Week 11 - action

• humans attribute mental states to others (beliefs, desires and intentions)
• Mentalistic action interpretation system is a cognitive system using mental state representations to interpret and predict others behaviour
• theory of mind is the ability to think about other peoples mental states and is an important component of the mentalistic action interpretation system
• Adults abilities to reason about others mental states (TOM) are very sophisticated
• Lived/ scientific evidence show children understand living beings are special and different from inanimate objects but how much do children understand surrounding mental states, beliefs and how mental states influence behaviour
• false belief tasks used to test childrens development of theory of mind such as sally anne (Cohen, 1985)
• smarties task was conducted by Perner, 1987
• Numerous studies show progression from failing false belief tasks at 3 to passing them at 4 (Wellman, 2001)
• just because infants may understand false beliefs this does not mean that they have a full theory of mind but it is an important component
• in tasks requiring lower loads on executive processing even young children have a rudimentary understanding of false beliefs
• mental states is not the only tool to think about and predict others actions
• Infants have access to a non mentalistic action interpretation system containing 3 elements: concept of agent, goal and principle of cost efficiency
• infants have a distinctive concept of agent from other inanimate objects
• agents are solid and subject to physical constraints like objects. However unlike objects they move on their own, have goals and pursue efficient means to their goals.
• Agents include people, hands, animals and animated creatures
• woodward, 1998 showed that infants expected the hand to follow the ball and not the trajectory through looking longer showing at 9 months they have an understanding of agents behaviour being directed to a specific goal
• woodward 1998 entailed a ball on one stand and a teddy on another. In the familiarisation trial the experimenter reaches for the teddy on the left stand. The objects are then swapped and in test A it is the old path but new goal with B being new path and old goal. Infants looked longer when the reach followed the same trajectory (left then left) rather then following the goal of the ball
• gergeley et al, 1999 used the red ball yellow ball with wall in the middle to habituate 6-12 mo with the yellow having to jump to get to red. Wall is then taken away to test infants understanding of minimising the cost of actions
• Results of gergely showed infants looked longer to test events where the agent jumped with no obstacle showing they have an understanding of minimising the cost of actions and expect the agent not to jump when unnecessary
• looking time increases the older the infant gets as they have a greater understanding of cost effective actions. By 6mo babies already able to understand agents should be rational and minimise energy
• spelke, 2016 did a similar study but with a small compared to high wall. When the wall was low the ball still had to jump but either jumped at the same trajectory as before unnecessarily or lower
• when ball does the same jump infants look longer due to them expecting to minimise energy by jumping lower therefore showing their understanding of efficiency
• these non mentalistic action interpretation system means that they do not need to have mentalistic understanding of their thought to predict behaviour due to predicting based on agent, goal and cost which is simpler
• social relationships are important and the challenge is mapping our social environment and understand what relationships others are in
• we solve the task of discovering social relations around us through language and observation
• certain behaviours serve as cues to different social relationships - watching people hug makes us realise theyre close
• thamas, 2022 tested whether children would expect for food sharing with saliva to occur distinctly with family relations
• girl drinking juice and there is a non family and family. Children asked which one they will share the juice with and they overwhelmingly chose family (5-7 years)
• shows children understand social relations and saliva sharing as a relational cue
• infants infer close relationships between people how share saliva and would expect people who share food with saliva to respond to one another with distress
• infants will leverage their knowledge about these relationships and cues to identify social partners and learn how to act