presentation Flashcards
compare and contrast
Gordon 1996, who argues for ST, describes ST as a hot theory (uses emotional and motivational resources and ones own capactity for practical reasoning) and TT as a cold theory (uses intellectual processes, makes inferences from one set of beliefs to another and makes no essential use of our own capacities for emotion, motivation and practical reasoning)
conclusion
Neither provide complete comprehensive explanation
Both should explain emotional deficits in autism, ST explanation is better
More evidence for ST
Others have presented hybrid theories
Still a lot of unanswered questions
what is TT
Infer others’ thoughts based on theoretical reasoning and causal/explanatory laws, refined over time.
goldman outlines as being i)Young children’s performance on mentalizing tasks changes over time as a function of changes in their grasp, or understanding, of mental concepts.
(ii)These changes in concepts, or conceptual understanding, reflect successive stages in children’s theories of the mental.
(iii)Therefore, mental concepts must be theoretical concepts.
(iv)Hence, all determinations of the instantiation of mental concepts, in both self and others, must be inferential in character.
what is ST
Michlmayr 2002 outlines: ST suggests we do not understand others via the use of a folk psychological theory but we use our own mental apparatus to form predictions and explanations of someone by putting ourselves in the shoes of another person and simulating them. It is an offline simulation (one puts ones own decision making processes off line and replaces its inputs with pretend inputs of the beliefs and desires of the person theyre simulating in order to predict their behaviour – one then lets their decision making system to make a prediction)) Although there are many variations, all ST theorists argue simulation is a very effective device for making predictions and explanations. This leads to an important implication of ST, since simulation depends on one’s own mental apparatus, ST is attributor dependent whereas TT isn’t
relevance and other arguments about autism
Currie 1996 distinguishes TT as knowing that and ST as knowing how. Describes autism as a lack of knowledge according to TT – autistic people do not know a significant number of propositions and potentially cant even formulate them. According to ST autism is a lack of imaginative capacity – abilitity to imaginatively project oneself onto a different situation to its own current actual position.
ST theorists use autism as support because of lack of pretense and imaginative activity (shows many connections to simulation) and deficits in mentalistic understanding (clearly due to an impairment in theory of mind). In simulation you have to pretend being the other person. Frith 1996 – imaginative and pretend play is not possible if
According to currie 1996 ST theorists explain the sally ann task by impaired ability to simulate sally whose epistemic situation differs from their own as sally lacks knowledge that the child has. Also tt cant explain why 20% of autistic people pass these tests (sally, smarties etc) because people with same theoretical framework should reach the same conclusion. ST offers 2 explainations. First, older autistic children cant mentalise but have learnt rules of thumb such as ‘people who haven’t seen something don’t know about it’ (currie 1996). Second, different autistic people have varying abilities of simulation and those less affected can make simple perspective changes required for false belief task. Both explainsations imply, and it has been shown elsewhere, autistic people will fail more complex false belief tasks. The first explaination fits neastly with goldman’s suggestion that evolution gave us more than one mentalising strategy, since their simulation ability is impaired autistics will try to acquire a theoretical framework
Rizzolatti (video) argues autism is prob with not having experiences in motor repertoire so cant replicate with miiror neurons (not completely evidence for ST as ST means it shouldn’t matter if experienced or not but the fact that its to do with MN goes against ST
As michlmayr points its not clear how much of autism can be explained by an impairment of theory of mind as there are more aspects of autism than just impairments in social interaction, play, verbal and non verbal communication, though it is still plausible to have ToM supplemented by another explanation, therefore michlmayr argues autism is good support for ST
problems with TT
Carruthers 1996 argues that our full internal FP theory is innate and not acquired at all because: 1) how do all young children come to the same theory at the same time? (ironic, strange etc) and 2) if learnt from adults, how is there no explicit teaching? Furthermore he notes FP theory has remained consistent across time and cultures so how can it be a cultural construct?
Descriptive rather than explanatory
With the aurgument steps being i)Young children’s performance on mentalizing tasks changes over time as a function of changes in their grasp, or understanding, of mental concepts.
(ii)These changes in concepts, or conceptual understanding, reflect successive stages in children’s theories of the mental.
(iii)Therefore, mental concepts must be theoretical concepts.
(iv)Hence, all determinations of the instantiation of mental concepts, in both self and others, must be inferential in character.
Goldman describes broad controversy over the main evidence of point 1 as tt argues sally ann task is caused by conceptual deficit unable to conceptualise a misrepresentation, but other studies suggest 3 yro do have theory of mind and it is that the failure is because the task is too difficult because of other factors such as peocessing difficulties…….
A second worry concerns the putative link between (iii) and (iv). Even if a concept is a theoretical one, in the sense relevant here, it doesn’t follow that determinations of its instances must proceed wholly by theoretical inference. If the user of the concept can instantiate it herself, or instantiate pretend surrogates of it, simulation can be used as a shortcut procedure to determine its instantiation in others or in one’s future or past self (section2.1). So purely inferential methods of attribution are not a necessary consequence of the theoreticity of mental‐state concepts.
evidence for ST
Avanzini et al 2012 - Mu rhythym reductions in EEG when observing others actions – ev becauses TT would not predict this as it claims the others mental states are represented theoretically, not embodied. Also shows differences between asd v nt which could be more evidwence in terms of practical application
Fadiga et al 1995
Oberman, winkielman and Ramachandran 2007 – (remember tbp pen in mouth) need embodiment to recognise facial expressiojns
Dapretto et al 2006 – children with autism showed less activity in frontal parts of mirror neuron system
Goldman (unpublished) concludes sufficient research indicates pretend states are accurate/ close enough to create accurate predictions, extrapolating from other attributes such as visual imagery (shepherd and metxler) and motor imagery (yue and cole 1992)
evidence for TT
Tt is popular amongst developmental psy as child scientist theory where studies show children dev increasingly complex theories and understanding as they grow
Meltzoff 1988 found a week after 14 month infants saw adults turn light on with their head, they used their head, showing imitation, not emulation
Gergley asks why infants didn’t just use hands - appears infants showed reasoning by re-enacting head movement rather than simply using hands – must have inferred that because experimenter declined to use hands the head action must offer some advantage
Gergely, bekkering and kiraly 2002 concluded the infants already had a simple theory about why others do the things they do based on odd findings that
Saxe and kanwisher 2003 – argue tpj –m is specifically involved in reasoning about others mental states and not just about other people
Gallagher and frith use false belief paradigm to counter this by finding no tpj activity difference between falso belief based task and true-belief based task, indicating tpj is not specialised in ToM, however this study is questionable because everydqay reasoning relies on true beliefs
problems with ST
ST needs a theory – davies and stone 1995 – summarise the argument that even if simulkation is not driven by a psyc theory, how do you feed your decision making system with pretend inputs without having to decide which inputs and facts are relevant? so need a theory to set the simulation up. Churchland (1991) argues even if simulation can predict beh without a theory, you need a theory to explain the beh because to understand beh you need appreciation of general patterns that comprehend the individual events in both cases
Dev evidence against ST e.g. perner and howes 1992 who concluded the developmental gap in children’s self reflection and identifying what character thinks in inconsistent with ST
Gordons ST and c ircularity – fuller argues…. The final stage of simulation involves ascribing a mental state to the other person which requires a concept
ST relies on introspection – gordon argues for theories depending on putting yourself in others’ shoes requires a comparison between you and the other person, which he argues requires introspective access. Similarly carruthers 1996 argues ST takes self-knowledge of mental states for granted and we need to be able to recognise the belifs, desires and intentions which are relevant to the simulation
Although not exclusively based on MN, ST would be sig weakened if suggestions of MN having no purpose (check videos) are true
