Action Understanding in Infancy: Do Infant Interpreters Attribute Enduring Mental States or Track Relational Properties of Transient Bouts of Behavior?

Fenici, Marco; Zawidzki, Tadeusz Wiesław

doi:10.12697/spe.2016.9.1.10

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Rather, it appears that infants are using an automatic, inflexible cognitive system such that they attribute beliefs implicitly (if they do) broadly to all agents as well as across agents. Nevertheless, the present findings could also be in line with Fenici and Zawidzki's (2016) interpretation of infants' responses on implicit false belief tasks which is an elaboration of Butterfill and Apperly's (2013) minimalistic theory. Specifically, they argue that the infants do not recognize "enduring mental states, " which would be bound to an individual.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

2020

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It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent – they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants’ implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

2020

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“…Equifinality then served as a means by which infants could "see" goal-directness without attributing a mental goal. Other theoretical possibilities for how to perceive goal-directedness without mental-state attribution have also been offered (Byrne, 1999;Carpendale & Lewis, 2015;Dimitrova & Moro, 2013;Fenici & Zawidzki, 2016;Gallagher & Povinelli, 2012;Marken, 2002;Raczaszek-Leonardi et al, 2013).…”

Section: Equifinalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent Constructivism: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

Allen¹,

Bickhard²

2022

Human Development

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Nativist and empiricist approaches require foundationalism because they cannot account for the emergence of representation. Foundationalism is the assumption of an innate representational base. In turn, foundationalism places limits on the nature of learning as a constructivist process. In contrast, action-based approaches can account for the emergence of representation through (inter)action. In so doing, action-based approaches can pursue an emergent constructivism for learning and development. Despite the theoretical symmetry between nativism and empiricism with respect to foundationalism, there is an asymmetry in nativist and empiricist research programs. Nativism generally ignores constructivist complexity with rich interpretations that non-nativist approaches assume needs to be investigated empirically. Importantly, the problem of a priori assumptions driving rich interpretations is not specific to nativism or looking methodologies. Mindreading as a research program also engages in rich interpretations for studies that concern social-cognition from infancy through preschool. To the extent that empiricist research programs incorporate constructivist thinking into research, they converge with action-based approaches. This creates a sort of methodological bridge between lean-empiricist research programs and action-based approaches. However, this bridge has limitations that we illustrate through an example concerning maternal mental-state discourse and theory of mind development.

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“…Research on the early development of knowledge of other minds (e.g., Onishi and Baillargeon 2005;Scott and Baillargeon 2009) indicate that pre-verbal children know about the mental states of others (for overview and criticism, see Fenici and Zawidzki 2016;Zawidzki 2011). Pre-verbal children clearly don't master the attributional use of possessive and prepositional locutions, not to mention their use in the context of mental state attributions.…”

Section: Interpreting Verbal-and Pre-verbal False Belief-testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing Other Minds: A Scorekeeping Model

Presti

2022

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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The prepositional ‘in’ and possessive pronouns, e.g., ‘my’ and ‘mine,’ in the context of attributions of mental states, such as “in my mind” or “in your mind,” threaten to confuse attempts to account for knowledge of other minds. This paper distinguishes proper from improper uses of such expressions. I will argue that proper use of the prepositional ‘in’ and possessive pronouns in the context of mental state attributions presupposes capacities to properly track and attribute what are really, in a sense to be specified, intersubjectively articulated and inferentially interrelated normative statuses. What we call “mental states” or “minds,” in as far as primarily cognitive states such as beliefs are concerned, are intersubjectively constituted. As opposed to being inner and private, something we must learn to intersubjectively discover, minds and mental states are intersubjectively articulated and we learn to attribute them as inner and private. A scorekeeping-model is used to illustrate how the privacy of mind presupposes intersubjectivity. Using that model, I argue that the traditional problem of knowing other minds can be re-framed as a problem of learning how to pursue intersubjective practices of acknowledging, attributing and undertaking mental states.

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Action Understanding in Infancy: Do Infant Interpreters Attribute Enduring Mental States or Track Relational Properties of Transient Bouts of Behavior?

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

Infants Generalize Beliefs Across Individuals

Emergent Constructivism: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

Knowing Other Minds: A Scorekeeping Model

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