scholarly journals Theory of Mind, Aesthetic Judgment and Child Development Issues: A Narrative Review / Théorie de l’esprit, jugement esthétique et enjeux du développement de l’enfant : un compte rendu narratif

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Pedro Mendonça ◽  
Alain Savoie ◽  
Anne-Marie Émond
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Art Appreciation ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
Développement De L’Enfant ◽  
Theorie De L'esprit

Abstract: The Theory of Mind (ToM) is an empathy related concept that refers to the ability of attributing mental states to oneself and to others. ToM is present throughout the process of aesthetic judgment and essential for an aesthetic experience to happen. We present a narrative overview of four influential studies that propose a developmental model of aesthetic judgment in children and we discuss their inherent relationship with ToM. We argue that ToM permeates the four suggested models, although not expressly mentioned in them, and conclude that ToM cannot be separated from the aesthetic experience in the context of child development.Keywords: Art Appreciation; Aesthetic Experience; Aesthetic Judgment; Child Development; Empathy; Imagination; Shared meaning; Theory of Mind (ToM). Résumé : La théorie de l’esprit désigne un concept lié à l’empathie, qui relève de la capacité d’attribuer des états mentaux, à soi-même et à autrui. La théorie de l’esprit est inhérente au processus de jugement esthétique et indispensable au vécu de l’expérience esthétique. Nous proposons ici un compte rendu narratif de quatre études déterminantes qui introduisent un modèle développemental du jugement esthétique chez l’enfant et analysons sa relation étroite avec la théorie de l’esprit. Nous affirmons que la théorie de l’esprit imprègne les quatre modèles suggérés, bien qu’elle n’y soit pas exprimée directement, et qu’elle ne peut donc être dissociée de l’expérience esthétique au niveau du développement de l’enfant.Mots-clés : connaissance des arts ; expérience esthétique ; jugement esthétique ; développement de l’enfant ; empathie ; imagination ; sens commun ; théorie de l’esprit.

scholarly journals Theory of Mind in Pre-school Aged Children: Influence of Maternal Depression and Infants’ Self-Comforting Behavior

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Nonnenmacher ◽  
Mitho Müller ◽  
Joana Taczkowski ◽  
Anna-Lena Zietlow ◽  
Beate Sodian ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Maternal Depression ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Sensitive Period ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Affective States ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Dsm Iv

A milestone of child development is theory of mind (ToM): the ability to attribute mental states, especially beliefs and desires, to other persons and to understand that their behavior is guided by mental states. The learning process about the mental world also takes place in social communication and interaction, beginning in infancy. Infancy is assumed to be a sensitive period for the development of social skills through interaction. Due to limited self-regulatory skills, infants depend on sensitive behavior of their caregivers to regulate affective states and physiological arousal, and in turn, mutually regulated affects allow the infant to gradually acquire the capability to self-regulate negative affective states. Effective and adequate affect regulation is an important prerequisite for environmental interaction and thus for the development of socio-emotional skills. The present study investigated the relation of self-regulatory abilities in infancy and later ToM in pre-school aged children of clinically depressed mothers and healthy controls. The sample comprised of N = 55 mother–child dyads, n = 22 diagnosed with postpartum or lifetime depression according to DSM-IV and n = 33 healthy controls. Mother–infant-interaction was videotaped during the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm. At 3 and 42 months postpartum mothers were interviewed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I) to evaluate maternal psychopathological status according to DSM-IV. At the age of M = 4.0 years, children’s ToM abilities were assessed using content-false-belief and location-false-belief tasks. The results of this study show that contrary to our hypotheses, maternal depression did not impair the development of children’s ToM-abilities per se. Rather, an interaction effect highlights the role of infant’s self-comforting behavior during mother–infant interaction in infancy (3 months postpartum) for ToM-development at pre-school age assessed with the Maxi-task; this association was distinct for female in comparison to male children. The results of this longitudinal study shed light on the discussion, how maternal depression influences child development and point in the direction that self-comforting behaviors in infancy can also be seen as a resource.

Sources of cognitive conflict and their relevance to Theory of Mind proficiency in healthy ageing. A preregistered study.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Foyzul Rahman ◽  
Sabrina Javed ◽  
Ian Apperly ◽  
Peter Hansen ◽  
Carol Holland ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Spatial Working Memory ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Response Speed ◽  
Cognitive Conflict ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Outcome Knowledge

Age-related decline in Theory of Mind (ToM) may be due to waning executive control, which is necessary for resolving conflict when reasoning about others’ mental states. We assessed how older (OA; n=50) versus younger adults (YA; n=50) were affected by three theoretically relevant sources of conflict within ToM: competing Self-Other perspectives; competing cued locations and outcome knowledge. We examined which best accounted for age-related difficulty with ToM. Our data show unexpected similarity between age groups when representing a belief incongruent with one’s own. Individual differences in attention and motor response speed best explained the degree of conflict experienced through conflicting Self-Other perspectives. However, OAs were disproportionately affected by managing conflict between cued locations. Age and spatial working memory were most relevant for predicting the magnitude of conflict elicited by conflicting cued locations. We suggest that previous studies may have underestimated OA’s ToM proficiency by including unnecessary conflict in ToM tasks.

DISCOURSE ON FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE: A THEORY OF MIND PERSPECTIVE

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Elena Botts
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Mind Theory ◽  
Improve Analysis ◽  
Epistemic Process

This article aims at explicating that can we usefully talk about a failure of intelligence and deliberating the perspective of mind theory into it. Failures of intelligence are useful insofar as they can be evaluated so as to improve analysis. In this process, it is important that one considers the psychological processes that underpin analytical failures. It is especially important to consider how failures of intelligence are governed by an insufficient ability to understand the perspectives of others. This ability to determine others mental states is known as the theory of mind. This paper further argues that discourse on the failure of intelligence is increased because of a flaw in the epistemic process among intelligence operators and consumers.

Thinking about Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Semantic Description ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things like unicorns. The explanation centers on display theory, a theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Display theory explains away these seeming anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking. The book describes how concepts can be learned, originated, and given a systematic semantic description, independently of whether there exist things to which they refer. There being no things we are thinking about does not mean that we are not thinking about things.

Do people with schizophrenia display theory of mind deficits in clinical interactions?

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. McCABE ◽  
I. LEUDAR ◽  
C. ANTAKI
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental Health Professionals ◽  
Negative Symptoms ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Chronic Schizophrenia ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Behaviour Therapy ◽  
Cognitive Behaviour ◽  
Clinical Interactions ◽  
Therapy Sessions

Background. Having a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) means that one appreciates one's own and others' mental states, and that this appreciation guides interactions with others. It has been proposed that ToM is impaired in schizophrenia and experimental studies show that patients with schizophrenia have problems with ToM, particularly during acute episodes. The model predicts that communicative problems will result from ToM deficits.Method. We analysed 35 encounters (>80 h of recordings) between mental health professionals and people with chronic schizophrenia (out-patient consultations and cognitive behaviour therapy sessions) using conversation analysis in order to identify how the participants used or failed to use ToM relevant skills in social interaction.Results. Schizophrenics with ongoing positive and negative symptoms appropriately reported first and second order mental states of others and designed their contributions to conversations on the basis of what they thought their communicative partners knew and intended. Patients recognized that others do not share their delusions and attempted to reconcile others' beliefs with their own but problems arose when they try to warrant their delusional claims. They did not make the justification for their claim understandable for their interlocutor. Nevertheless, they did not fail to recognize that the justification for their claim is unconvincing. However, the ensuing disagreement did not lead them to modify their beliefs.Conclusions. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated intact ToM skills in conversational interactions. Psychotic beliefs persisted despite the realization they are not shared but not because patients cannot reflect on them and compare them with what others believe.

Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology

1980 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Fodor
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Computational Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Computational Theory ◽  
Methodological Solipsism ◽  
Semantic Properties

AbstractThe paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes to itself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful.

Did a Little Birdie Really Tell Odin? Applying Theory of Mind to Old Norse Religion

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 280-308
Author(s):  
Declan Taggart
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
Religious Theory ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Theory of mind, the theory that humans attribute mental states to others, has become increasingly influential in the Cognitive Science of Religion in recent years, due to several papers which posit that supernatural agents, like gods, demons, and the dead, are accredited greater than normal knowledge and awareness. Using Old Norse mythology and literary accounts of Old Norse religion, supported by archaeological evidence, I examine the extent to which this modern perspective on religious theory of mind is reflected in religious traditions from the Viking Age. I focus especially on the extent to which superperception and superknowledge were attributed to Old Norse supernatural agents and the impact of this on expressions of religion; how the attribution of theory of mind varied with circumstances and the agents to which it was being attributed; and the extent to which features of religious theory of mind common in other societies were present in the historical North. On this basis, I also evaluate the usefulness of Old Norse historiography to Cognitive Science of Religion and vice versa.

scholarly journals The Interaction Between Caudate Nucleus and Regions Within the Theory of Mind Network as a Neural Basis for Social Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Votinov ◽  
Artem Myznikov ◽  
Maya Zheltyakova ◽  
Ruslan Masharipov ◽  
Alexander Korotkov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Caudate Nucleus ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Functional Integration ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Caudate Nuclei ◽  
Structural Peculiarity ◽  
The Right

The organization of socio-cognitive processes is a multifaceted problem for which many sophisticated concepts have been proposed. One of these concepts is social intelligence (SI), i.e., the set of abilities that allow successful interaction with other people. The theory of mind (ToM) human brain network is a good candidate for the neural substrate underlying SI since it is involved in inferring the mental states of others and ourselves and predicting or explaining others’ actions. However, the relationship of ToM to SI remains poorly explored. Our recent research revealed an association between the gray matter volume of the caudate nucleus and the degree of SI as measured by the Guilford-Sullivan test. It led us to question whether this structural peculiarity is reflected in changes to the integration of the caudate with other areas of the brain associated with socio-cognitive processes, including the ToM system. We conducted seed-based functional connectivity (FC) analysis of resting-state fMRI data for 42 subjects with the caudate as a region of interest. We found that the scores of the Guilford-Sullivan test were positively correlated with the FC between seeds in the right caudate head and two clusters located within the right superior temporal gyrus and bilateral precuneus. Both regions are known to be nodes of the ToM network. Thus, the current study demonstrates that the SI level is associated with the degree of functional integration between the ToM network and the caudate nuclei.

scholarly journals Representation, Control, or Reasoning? Distinct Functions for Theory of Mind within the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte E. Hartwright ◽  
Ian A. Apperly ◽  
Peter C. Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Medial Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cortical Region ◽  
Behavioral Task ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
Different Parts

The medial pFC (mPFC) is frequently reported to play a central role in Theory of Mind (ToM). However, the contribution of this large cortical region in ToM is not well understood. Combining a novel behavioral task with fMRI, we sought to demonstrate functional divisions between dorsal and rostral mPFC. All conditions of the task required the representation of mental states (beliefs and desires). The level of demands on cognitive control (high vs. low) and the nature of the demands on reasoning (deductive vs. abductive) were varied orthogonally between conditions. Activation in dorsal mPFC was modulated by the need for control, whereas rostral mPFC was modulated by reasoning demands. These findings fit with previously suggested domain-general functions for different parts of mPFC and suggest that these functions are recruited selectively in the service of ToM.

Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience, Music and Digitization

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
The Aesthetic

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.

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