Theroy of Mind in Non-Verbal Apes: conceptual issues and the critical experiments

2001 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 199-223
Author(s):  
Andrew Whiten
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
States Of Mind

It is now over twenty years since Premack and Woodruff (1978) posed the question, ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’—‘by which we meant’, explained Premack (1988) in a later reappraisal, ‘does the ape do what humans do: attribute states of mind to the other one, and use these states to predict and explain the behaviour of the other one? For example, does the ape wonder, while looking quizzically at another individual, What does he reallywant?What does hebelieve?What are hisintentions?'

Monolingual and bilingual children’s understanding of Moore-paradox sentences

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-155
Author(s):  
Krisztina Bartha ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
Experimental Findings

Research of the theory of mind (ToM) has long been a central topic in cognitive science and experimental philosophy. A preliminary example of a Moore-paradox sentence would be: It is raining, but I don’t think it is. Understanding the paradoxes in these sentences is considered part of ToM development. This study focuses on the recognition of Moore’s paradoxical sentences by monolingual and bilingual children. According to the first hypothesis, comprehension of Moore-paradoxical sentences is estimated to start at the age of 7. The second hypothesis assumes that balanced bilingual children develop the ability to understand Moore-paradoxical sentences earlier than Hungarian dominant bilinguals, and balanced bilinguals also outperform their monolingual peers. Romanian monolingual and Hungarian-Romanian bilingual children aged between 5 and 8 (N = 134) participated in the experiment. Balanced and dominant bilingual groups were established based on a questionnaire filled in by the children’s parents. During the experiment, children had to listen to a number of sentences. Each sentence that contained paradoxical statements had control sentences matching syntactically. Children had to choose the sentences they thought to be “silly”. According to the experimental findings, 5- and 6-year-old children performed poorly while the overwhelming majority of 7- and 8-year-olds could select the Moore-paradoxical sentences. There were differences between the performance of monolingual and balanced bilingual groups and between the two bilingual groups. Balanced bilinguals performed better, and their comprehension of understanding Moorean sentences developed earlier than those of the other groups.

Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Winfried Nöth
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Other ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

Abstract The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: (1) primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, (2) altersense (consciousness of the other), and (3) medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis.

scholarly journals Cooperation between Emotional Players

Games ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Lina Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Repeated Games ◽  
Stochastic Games ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Finitely Repeated Games ◽  
Prisoners Dilemma ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Infinitely Repeated Games

This paper uses the framework of stochastic games to propose a model of emotions in repeated interactions. An emotional player can be in either a friendly, a neutral, or a hostile state of mind. The player transitions between the states of mind as a response to observed actions taken by the other player. The state of mind determines the player’s psychological payoff which together with a material payoff constitutes the player’s utility. In the friendly (hostile) state of mind the player has a positive (negative) concern for other players’ material payoffs. This paper shows how emotions can both facilitate and obstruct cooperation in a repeated prisoners’ dilemma game. In finitely repeated games a player who cares only for their own material payoffs can have an incentive to manipulate an emotional player into the friendly state of mind. In infinitely repeated games with two emotional players less patience is required to sustain cooperation. However, emotions can also obstruct cooperation if they make the players unwilling to punish each other, or if the players become hostile when punished.

A PERCEPTUALLY-BASED THEORY OF MIND FOR AGENT INTERACTION INITIATION

2006 ◽  
Vol 03 (03) ◽  
pp. 321-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER PETERS
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Synthetic Vision ◽  
Agent Interaction ◽  
Mind Theory ◽  
Important Idea ◽  
Interaction Behaviors

We endow agents with the capability to open interactions based on their perception of the gaze and direction of attention of others in a virtual environment. The capability is geared towards the earliest part of interaction initiation, where agents may be at some distance from each other and may not initially have knowledge of each other's presence. An important idea in our work is that the start of interaction be initiated in a graceful manner involving exchanges of subtle cues before overt interaction commitments are made. Synthetic vision, attention and memory are used to implement the perceptually-based agent theory of mind. Theory of Mind is used to infer information about the intention of the other to interact based on their eye, head and body directions, locomotion and greeting gestures. An agent's interaction behavior is therefore driven not only by its interaction goal, but also by its theory of the goal of the other based on perception. We have implemented this system and used it to automate and evaluate social interaction behaviors between humans and agents in a virtual environment.

scholarly journals Performing Arts And Limitation As A Motive

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Ion Mircioagă
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Formal Treatment ◽  
Total Absence ◽  
National Theater ◽  
The One ◽  
2D Images

AbstractTwo categories of limitations are identified in the performing arts: physical, on the one hand, and those related to the intellectual and emotional predispositions of artists, on the other. Physical boundaries, in turn, are divided into material barriers - for example, the type of performing space and its dimensions - and the constraints generated by the anatomy and morphology of each artist. The experience had at the Vasile Alecsandri National Theater, in Iaşi, is evoked, while insisting on the importance of the actors’ abilities to go through the different states of mind that accompany various ages of man. The discussion of limitations involves the discussion of the new. The contribution of new stage technologies to the evolution of theater is recorded. It is briefly described, in context, the experience facilitated by the show Planet of Lost Dreams, in order to advocate for the avoidance of the unwarranted use of means such as video projections, the Internet, etc. The challenges posed by the mix of 3D and 2D images are noted. The view is advanced that the total absence of limitations, as well as their formal treatment can block the development of the theater.

scholarly journals Methods of Assessing the Mental State of the Others by the Expression of the Eyes of Adolescents in Health and Schizophrenia

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.E. Rumyantseva ◽  
T.N. Samarina
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Significant Relationship ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
Previous Episode ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Icd 10

We describe a study involving 72 mentally healthy adolescents (13-17 years), 24 young men (15 ± 1,4 years), 48 women (15 ± 1,4 years) and 8 children (13-18 years), 6 boys (15 ± 1,9 years) and 2 women (16 ± 2,1 years) who had undergone previous episode of schizophrenia (F 20, ICD-10) and at the time of the survey being in remission. We tested the hypotheses about differences in the development of the theory of mind in different groups of adolescents. The study was conducted using test of "Reading the mental state of the other by his gaze" and a test of social intelligence by Gilford and Sullivan. It was found that the healthy adolescents build better mental models of the other person than adolescents with schizophrenia (U = 102, p≤0,05). In the group of mentally healthy women, we found a statistically significant relationship between the understanding of mind by the gaze and social intelligence (r = 0,6; p = 0.01). The used test proved to be a representative tool for the study of mind in different groups of adolescents.

scholarly journals Functional organization of the temporal-parietal junction for theory of mind in preverbal infants: A near-infrared spectroscopy study

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Hyde ◽  
Charline E. Simon ◽  
Julia Nikolaeva ◽  
Fransisca Ting
Keyword(s):  
Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Functional Organization ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
The Other ◽  
Brain Response ◽  
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy

Successful human social life requires imagining what others believe or think to understand and predict behavior. This ability, often referred to as theory of mind, reliably engages a specialized network of temporal and prefrontal brain regions in older children and adults, including selective recruitment of temporal-parietal junction (TPJ). To date, how and when this specialized brain organization for ToM arises is unknown due to limitations in functional neuroimaging at younger ages. Here we employed the emerging technique of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure the functional brain response across the parietal, temporal, and prefrontal regions in 7-month old male and female infants as they viewed different video scenarios of a person searching for a hidden object. Over different conditions, we manipulated whether the person held an accurate (true) or inaccurate (false) belief about the location of the hidden object in the videos. In two separate experiments, we observed that the TPJ, but not other temporal and prefrontal regions, spontaneously tracked with the beliefs of the other person, responding more during scenarios when the other person’s belief regarding the location of the object was false compared to scenarios when her belief was true. These results mirror those obtained with adults to show that the TPJ already shows some functional organization relevant to high-level social cognition by around 7-months. Furthermore, these results suggest that infants may draw on similar core mechanisms to implicitly track beliefs as adults do when explicitly reasoning about them.

scholarly journals Theory of mind and thinking development of preschool children

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-80
Author(s):  
P.N. Ermakov ◽  
E.V. Vorobyeva ◽  
I.A. Kaidanovskaya ◽  
E.O. Strelnikova
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
The Other ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
High Degree

The paper is devoted to a comparative study of psychodiagnostic formation of theory of mind (using task of understanding false beliefs of other people) and the level of thought development of preschool children by Piaget. The study involved 56 children aged 3 to 5.5 years (27 boys and 29 girls). We used technique for the diagnosis of formation of theory of mind, and to assess the development of thinking in children. As a result, it was found that indicators of formation of theory of mind and indicators of development thinking by Piaget in the high degree of consistency. Children who understand the presence of the other person false beliefs, are also able to anticipate the results of the substantive action, to understand the laws of conservation of matter and are capable of thinking decentration.

scholarly journals Developmental evidence for enhanced theory of mind for competitive versus cooperative contexts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Tsoi ◽  
Kiley Hamlin ◽  
Adam Waytz ◽  
Andrew Scott Baron ◽  
Liane Young
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

There is a debate regarding the function of theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to infer, attribute, and reason about mental states. On the one hand are evolutionary and psychological work suggesting that ToM is greater for competition than cooperation. On the other hand are findings and theories promoting greater ToM for cooperation than competition. We investigate the question of whether ToM is greater for competition than cooperation or vice versa by examining the period of development during which explicit ToM comes online. In two studies, we examined preschool children’s abilities to explicitly express an understanding of false beliefs—a key marker of ToM—and ability to apply that understanding in first-person social interactions in competitive and cooperative contexts. Our findings reveal that preschool children are better at understanding false beliefs and applying that understanding in competitive contexts than in cooperative contexts.

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