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Two Systems for Mindreading?

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Abstract

A number of two-systems accounts have been proposed to explain the apparent discrepancy between infants’ early success in nonverbal mindreading tasks, on the one hand, and the failures of children younger than four to pass verbally-mediated false-belief tasks, on the other. Many of these accounts have not been empirically fruitful. This paper focuses, in contrast, on the two-systems proposal put forward by Ian Apperly and colleagues (Apperly & Butterfill, Psychological Review, 116, 953–970 2009; Apperly, 2011; Butterfill & Apperly, Mind & Language, 28, 606–637 2013). This has issued in a number of new findings (Apperly et al., Psychological Science, 17, 841–844 2006a; Back & Apperly, Cognition, 115, 54–70 2010; Qureshi et al., Cognition, 117, 230–236 2010; Samson et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1255–1266 2010; Schneider et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 433–438 2012a, Psychological Science, 23, 842–847 2012b, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 433–438 2014a, Psychological Science, 23, 842–847 2014b; Surtees & Apperly, Child Development. 83, 452–460 2012; Surtees et al., British Journal of Developmental Psychology 30, 75–86 2012, Cognition, 129, 426–438 2013; Low & Watts, Psychological Science, 24, 305–311 2013; Low et al., Child Development, 85, 1519–1534 2014). The present paper shows that the theoretical arguments offered in support of Apperly’s account are nevertheless unconvincing, and that the data can be explained in other terms. A better view is that there is just a single mindreading system that exists throughout, but which undergoes gradual conceptual enrichment through infancy and childhood. This system can be used in ways that do, or do not, draw on executive resources (including targeted searches of long-term memory) and/or working memory (such as visually rotating an image to figure out what someone else sees).

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Notes

  1. The dependence here is intended to be developmental, not constitutive, since severely aphasic people can have normal mindreading abilities (Apperly et al. 2006b).

  2. Note that these same three-year-olds fail verbal tests of their false-belief understanding.

  3. Note, too, that no such distinction applies in the case of the other early-developing system that Apperly and colleagues take as their model, namely the approximate number system. For the output of this system is available not only to inform children’s decisions about which of two bowls of treats they should choose, for example, but also enables them to say which bowl contains more.

  4. Baillargeon et al. (2010) actually describe their view as a two-systems account. They think that there are two early-developing mindreading systems, one of which develops slightly in advance of the other. The first handles attributions of goals, perceptual access, and knowledge or ignorance. The second deals with belief and false-belief, together with misleading appearances. But this is better characterized as a one-system view where the mindreading system is made up of distinct components. For there is no suggestion of radical conceptual change with further development in childhood, and the two components are not appealed to when explaining why three-year-olds fail verbal tasks. Nor is there any suggestion of distinct systems with very different processing profiles existing alongside one another in adulthood. I am myself quite happy to allow that the mindreading system might divide into a number of dissociable components. Note, however, that the evidence of false-belief understanding at 6 or 7 months of age (Kovács et al. 2010; Southgate and Vernetti 2014) suggests at least that all of the various components come online at about the same early age.

  5. Throughout I use small capitals to signify mental representations (as opposed to the contents of those representations). I assume that these representations are abstract and amodal in nature, and can be structured out of component concepts. But it is not presupposed that the resulting thoughts are language-like in nature (they might be map-like or diagram-like, for example). See Carruthers (2015b) for defense of these assumptions.

  6. Consistent with these suggestions, Saxe et al. (2009) find increasing response-selectivity with age in the right temporo-parietal junction, which is known to be a crucial component of the mindreading system in adults.

  7. Is it a problem for this account that there are wholly non-verbal false-belief tasks that even 4-year-olds will fail? I suggest not. Indeed, when one looks at the details of such tasks, the incremental-development account is, if anything, further supported. Thus in Call and Tomasello (1999) the children would have had to represent that the agent had some false belief without knowing what that belief was. This can’t be handled just by computing what someone believes and then failing to update when things change in their absence. On the contrary, it seems to require an explicit concept of false belief, as well as a capacity to quantify over false beliefs.

  8. Moll and Meltzoff (2011) provide a similar demonstration with three-year-old children.

  9. This is one of the places where philosophers, with their traditional focus on definitions and conceptual analysis, have had a bad influence on the rest of cognitive science.

  10. Note that this would require the infant system to be encapsulated from the rest of cognition, in such a way that new inferential liaisons cannot be added, just as Butterfill and Apperly (2013) claim.

  11. The proposals contained in this paragraph seem ripe for experimental testing. Note that they make minimal executive demands.

  12. Note that this perspective is really quite close to the “minimal mindreading” ideas of Butterfill and Apperly (2013), with the difference that they disallow any role for learning in the early-developing system, and with the difference that this system is stipulated to be incapable to tracking identities or quantified states of affairs. The former stipulation makes sense if the proposal is that the system should continue to exist unchanged into adulthood. But the latter is odd. If infants themselves can represent identity facts and quantified facts, why should they be prevented from attributing mental states to others that track such facts? If an infant is shown that all the balls in a box are red, for example, and can judge that they are, and then another agent is seen to look inside the box, why should the infant be incapable of judging, the agent registers: all the balls in the box are red? Of course it might be said that infants are incapable of thinking propositional thoughts at all. But this would be a bold claim. (Remember that propositions don’t need to have language-like structure. They just need to encode properties and relations among individuals or collections of individuals.) And it is one for which we have been offered no evidence.

  13. Note that one of the authors of this study is Lillard, who had previously (1998) suggested that false-belief reasoning is not a human universal.

  14. Perhaps Butterfill & Apperly believe that infants are incapable of thinking propositional thoughts at all. This would then explain why they think infants are incapable of attributing propositional thoughts to other people. But this would be tantamount to claiming that infants are incapable of thinking. For although thoughts can be described and individuated either extensionally or intensionally for various purposes, thoughts themselves are inherently aspectual (and hence propositional) in nature. Anything that an infant can think will represent some aspects of a state of affairs but not others.

  15. And just as this account predicts, if the delay between participants observing the belief-inducing event and the unexpected belief-probe is greatly reduced, people do not show any cost in reaction times or error rates (Cohen and German 2009). This is presumably because the belief-representation is still readily available, and does not need to be retrieved from long-term memory.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Suilin Lavelle, Evan Westra, and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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    Peter Carruthers

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Carruthers, P. Two Systems for Mindreading?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 141–162 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0259-y

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