g. pretending that, believing that).
The false-belief task is one way of observing when children acquire theory of mind mechanisms II—i.e. being able to understand that other people may have different perspectives and different beliefs (attitudes and propositions) than they do.

Question 46

Simulation theory

Answer 46

[Simulation theory] proposes that empathy is possible because when we see another person experiencing an emotion, we “simulate” or represent that same emotion in ourselves so we can know firsthand what it feels like.

When children become aware of their own mental states, they use this awareness to infer the mental states of other people (not inconsistent with theory-theory, but assuming that others think like they do). For example, ‘I don’t like this, therefore, if I thought like you, I would think you wouldn’t like it either’. It is similar to jumping into the mind of someone else and pretending to be them.

Question 47

Simulation theory

Answer 47

Mindreading is crucially important for our social life: our everyday ability to predict, explain, and/or coordinate with others’ actions relies on our ability to represent their mental states in our own mind.

Question 48

Theory theory

Answer 48

The idea that humans learn through a process of theory revision which closely resembles the way scientists propose and revise theories on the basis of data and experience accrued.

Question 49

Modularity

Answer 49

The idea that certain psychological processes—input systems, such as systems involved in perception and language—are self contained and are NOT interconnected, freely exchanging information.

Question 50

Theory of mind and false belief test

Answer 50

The experimenter then asks the child what another child would think is in the box. The false-belief task allows us to see whether the child understands that it is possible to believe something that is not true. As the child develops, they start to realise that there is a difference between a belief (mental state) and the actual state of the world—which is a necessary foundation of theory of mind.

Question 51

Difference between a three and five year old in test.

Answer 51

The Test demonstrates that younger children do not have the conception of mind. That is, they do not differentiate between the way things are represented in the world mentally and the way the world is. As children get older, they therefore develop this ability to imagine what other people are thinking.

Question 52

Cheater detection

Answer 52

Humans and other animals practise multiple forms of cooperation or ‘reciprocal altruism’ (e.g. ‘I help you and you help me’). Some of this may be hardwired as part of our evolutionary heritage. However, what happens if you are practising altruism but don’t want to reciprocate i.e. what happens if someone cheats? If we have genes that lead to altruistic behaviour, it may also be necessary to have mechanisms that would allow us to detect people that cheat.

Therefore, there is a relationship between the idea of altruism and cheater detection.

Question 53

Game theory and cheater detection

Answer 53

If the benefits of being altruistic outweigh the costs, then helping others helps ourselves. This is not just a human trait e.g. vampire bats live in large stable social groups and recognise each other. Each night, vampire bats must look for food as they die if they are not fed for sixty hours. The chances of actually finding food are highly variable, so to reduce this variance, bats who found food will regurgitate some for other bats who were unlucky. They thus cooperate with other bats. The best predictor of cooperation (sharing food with non-relatives) is whether two bats have previously shared food.

Game theory suggests that there must be some trade-off that allows groups of cooperators to recognise cheaters. Otherwise, the cooperators would in effect be subsidising cheaters at a cost to themselves, and then an invasion from cheaters would be too easy. Cheaters would succeed and cooperators would die out. However, if cooperators died out, cheaters would also struggle to survive due to the variable food resources. Game theory suggests that cooperation first is a good strategy. However, at the first subsequent encounter where reciprocation is appropriate, if reciprocation does not occur, an individual will be labelled as a cheater and be ostracised.

Question 54

The Wason test

Answer 54

Cheaters are people who break rules. These rules can be rules relating to specific domains (e.g. sport, or driving), or can be rules that operate as social contracts (e.g. rules governing etiquette, social interactions or financial obligations). Interpreting rules involves logical deduction and both observing rules and cheating involves a capacity for logical deduction.

The Wason test, devised by Peter Cathcart Wason (1966), tests deductive reasoning and logic.

Question 55

Wason Task findings might in fact hinge on t

Answer 55

The difference between mechanistic and mentalistic modes of cognition.

Question 56

Peter Wason originally designed the test

Deductive reasoning

Answer 56

To see if people applied logic that would disprove a hypothesis by falsifying it as well as by confirming it.

Question 57

Both Watson tests are logically exactly the same, but that in the second one, a “cheat-detection” mental module kicks in which helps people to get it right most of the time. Why?

Answer 57

They argue that the problem with enforcing the law about the drinking age is a “social contract” issue that mobilizes the cheat-detection module of the mind to get the answer right in the majority of cases. However, if cheat-detection is not involved, as it isn’t with the card-checking problem, most people get the answer wrong.

Question 58

The cheat-detection versus social-relevance interpretations can be reconciled as stressing different aspects of mentalistic cognition.

Answer 58

Detecting cheating is an obvious aspect of mentalism understood as interpersonal, psychological interaction, as indeed is putting things in their correct social context and judging their relevance accordingly.

Question 59

The original, purely abstract version of the Wason Selection Task, by contrast, epitomizes mechanistic cognition. Indeed, the latter is something you can imagine a computer being programmed to do very readily.

Answer 59

But serving drinks at a bar or assigning school children in the other two examples could not be entrusted to machines because both rely on good social skills, common-sense, and contextual understanding of people’s behavior: in a word, mentalism. And because people are people and not machines, the mentalistic versions of the Wason Task are easy, and the original, mechanistic version, hard.

Question 60

An obvious implication is that autistics — or at least high functioning ones —

Answer 60

Ought to do worse on the cheat-detection Wason Task than normal thanks to their symptomatic deficits in mentalism.

The researchers offer their own explanations, but my prediction is that if tested on the non-cheating, social relevance version of the Wason Task above, the autistics would do worse still. This is because autistics are good at rule-learning and rule-enforcement — often naively and very literally so, thanks to their mentalistic deficits and tendency to think mechanistically. This may explain their relative success with scenarios involving the detection of cheating, which is always a question of breaking a rule or acting unfairly in some way. Clearly, more research is needed, but it would help if researchers were aware that the Wason Task findings might in fact hinge on the difference between mechanistic and mentalistic modes of cognition.

Question 61

Matching bias

Answer 61

The tendency on the Wason selection task to select cards matching the items explicitly mentioned in the rule.

Question 62

The tendency on the Wason selection task to select cards matching the items explicitly mentioned in the rule.

Answer 62

A small percentage of individuals (mostly of high intelligence) use deductive reasoning and provide the correct answer on the standard Wason selection task. However, the great majority produce incorrect answers because they use simple strategies such as matching bias and/or because they do not understand fully what the task involves. Performance is substantially better with deontic rules than indicative ones because the former rules direct people’s attention to the importance of disproving the rule. Performance also improves if individuals are personally motivated to disprove the rule.