|
|
SIMULATION THEORY OR DISENGAGEMENT HYPOTHESIS Mental states are desires, percepts, beliefs, knowledge, thoughts, intentions, feelings, etc. They play a causal role in behaviour; I don’t go to get some chicken because it’s in the fridge, but because I believe it’s in the fridge and desire it. I’ll still go to the fridge if the chicken’s not there. We automatically infer mental states from people’s behaviour. This is incredibly adaptive, permitting prediction of other people based on what one knows about their beliefs and desires. Any theory of how we acquire these mentalising capabilities would have to explain children’s normal and abnormal development. Young children fail to understand other people will act on false beliefs. In the Sally-Ann task, Sally puts an object in box X and then departs. Ann moves the object to box Y during Sally’s absence. When Sally returns, the question to the child is: Where will Sally search for the object-in X or in Y? Most 4-year olds say X, 3 year olds say Y. It seems to be quite a profound problem, e.g. even if Sally says, “I think it’s in X”, they still respond she thinks it’s in Y. In general there’s a developmental transition around 3/4. They not only have problems with other people’s false beliefs, but also their own. In the smarties task, an experimenter shows a 5-year-old a smarties tube and asks her what she thinks is in it. "Smarties," she replies. Then the child gets to look inside and discovers that it actually contains pencils, not smarties. The experimenter then asks her what another child who had not yet seen inside the tube would think it contained. "Smarties," the child answers. The experimenter tries the same procedure with a 3-year-old. The response to the initial question is the expected "smarties," but the response to the second is "pencils." Even more surprising is that in response to further questioning, the 3-year-old claims that she had initially thought that there were pencils in the tube and had even said that there were. You get the same results with autistic people. According to simulation theory, children are introspectively aware of their own mental states and can use this to infer the mental states of other people through a kind of role-taking or simulation process. E.g. in the false-belief task, children could predict what a naive other child would think the candy box contained by imagining or mentally simulating what they themselves would think if they were in his or her shoes. This whole process may be largely unconscious. It may be that all you are aware of is the prediction itself. There is no need for a folk psychological theory. Rather, you are using your own cognitive mechanism as a model for another’s. What develops is the ability to make increasingly accurate simulations. Though people also resort to theories in predicting and explaining behaviour, mental-simulation processes are important in the acquisition of social-cognitive knowledge and skills. Like theory theorists, simulation theorists also assume that experience plays an important formative role, in that it is through practice in role taking that children improve their simulation skills. There is subliminal muscular mimicry of the bodily postures and especially facial expressions. Where the other's face bears an expression of emotion, adoption of a similar expression tends to produce a similar emotion in oneself. Even when it does not produce an emotional response, it allows recognition of the other's emotion. Human beings have an automatic tendency to direct their eyes toward the target of another’s gaze. This mechanism turns one's own attention from the other's response to the object of the other's attention or emotion or the goal of the other's action. This emerges in the first year. If psychological competence depends on a capacity to simulate others, these imitative mechanisms are important. Figure 1 How you make a decision based on your beliefs and desires You have a store of beliefs and desires. Some of the beliefs are derived from perception, others from inference. Some desires (e.g. desire to get a drink) arise from bodily states, others (e.g. desire to go to the kitchen) are sub-goals generated by the decision-making system. The decision-making system, which takes your beliefs and desires as input, generates sub-goals and comes up with a decision about what to do. That decision is then passed on to the mechanisms responsible for sequencing and coordinating the behaviour.
The Simulation Theory says we predict others’ behaviour by using a skill that has two components: the capacity for making decisions and the capacity to introduce pretend facts and values into one's decision-making. The recognition and understanding of pretence might involve metarepresentation, but not necessarily the production of pretence. The 3-year-old child has developed a decision-making system for making on-line decisions on the basis of actual beliefs and desires. But by itself this provides the child with no way of predicting anyone else's behaviour. Suppose you could feed the decision-making system some pretend beliefs and desires. If the hypothetical beliefs and desires you've fed into your system are similar to the ones that someone else has, then the decision that your system generates will be similar to theirs. In order to pass the Sally-Ann task, the child needs to provide the system with pretend input other than her own actual beliefs and desires, i.e. Sally’s beliefs and desires. She follows Sally as she goes outside, and thus fails to "see" what subsequently happens inside. If you could then take the decision-making system off-line by disengaging the connection between the system and the action controllers, you could generate decisions without acting on them. In order to pass the Sally-Ann task, the child needs to treat decisions as predictions or expectations, rather than simply feeding them to the action controllers. If the child first acquires the ability to take the output off-line, and then acquires the ability to provide the system with pretend input, we expect three developmental stages. In the first, the child can make no predictions. In the second, she can only make predictions about her own behaviour or about the behaviour of people whose beliefs and desires are identical to hers. In the third, she can make the full range of predictions. It appears that 3-year-old children have acquired the ability to take the output off-line, but not the ability to provide the system with pretend input. They can feed pretend desires into the decision-making system, but not pretend beliefs. The theory is compatible with the observed developmental pattern. How do they explain the autist’s failure to develop the skill to predict and explain others’ behaviour? According to mental simulation theory a faulty capacity for pretence would degrade a person's capacity to ascribe mental states. From 1½ to 3 years, mainstream children's pretence becomes more sophisticated in terms of tracking the counterfactual consequences of pretence. E.g. when naughty Teddy is pretending to have tea in his cup and tilts the cup over a piece of chocolate children are able to state that the piece of chocolate is now wet. Autistic children suffer a deficit in the capacity for pretend-play. They fail to treat others as having points of view distinct from their own. If the off-line simulation theory is right, predicting the behaviour of people whose beliefs differ from our own requires an ability to provide our own decision making system with pretend input. This ability would also play a central role in pretend play. Conditionals concerning actions under hypothetical or counterfactual conditions are also related to simulation, e.g. predict what actions one would take upon hearing footsteps coming from the basement. Hence, there’s a relationship between counterfactual reasoning and capacity to infer others’ mental states. The false belief task is a reasoning task. The Sally-Ann story requires deduction because it never mentions where Sally thinks the chocolate is (it’s not a recall task). False belief tasks correlate with tasks that require conditionals, e.g. Sally who had put his chocolate into location A didn't see Ann used some of the chocolate for baking a cake and then put the rest of the chocolate into location B. Children's ability to answer the false belief question, "Where will Sally look for her chocolate?" correlated highly with their ability to answer the counterfactual conditional, "If Ann hadn't baked a cake, where would the chocolate now be?" Evidence for simulation theory includes:
Arguments against simulation theory include:
|