Online research in philosophy

Limitations of Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) theory are traced to the assumption that the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is true. D&P claim that 18-month-old children are capable of explicitly representing factuality, from which it follows (on D&P's theory) that they are capable of explicitly representing content, attitude, and self. D&P then attempt to explain 3-year-olds' failures on tests of voluntary control such as the dimensional change card sort by suggesting that at this age children cannot represent content and (...) attitude explicitly. We provide a better levels-of-consciousness account for age-related abulic dissociations between knowledge and action. (shrink)

Relational complexity provides a metric for measuring task demands, and in this respect has much in common with the cognitive complexity and control theory. However, relational complexity does not account for the relative difficulty of different relational types, and appears to underestimate the importance of changes in children's ability to act on the basis of their understanding.