Navigating beyond “here & now” affordances—on sensorimotor maturation and “false belief” performance

Abstract

How and when do we learn to understand other people's perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance.

Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents

“…Speaking of the new infant data more generally, Brincker (2014) offers an enactivistfriendly reading: "On a theoretical level such findings complicate our notion of social perception, as we see not only the actual behaviors of others, but their potential and afforded action targets, and how these relate to our own current action in overall shared affordance space. The key is that affordances alert to potential outcomes as they relate to actual objects and agents in the spatial environment" (p. 2).…”

Brain Dynamics and Plastic Deformation of Self Circuitries in the Dementia Patient

“…Current evidence, for example, indicates that the self is associated with the whole of the individual, that is, it is a totality whose origin and association is linked to the entire corpus, and not restricted to an isolated domain of representation lying within the brain [7], one that is the product of the progressive integration of regionally distributed, somatotopic afferent input. Significantly, this perceptual image appears to be invested with protagonist features and to assist in the construction of an intentional image used for counterfactual affordances [8]; in other words, this 3-D body image of the self enables the individual to 'situate and to conceive of himself' in different goal-directed planning trajectories.…”

“…This is also to imply that the sense of self in a minimal sense is a persistent process that provides the stable ground for decisional performance. That is, we consciously select among a range of potential acts suited to achieving a particular interactive goal [8] that must be understood to be the consequence of self made motions, in order to distinguish them from a sea of surrounding and non-cohering imagery. Here the infant perseveration results are again useful for understanding the need for a coherent image that can be directed to perform various motions.…”

Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking

“…(3) The present affordance space: The notion of a 'here and now' affordance space is not meant to be limited to our current perception-i.e. the door as I am looking at it or pen as I am holding it ( Brincker, 2014). Rather, it is crucial that we track affordances beyond current modality--dependent perceptions-but as still present and available in relation to some of our affordance trackings and movement potentials.…”