PSY20006 Cog Psych Week 12

PSY20006 Cog Psych Week 12

1. Theory of Mind

   • Metacognition
   • Mindreading
   • 1.Developmental approach
     • • Stems from Piaget: children are initially cognitively egocentric
       • They do not differentiate between conceptual, perceptual, and affective perspectives
       • If you have no knowledge of perspectives, then you can’t know that others have perspectives that might differ from your own
     • • Even after children become aware of the existence of perspectives, they still must learn to discriminate their own perspective from other people’s perspectives • Perspective taking abilities increase with age.
   • 2.Metacognition approach
     • People started examining metacognitive development
     • • The nature of people as cognisers (thinkers) •The nature of different cognitive tasks •Strategies that can be applied to find solutions to different tasks •Skills for monitoring and regulating one's
       cognitive activities
       • • This approach identifies understanding others as cognisers as just one of many the many cognitive activities that people engage in and can reflect on and develop
   • 3. Current approach
     • •Focuses on what children know about how mental states are linked to perceptual inputs, behavioral outputs and to other mental states
     • • Three different current theories that focus on how we understand mental states of ourselves and others
       • 1. Theory Theory
         • This can range from the general to the specific
       • 2. Modularity theory
         • 1. Body Mechanisms
           • • First year. Allows babies to recognize that agents have an internal source of energy that allows them to move on their own
         • 2. Mind (1) Mechanisms
           • • Late first year. Allows infant to construe people and other agents as part of the environment and as pursuing their own goals within the environment
         • 3. Mind (2) Mechanisms
           • • Second year. Allows children to represent agents as holding attitudes and propositions (e.g., pretending that, believing that)
       • 3. Simulation theory
         • Children become aware of their own mental states
         • They use this awareness to infer mental states of others
           • •Specifies how theory theory is implemented
           • • “If I were you ...” compared with “if someone like you, with access to the perspective you have ...”
         • This is a bit like jumping into the mind of someone else and pretending to be in their position, but using your own thought processes
   • Differences:
     • Cross cultural/Individual / Clinical Population
   • Universal Aspects
     • Altruism
     • Cheater detection modules (and Wason Card Sorting test)
   • Individual Differences
     • Large variance in normal adults
     • People believe different things
     • General mechanisms ie. memory capacity
   • Clinical Population
     • Autism
       • Understand self but not others
     • Passivity symptom schizophrenia
       • Understand others, but not self
   • Game Theory/ Cheater
     • Sugiyama, Tooby & Cosmides (2002)
     • Social, switched and standard social contract

2. False Beliefs

   • Demonstrates that mental states (beliefs and desires) exist independently from the actual state of the world •Beliefs and desires are called “propositional attitudes” in Philosophy of Mind

3. Leggenhager et al.(2007)

   • During multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders
   • Results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information