False Belief Test

La ricerca empirica nelle scienze cognitive può essere di supporto all’indagine filosofica sullo statuto ontologico e epistemologico dei concetti mentali, ed in particolare del concetto di credenza. Da oltre trent’anni gli psicologi utilizzano il test della falsa credenza per valutare la capacità dei bambini di attribuire stati mentali a se stessi e a agli altri. Tuttavia non è stato ancora pienamente compreso né quali requisiti cognitivi siano necessari per passare il test né quale sia il loro sviluppo. In questo articolo analizzo l’impatto della funzione esecutiva e delle abilità linguistiche per la capacità di passare il test della falsa credenza. Suggerisco che tale abilità dipende dall’acquisizione di un nuovo formato rappresentazionale per codificare la falsità degli stati mentali altrui. I dati in nostro possesso non permettono tuttavia di precisare la natura di tale formato.

Embodiment and embeddedness define an attractive framework to the study of cognition. I discuss whether theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others to predict and explain their behaviour, fits these two principles. In agreement with available evidence, embodied cognitive processes may underlie the earliest manifestations of social cognitive abilities such as infants’ selective behaviour in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. Instead, late theory-of-mind abilities, such as the capacity to pass the (elicited-response) false belief test at age four, depend on children’s ability to explain people’s reasons to act in conversation with adults. Accordingly, rather than embodied, late theory-of-mind abilities are embedded in an external linguistic practice.

According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour, and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance in spontaneous-response false belief tasks without the need to assume the existence of a cognitive module specific for mental state attribution. My proposal suggests a plausible explanatory strategy for the problem of the representational format of the information processed in spontaneous-response false belief tasks.

According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children’s acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and even the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged mindreading abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children’s success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others’ beliefs across contexts.

I discuss three arguments that have been advanced in support of the epistemic mentalist view, i.e., the view that infants’ social cognitive abilities (SCAs) manifest a capacity to attribute beliefs. The argument from implicitness holds that SCAs already reflect the possession of an “implicit” and “rudimentary” capacity to attribute representational states. Against it, I note that SCAs are significantly limited, and have likely evolved to respond to contextual information in situated interaction with others. I challenge the argument from parsimony by claiming that parsimony per se favours neither a mentalist nor a behaviour-reading account. Finally, I argue that early SCAs do not develop continuously into four-year-olds’ belief attribution abilities. Accordingly, the argument from developmental continuity is empirically inadequate. Careful analysis of both the empirical data and the theoretical assumptions leading to the epistemic mentalist view is needed in order to improve our understanding of SCAs in early infancy.

For almost forty years psychologists and philosophers have been devising experiments and testing chimpanzees on the question first asked by Premack and Woodruff in 1978: " Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? " With this question, they meant to ask whether chimpanzees do what they assumed we do, namely attribute beliefs and desires in order to predict behavior. This capacity is known as mindreading or theory of mind. After thirty years of chimpanzees failing all the tests we put to them, some researchers concluded that chimpanzees probably don't reason about belief (Call and Tomasello 2008). 1 Ten years later, those same researchers were part of a team that reversed course: " our results, in concert with existing data, suggest that apes solved the task by ascribing a false belief to the actor, challenging the view that the ability to attribute reality-incongruent mental states is specific to humans " (Krupenye et al. 2016). 2 The claim that passing the false belief task is evidence of false belief ascription is one that requires critical scrutiny. For one, there is no consensus on what is involved in ascribing belief, given the lack of agreement regarding the nature of belief. And, given that we don't directly observe anyone ascribing belief, but infer it from behavior, we must consider alternative explanations for the behavior. However, the typical alternative explanations considered are all of the variety that apes are not mentalists. There is good reason to think that apes are mentalists who see other apes and other animals as intentional agents. Nonetheless, they may not be 1 At the end of their review of the status of chimpanzee theory of mind research program after 30 years of research, Call and Tomasello wrote, " chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology in which they appreciate that others have mental representations of the world that drive their actions even when those do not correspond to reality. And so in a more narrow definition of theory of mind as an understanding of false beliefs, the answer to Premack and Woodruff's question might be no, they do not. Why chimpanzees do not seem to understand false beliefs in particular – or if there might be some situations in which they do understand false beliefs – are topics of ongoing research " (Call and Tomasello 2008: 191). 2 An important lesson to be taken away from the 40 years of testing chimpanzees on false belief tracking is that we need to be very cautious making claims of inability; not finding evidence of a capacity in an experimental setting can say more about the researchers than the chimpanzees. It took people who understand the chimpanzee's point of view-who think like a chimpanzee-to create materials that would interest a chimpanzee. The development of eye-tracking technology was also crucial.

This paper addresses a challenge proposed against non-mindreading explanations of infant spontaneous-response task data. The challenge is a foundational assumption of mindreading explanations best summed up by Carruthers' (2013; 2015) claim that only by appealing to a theory of mind is it possible to explain infant responses in spontaneous-response false-belief tasks when there are no one-to-one correspondences between observable behavior and mental states. Heyes (2014a; 2014b) responds to this challenge arguing discrete stimuli is informationally wealthy, and interprets the spontaneous-response results in terms of low-level perceptual novelty. However, Scott and Baillargeon (2009; 2014) challenge Heyes' explanation on the grounds that her account of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks cannot also explain spontaneous-response ignorance tasks. In response to this, an enactive, ecological goal-tracking explanation of spontaneous-response tasks is presented, and argued to be superior to both mindreading explanations and Heyes' account. This is done by recasting perception and anticipation and appealing to the central role social normativity plays in constraining social cognition. Finally, it is argued the cognitivist framework that both Heyes and mindreading proponents appeal to, begs the question in favor of the indispensability of mental representations for explaining perception and anticipation.

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naïvely the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with (elicited-response) false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail (elicited-response) false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s (verbally ascribed) mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state.

The age at which children acquire the concept of belief is a subject of debate. Many scholars claim that children master beliefs when they are able to pass the false belief test, around their fourth year of life. However, recent experiments show that children implicitly attribute beliefs even earlier. The dispute does not only concern the empirical issue of discovering children’s early cognitive abilities. It also depends on the kind of capacities that we associate to the very concept. I claim that concept possession must be understood in terms of the gradual development of the abilities that underlie the concept in question. I also claim that the last step to possess the concept of belief requires children to understand how beliefs and desires are used in everyday explanations of people’s actions. Thus, I suggest that understanding folk psychology as an explanatory theory is what children lack when they fail the false belief test.

In this paper, I comment on Shaun Gallagher's "The problem with 3-year-olds", where he gives his enactive interpretation of the latest developments of research on children's understanding of other minds through false belief tests. I argue that Gallagher's take has several advantages: it can offer an explanation of other controversial issues in developmental psychology, such as early deception, but more importantly it offers a better picture of development, it offers ample room for emotion to be included as a key factor underlying social cognition, and it offers a picture of the mind that is not plagued by the threat of solipsism and scepticism about other minds.

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's (2013) "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, (mis- or un-) informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this i...

DANIEL CLEMENT DENNETT (1942, Boston, MA) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research work mostly concerns the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology. He has been one of W. V. O. Quine’s students at Harvard University, where he graduated in philosophy in 1963. In 1965, he achieved his Ph.D in philosophy at the University of Oxford under Gilbert Ryle’s supervision. In his academic career, he has taught at the universities of Irvine, Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Since 1971, he is professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where he co-directs with Ray Jackendoff the Center for Cognitive Studies. Among his books, Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms (1978), The Mind's I (with D. R. Hofstadter, 1981), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), Brainchildren (1998), Freedom Evol...

Theory of Mind is an inferential system central to human–human communication by which people ascribe mental states to
self and other, and then use those deductions to make predictions about others’ behaviors. Despite the likelihood that ToM
may also be central to interactions with other types of agents exhibiting similar cues, it is not yet fully known whether humans
develop ToM for mechanical agents exhibiting properties of intelligence and sociality. A suite of five tests for implicit ToM
were performed (white lie test, behavioral intention task, facial affect inference, vocal affect inference, and false-belief test)
for three different robots and a human control. Findings suggest that implicit ToM signals are consistent across variably
human-like robots and humans, so long as the social cues are similar and interpretable, but there is no association between
implicit ToM signals and explicit mind ascription; findings suggest that heuristics and deliberation of mental status of robots
may compete with implicit social-cognitive reactions.

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as they relate to 1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to 2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of ‘sensorimotor priors’, i.e. statistical expectations of own kinestetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance.

"Empirical research showing that infants’ are sensitive to others’ false beliefs in their second year of life (Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010; Luo, 2011) has recently questioned the traditional assumption that children acquire the concept of belief around age four (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Wellman & Liu, 2004). In this talk, I will argue that these results do not undermine the centrality of children’s capacity to pass the false belief test (FBT) (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Wimmer & Perner, 1983) in their understanding of the concept of belief. In particular, I will claim (i) that passing FBT marks children’s acquisition of a minimal capacity to provide explanations in the domain of folk psychology (Bartsch, Campbell, & Troseth, 2007; Bartsch & Wellman, 1989), and (ii) that children learn this capacity by being exposed to explanations of others’ actions in everyday conversation with their parents. I will advance a Vygotskian model of how children learn to give psychological explanations and argue in support of the social origin of mature theory of mind abilities.



BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & He, Z. (2010). False-belief Understanding in Infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 110–118. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.006
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the Autistic Child Have a “Theory of Mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46.
Bartsch, K., Campbell, M. D., & Troseth, G. L. (2007). Why Else Does Jenny Run? Young Children’s Extended Psychological Explanations. Journal of Cognition and Development, 8(1), 33–61.
Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H. M. (1989). Young Children’s Attribution of Action to Beliefs and Desires. Child Development, 60(4), 946–964.
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others’ Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830 –1834. doi:10.1126/science.1190792
Luo, Y. (2011). Do 10-month-old infants understand others’ false beliefs? Cognition, 121(3), 289–298. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.011
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-Mind Development: The Truth about False Belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.
Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of Theory-of-Mind Tasks. Child Development, 75, 523–541.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about Beliefs: Representation and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103–128.

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According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months of age can attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I will advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I will argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour, and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance on spontaneous-response false belief tasks without the need to ascribe to them a capacity to attribute (false) beliefs. Still, it is debatable whether these capacities stand for genuine abilities to attribute goals and perceptual states or rather merely denote primitive behaviour-reading skills. I will defend this second minimal interpretation by reporting empirical evidence from neuroscience and developmental psychology suggesting that responding to others’ people motor goals does not require any genuine understanding of others’ mental states. If my interpretation is correct, social cognitive abilities in infancy do not demonstrate the existence of a theory-of-mind module, which allows attributing mental states to others. We can more parsimoniously explain them through the activity of embodied cognitive processes integrating perceptual and motor information.

In this dissertation, I argue that children’s acquisition of the concept of belief depends on a cluster of cognitive abilities developing at different stages. In particular, early social cognitive abilities are provided by the endogenous maturation of a specific cognitive module. Against permissive interpretations, I contend that this cognitive module operates only in a limited range of situations because its activation is restricted to visual input. Theory of mind competence is augmented by later cognitive development, particularly by language acquisition. In their linguistic interactions, children are exposed both to new syntactic structures (i.e., sentential complements) and explanatory practices (i.e., folk psychological narratives). While these structures are necessary to represent the attribution of a belief to an agent, these practices are necessary to model the behaviour of people entertaining false beliefs and to predict and explain their behaviour. I contend that this specific feature of linguistic interaction allows children to shape their concept of false belief thereby extends both their understanding of the mental domain and their ability to predict people’s behaviour in abstract situations where they cannot rely on contextual clues.
Participants on each side of the traditional debate between the theory and the simulation theory of the mind assumed that the same cognitive mechanism must be at work in all cases in which we predict someone’s behaviour based on the attribution of mental states to her. Since I contend that the development of late social cognitive abilities does not recruit the same cognitive structures implementing infants’ early social cognitive abilities, my proposal rejects both sides of the debate. By showing how different cognitive achievements improve social cognitive abilities from infants’ early contextually-restricted to late context-independent theory of mind abilities, I place the acquisition of the concept of belief in a more complex and realistic framework of cognitive development.

Intensionality (or opacity) is a core property of mental representations and sometimes understanding opacity is claimed to be a part of children's theory of mind (evidenced with the false belief task). Children, however, pass the false belief task and the intensionality tasks at different ages (typically 4 vs. 5;1-6;11 years). According to two dominant interpretations, the two tests either require different conceptual resources or vary only in their executive or linguistic load. In two experiments, involving 120 children aged 3-6 (Experiment 1) and 75 children aged 4-6 (Experiment 2), we tested two variants of the executive load hypothesis: The differential linguistic complexity of the two tests, and the dual-name problem of the intensionality task. The former was addressed by standardizing and minimizing the linguistic demands of both tasks (contrasted with the typical narrative intensionality task), and the latter by introducing the dual-name problem into the false belief task...

I review a variety of theories that attempt to explain how
young infants are able to pass spontaneous false belief tests, and then ask whether any of these approaches can explain the 3-year-olds’ failure on standard, elicited FB tests. I argue that some of these approaches fail to provide adequate explanations, and I defend an embodiedenactive approach that I think does a better job. The primary reason 3-year-olds fail at the elicited FB tests is not due to language problems, the complexity of the situation, or the number of perspectives involved, but because the saliency of the second-person interaction with the experimenter takes precedence over the third-person task.