Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Under Pressure: Processing Representational Decoupling in False-Belief Tasks

  • Published:
Review of Philosophy and Psychology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Several studies (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Surian et al. 2007) demonstrated that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false-belief task, can anticipate others’ actions based on their attributed false beliefs. This gave rise to the so-called “Developmental Paradox”. De Bruin and Kästner (2012) recently suggested that the Developmental Paradox is best addressed in terms of the relation between coupled (online) and decoupled (offline) processes and argued that if enactivism is to be a genuine alternative to classic cognitivism, it should be able to bridge the “cognitive gap”, i.e. to provide us with a convincing account of how low-level sensorimotor practices transform into higher-order representational skills. This paper defends, against De Bruin and Kästner, an enactive response to the Developmental Paradox. I argue that 3-year olds’ failure to verbally report their false-belief understanding does not arise from stronger decoupling demands. Rather, they fail because the elicited response false-belief trials involve representational decoupling tout court and what is more, under pressure.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The VOE protocol tests whether children look longer when agents act in a manner that is inconsistent with their false beliefs and relies on the basic assumption that when an individual’s expectations are violated, she is surprised and thus she looks longer at an unexpected event rather than at an expected event.

  2. In this famous experiment, dolls are used to act out a scenario in which Sally hides a marble in a basket and leaves the room. While she is gone, Anne enters and moves the marble to a box. Sally returns, and the children are asked, “Where will Sally look for her marble?”

  3. Executive functioning refers to a set of cognitive faculties that underlie goal-directed behavior and cognitive control across conceptual domains such as inhibitory control – i.e. the capacity to overcome one’s putatively prepotent tendencies to simply say what is true and known – working memory, attention and error monitoring, etc.

  4. One anonymous referee pointed out that De Bruin & Kästner could adopt another definition of cognition while keeping the fundamentals of DEC intact. However, as we shall see shortly, it is crucial for their solution to the puzzle to hold that preverbal infants are already capable of processing – via offline decoupling – internally represented information. REC challenges this claim and argues that situating the decoupling processing earlier in development does not help us to bridge the cognitive gap.

  5. Importantly, the Dynamical Systems Theory can also provide nonrepresentational explanations of internal brain processes (see Freeman 1975; Chemero 2009). Note also that Occam’s razor may apply here: if a given phenomenon can be explained without the need of adding an extra ingredient – i.e. representations – one should adopt the most parsimonious option.

  6. The same findings have been replicated with Korean children (Oh and Lewis 2008). Moreover, developmental cognitive neuroscience studies suggest that the neural bases of mentalizing abilities are clearly dissociable from those that deal with executive functioning skills (Sabbagh et al. 2009; Saxe and Wexler 2005; Sommer et al. 2007).

  7. Note that this is a hybrid form of metarepresentation – the drawing being “external” and not a mental representation. Of course, one interesting question is whether hybrid metarepresentation is the same sort of thing as purely mental metarepresentation. However, this need not concern us here. The important point is that metarepresentation1 is cognitively demanding and humans are unique in their capacity to form this type of metarepresentations.

  8. Explicit representations are available to one’s explicit awareness, whereas sub-personal or implicit representations are processed without one’s explicit awareness.

  9. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who pressed clarification on this paragraph.

  10. A recent study (Rubio-Fernández 2013) illustrated that perspective tracking is a continuous process that can be easily disrupted in adults by a subtle visual manipulation in both indirect and direct false-belief tasks. I am grateful to the anonymous referee who directed me to this reference.

  11. Social perspective-taking is a set of manifold abilities of infants which helps them to establish reference against the background of prior social interactions.

  12. For example, Sommerville et al. (2005) demonstrated that 3-month olds focus on the relation between an agent and her goal if they reached for (and not merely looked at) a toy before observing another actor grasping it. Also 10-month olds who received active training in pulling a cane to retrieve a toy subsequently registered another person’s cane-pulling action as goal-directed behavior, while infants who underwent mere observational training were unable to do this. Importantly, goal-relatedness is differently perceived by infants in social versus physical event configurations (Woodward et al. 2001).

  13. I am indebted to comments from an anonymous referee for pressing the clarification in this paragraph.

  14. Note that the verbal expression of (P) might be absent altogether, as in the “helping paradigm” trials (Buttelman et al. 2009). This corroborates the idea that the disrupting ingredient in ERT is not the mere verbal component, but the verbally interactive one.

  15. A recent study (Rubio-Fernández and Geurts 2013) illustrates that nonverbal versions of the ERT allow infants to keep track of a protagonist’s perspective over a course of events, whereas verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective tracking process.

  16. For example, Keysar et al. (2003) have shown that adults’ first rapid guesses about the meaning of words (using eye-tracking detecting measures) are based more on empirical generalizations (e.g. how a speaker has used a word in the past) rather than on complicated inferences about speakers’ beliefs and intentions. This does not imply that adults are unable to make such sophisticated inferences. However, these operations take time.

  17. I am grateful to the anonymous referee who pressed clarification on this point.

References

  • Agre, P., and D. Chapman. 1987. Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity. In Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 268–272. Menlo Park: American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apperly, I., and S. Butterfill. 2009. Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review 116: 953–970.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baillargeon, R., R.M. Scott, and H. Zijing. 2010. False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Science 14(3): 110–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press/Bradford Books.

  • Barsalou, L.W. 1999. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577–660.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bermúdez, J. 2003. Thinking Without Words. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brockmole, J.R., C.C. Davoli, R.A. Abrams, and J.K. Witt. 2013. The world within reach: Effects of hand posture and tool use on visual cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science 22(1): 38–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buttelman, D., M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello. 2009. Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition 112: 337–342.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carlson, S.M., and L.J. Moses. 2001. Individual differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind. Child Development 72: 1032–1053.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carlson, S., L. Moses, and C. Breton. 2002. How specific is the relation between executive function and theory of mind? Contributions of inhibitory control and working memory. Infant and Child Development 11: 73–92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chang, F.-M., J.R. Kidd, K.J. Kivak, A.J. Pakstis, and K.K. Kidd. 1996. The world-wide distribution of allele frequencies at the human dopamine D4 receptor locus. Human Genetics 98: 91–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chemero, A. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, X., P.D. Hastings, K.H. Rubin, H. Chen, G. Cen, and S.L. Stewart. 1998. Childrearing attitudes and behavioral inhibition in Chinese and Canadian toddlers: A crosscultural study. Developmental Psychology 34: 677–686.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Churchland, P.S. 2002. Brain-Wise. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, A. 1997. Being there: putting mind, body, and world together again. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clements, W.A., and J. Perner. 1994. Implicit understanding of belief. Cognitive Development 9: 377–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cole, K., and P. Mitchell. 2000. Siblings in the development of executive control and a theory-of-mind. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 18: 279–295.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Bruin, L.C., and L. Kästner. 2012. Dynamic Embodied Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11(4): 541–563.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, D. (1998). Making tools for thinking. In D. Sperber (Ed.) (2000). Metarepresentations. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Dretske, F. 1995. Naturalizing the mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Falck-Ytter, T., G. Gredebäck, and von Hofsten. 2006. Infants predict other peoples’ action goals. Nature Neuroscience 9: 878–879.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman, W. 1975. Mass Action in the Nervous System. New York: Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. and Varga S. (2013). Social Constraints on the Direct Perception of Emotions and Intentions. Topoi:1–15 (2013).

  • Gallese, V., and G. Lakoff. 2005. The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in reason and language. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22: 455–479.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gergely, G., Z. Nadasdy, G. Csibra, and S. Bıró. 1995. Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition 56: 165–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grush, R. (1997). Yet another design for a brain? Review of Port and van Gelder (Eds.), Mind as motion. Philosophical Psychology, 233–242.

  • Hala, S., S. Hug, and H. Henderson. 2003. Executive functioning and false-belief understanding in preschool children: two tasks are harder than one. Journal of Cognition and Development 4: 275–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hauk, O., I. Johnsrude, and F. Pulvermüller. 2004. Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron 41: 301–307.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, D.Y.F. 1994. Cognitive socialization in Confucian heritage cultures. In Cross-cultural roots of minority development, ed. P.M. Greenfield and R.R. Cocking, 285–313. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D. 2008. Folk psychological narratives: The sociocultural basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keysar, B., S. Lin, and D.J. Barr. 2003. Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition 89: 25–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Király, I. 2009. Memories for events in infants: Goal-relevant action coding. In Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience and Autism, ed. T. Striano and V. Reid. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A.M. 1991. Precursors to a theory of mind. In Natural Theories of Mind: Evolution, Development, and Simulation of Everyday Mindreading, ed. Whiten Andrew, 63–78. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A.M., T.P. German, and P. Polizzi. 2005. Belief–desire reasoning as a process of selection. Cognitive Psychology 50: 45–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Menary R. (2007). Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded. Palgrave.

  • Millikan, R. 1995. Pushmi-Pullyu Representations. Philosophical Perspectives 9: 185–200.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moll, H., and Kadipasaoglu, D. (2013). The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7(558). doi: 10.3389/fnhum2013.00558.

  • Moll, H., and M. Tomasello. 2007. How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced. Developmental Psychology 43(2): 309–317.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moll, H., N. Richter, M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello. 2008. Fourteen-month-olds know what ‘we’ have shared in a special way. Infancy 13(1): 90–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oh, S., and C. Lewis. 2008. Korean preschoolers’ advanced inhibitory control and its relation to other executive skills and mental state understanding. Child Development 79: 80–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Onishi, K.H., and R. Baillargeon. 2005. Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs? Science 308(8): 255–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pecher, D., and R. Zwaan. 2005. The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. In Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought, ed. D. Pecher and R. Zwaan. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Pecher, D., R. Zeelenberg, and L.W. Barsalou. 2004. Sensorimotor simulations underlie conceptual representations: Modality-specific effects of prior activation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11: 164–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perner, J., and B. Lang. 1999. Development of theory of mind and executive control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(9): 337–344.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perner, J., and T. Ruffman. 2005. Infants’ insight into the mind: How deep? Science 308: 214–216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perner, J., B. Lang, and D. Kloo. 2002. Theory of Mind and Self Control: More than a common problem of inhibition. Child Development 73: 752–767.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Repacholi, B.M., and A. Gopnik. 1997. Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds. Developmental Psychology 33: 12–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ridderinkhof, K.R., M. Ullsperger, E.A. Crone, and S. Nieuwenhuis. 2004. The role of the medial frontal cortex in cognitive control. Science 306: 443–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubio-Fernández, P. 2013. Perspective tracking in progress: Do not disturb. Cognition 129(2): 264–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubio-Fernández, P., and B. Geurts. 2013. How to pass the false-belief task before your fourth birthday. Psychological Science. Jan 1; 24(1): 27–33.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sabbagh, M.A., F. Xu, S.M. Carlson, L.J. Moses, and K. Lee. 2006. Executive functioning and theory-of-mind in preschool children from Beijing, China: Comparisons with U.S. preschoolers. Psychological Science 17: 74–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sabbagh, M.A., L.C. Bowman, L.E. Evraire, and J.M.B. Ito. 2009. Neurodevelopmental correlates of theory of mind in preschool children. Child Development 80: 1147–1162.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saxe, R., and L.J. Powell. 2006. It’s the thought that counts: Specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind. Psychological Science 17: 692–699.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saxe, R., and A. Wexler. 2005. Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia 43: 1391–1399.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, S. 2001. Metarepresentations in Philosophy and Psychology. In Proceedings of the twenty-third annual conference of the cognitive science society, University of Edinburgh, ed. J. Moore and K. Stenning. London: LEA Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, R.M., R. Baillargeon, H.-J. Song, and A. Leslie. 2010. Attributing false beliefs about non-obvious properties at 18-months. Cognitive Psychology 61(4): 366–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sodian, B., C. Thoermer, and N. Dietrich. 2006. Two- to four-year-old children’s differentiation of knowing and guessing in a non-verbal task. European Journal of Developmental Psychology 3: 222–237.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sommer, M., K. Dçhnel, B. Sodian, J. Meinhardt, C. Thoermer, and G. Hajak. 2007. Neural correlates of true and false belief reasoning. NeuroImage 35: 1378–1384.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sommerville, J. A. and Woodward, A., (2010). The Link Between Action Production and Action Processing in Infancy. In Grammont, F., Legrand D., Livet, P. (eds.) Naturalizing intention in action, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  • Sommerville, J.A., A. Woodward, and A. Needham. 2005. Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition 96: B1–B11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spaulding, S. 2010. Embodied cognition and mindreading. Mind & Language 25(1): 119–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Surian, L., S. Caldi, and D. Sperber. 2007. Attribution of beliefs to 13-month-old infants. Psychological Science 18: 580–586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tobin, J.J., D.Y.H. Wu, and D.H. Davidson. 1989. Preschool in three cultures: Japan, China and the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ward, D. 2012. Enjoying the Spread. Conscious Externalism Reconsidered. Mind. 121(483): 731–751.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H.M., D. Cross, and J. Watson. 2001. Meta-analysis of Theory of Mind Development: The Truth about False-Belief. Child Development 72(3): 655–684.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilby, M. (2012), Embodying the False-Belief Tasks. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, special issue on ‘debates on embodied mindreading’ (ed. Shannon Spaulding) December 2012, Volume 11, pp. 519–540.

  • Wilson, M. 2002. Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12(9): 625–636.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wimmer, H., and J. Perner. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13: 103–128.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, A.L., J.A. Sommerville, and J.J. Guajardo. 2001. How infants make sense of intentional action. In Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of social cognition, ed. B. Malle, L. Moses, and D. Baldwin. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I thank Dan Hutto, Julian Kiverstein, Erik Myin, Uwe Peters, the editor and three anonymous referees for very helpful comments and criticisms.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Fribourg, Av. de l’Europe 20, CH-1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Anna Ciaunica

Authors
  1. Anna Ciaunica
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Ciaunica.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ciaunica, A. Under Pressure: Processing Representational Decoupling in False-Belief Tasks. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 527–542 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0195-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0195-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation