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Origins of Mind

Knowledge of Mind

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

The challenge is to explain the emergence of awareness of others’ mental states; here we focus on awareness of others’ beliefs.

Slides

Notes

Our Question

How do humans first come to know facts about others’ mental states? How, for instance, do they come to know that Ayesha believes, falsely, that she and Beatrice will still be able to catch a bus home even if they delay leaving the party?

Mindreading

Mindreading is the process of identifying a mental state as a mental state that some particular individual, another or yourself, has. To say someone has a theory of mind is another way of saying that she is capable of mindreading.1

False Belief Tasks

Wimmer & Perner (1983) set out to determine when humans can know facts about others’ beliefs. They told children a story like this:

‘Maxi puts his chocolate in the BLUE box and leaves the room to play. While he is away (and cannot see), his mother moves the chocolate from the BLUE box to the GREEN box. Later Maxi returns. He wants his chocolate.’

They then asked the children, ‘Where will Maxi look for his chocolate?’

The core feature of a standard false belief task is this:

‘[t]he subject is aware that he/she and another person [Maxi] witness a certain state of affairs x. Then, in the absence of the other person the subject witnesses an unexpected change in the state of affairs from x to y’ (Wimmer & Perner, 1983, p. \ 106).

The task is designed to measure the subject’s sensitivity to the probability that Maxi will falsely believe x to obtain.

Models of Minds and Actions

A model is a way the world could logically be, or a set of ways the world could logically be.

We can contrast a fact model of minds and actions with a belief model.

On the fact model, it is facts about where things are which explain an agents’ actions.

On the belief model, it is an agents’ beliefs about where things are which explain her actions.

False belief tasks can be used to distinguish the hypothesis that a subject is using a fact model from the hypothesis that she is using a belief model of minds and actions.

Findings

Three-year-olds systematically fail to predict actions (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and desires (Astington & Gopnik, 1991) based on false beliefs; they similarly fail to retrodict beliefs (Wimmer & Mayringer, 1998) and to select arguments suitable for agents with false beliefs (Bartsch & London, 2000). They fail some low-verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks Call & Tomasello, 1999; Low, 2010; Krachun, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2009; Krachun, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2010; they fail whether the question concerns others’ or their own (past) false beliefs (Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991); and they fail whether they are interacting or observing (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989).

References

Astington, J., & Gopnik, A. (1991). Developing understanding of desire and intention. In A. Whiten (Ed.), Natural theories of the mind: Evolution, development and simulation of everyday mindreading (pp. 39–50). Oxford: Blackwell.
Bartsch, K., & London, K. (2000). Children’s use of mental state information in selecting persuasive arguments. Developmental Psychology, 36(3), 352–365.
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (1999). A nonverbal false belief task: The performance of children and great apes. Child Development, 70(2), 381–395.
Chandler, M., Fritz, A., & Hala, S. (1989). Small scale deceit: Deception as a marker of two-, three-, and four-year-olds’ early theories of mind. Child Development, 60, 1263–1277.
Gopnik, A., & Slaughter, V. (1991). Young children’s understanding of changes in their mental states. Child Development, 62, 98–110.
Krachun, C., Carpenter, C. M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2010). A new change-of-contents false belief test: Children and chimpanzees compared. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 23(2). Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/68c0p8dk
Krachun, C., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). A competitive nonverbal false belief task for children and apes. Developmental Science, 12(4), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00793.x
Low, J. (2010). Preschoolers’ implicit and explicit False‐Belief understanding: Relations with complex syntactical mastery. Child Development, 81(2), 597–615. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01418.x
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(04), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00076512
Wellman, H., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory of mind development: The truth about false-belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.
Wimmer, H., & Mayringer, H. (1998). False belief understanding in young children: Explanations do not develop before predictions. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22(2), 403–422.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.

  1. According to an influential definition offered by Premack & Woodruff (1978, p. 515), for an individual to have a theory of mind its for her to ‘impute mental states to himself and to others’ (my italics). I have slightly relaxed their definition by changing their ‘and’ to ‘or’ in order to allow for the possibility that there are mindreaders who can identify others’ but not their own mental states. ↩