Naïve Theories of Biology, Physics, and Psychology in Children with ASD

Poulin‐Dubois, Diane; Dutemple, Elizabeth; Burnside, Kimberly

doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04813-9

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…That is, individuals can present with difficulty in one domain while their ability in the other domain remains intact. For example, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) score lower than typically developing children on tests of social cognition (Baron- Cohen et al, 1986), they tend to score similar to or higher than their peers on tests of physical reasoning (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001;Binnie & Williams, 2003;Poulin-Dubois et al, 2021). In one study, these two abilities were negatively correlated in children with ASD (Binnie & Williams, 2003), providing further support for their independence.…”

Section: Evidence From Clinical Psychology: Physical and Psychologica...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Naive psychology depends on naive physics

Liu,

Outa,

Akbiyik

2024

Preprint

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How do humans make sense of other people: entities who are simultaneously psychological beings and physical objects? Across the cognitive sciences, including psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience, scholars have puzzled over the origins and structure of our understanding of the physical world on the one hand, and the psychological world on the other. Each of these research areas has accumulated evidence that these two domains of thought are distinct and modular. We disagree. Starting in infancy, and indeed throughout our lives, our psychological reasoning (naive psychology) depends on inputs from physical reasoning (naive physics). In this paper, we first review evidence for the modularity hypothesis from developmental psychology, cross-cultural research, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology, and argue that this work provides evidence for domain-specificity (that naive psychology and physics are conceptually distinct) but not for modularity (that these two abilities are informationally encapsulated). To the contrary, we use evidence from each of these disciplines, and research from computational cognitive science, to argue that naive psychology and physics constitute parallel and integrated systems in human minds and brains. We end by laying out a research program to investigate this integration.

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