THE "THEORY OF MIND" OR METAREPRESENTATION 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. A belief is representation of the world, a picture in the head. If this representation matches up with the world, then the belief is true. False beliefs misrepresent the world. 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.

The theory-theory maintains that prediction, explanation and interpretation of people exploit an internally represented theory or knowledge structure - a folk psychology. Theory theorists view the child as a scientist, and argue that folk psychology is theoretical in nature. There are parallels between the maturation of theories in science and the child’s developing theory of mind. In science there are paradigm shifts, e.g. from classical to relativistic mechanics. Similarly, 3 and 4 year olds differ markedly on a range of tasks. But children’s theories are different from scientific theories in that they’re implicit, not conscious.

First there’s procedurally embedded knowledge we have implicitly from biological predispositions. Newborn infants can distinguish their mother's voice from another woman's based on prenatal, intrauterine auditory experience with her voice. Young babies also have an unlearned ability to hear fine differences between consonant sounds and to perceive them categorically. Newborns seem able to perceptually represent and imitate another person's movements. They lose the ability and it takes a few months to come back. E.g. the neonate will imitatively stick out its tongue after it has seen an adult do this. Infants respond differently to people than they do to objects and seem to expect people to behave differently than objects do. 5-8-week-old babies imitate mouth openings and tongue protrusions produced by an adult but not similar-looking behaviours produced by an object. Infants try to retrieve a just-disappeared object by reaching toward its place of disappearance but try to retrieve a just-disappeared person by vocalizing to the person. They act more surprised when an inanimate object seems to move entirely on its own, with nothing pushing it, than when a person does.

Theory theorists believe that experience provides young children with information that cannot be accounted for by their present theory of mind, information that will eventually cause them to revise and improve that theory. The role of experience is viewed as similar to that in Piaget's equilibration theory: Experience engenders disequilibrium and eventually a new theory. Scientists stick to favoured theories in the face of contradictory evidence before abandoning them. The initial reaction of a theory to counterevidence may be denial. The interpretive mechanism of the theory may treat the counterevidence as noise, mess, not worth attending to. At a later stage the theory may develop ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses designed to account superficially for the counterevidence. But such auxiliary hypotheses undermine the theory's coherence. The theory gets ugly and messy. The preference for simple theories over complex ones plays a major role in theory change. The next step requires an alternative model to the original theory. An important feature of theory formation is a period of intense experimentation or observation.

The recognition of agency develops into one of intention. Infants do a variety of things that reflect a dawning awareness of intentionality, using communicative gestures to get you to do something and checking to see whether their attempts have succeeded, e.g. looking at, pointing to, holding up, or vocalizing about an object, following another person's direction of gaze. At 5 months infants who were habituated to a person grasping a particular object dishabituated more strongly to a change in goal object than to a change in the grasping movement. Between 9 and 12 months children expect a person looking at an object to manipulate that object and not another object. 12-month-olds expect a person to reach for an object that the person is looking at with positive affect rather than for another one to which the person is not attending. Fairly sharply around 18 months some drastic changes occur in children's understanding of goals and desires. Children observing a failed action, e.g. trying to pull one of the balls off a small dumbbell, then imitate the intended successful action, not the actually observed action. They must have inferred the intended goal.

Children seem to show some awareness of the mental state of desire by the end of infancy. 18 month olds were given the choice between a something they considered tasty and something they didn’t. The infants observed the experimenter express the opposite preference with clear vocal and facial expressions. 18 month olds were given the choice between a tasty cracker and a repulsive piece of broccoli. The infants observed one of the experimenters express the opposite preference supported by clear vocal and facial expressions (e.g., "Ugh, this cracker is yucky! Mmm, this broccoli is yummy."). Children were then requested by that person to hand her something to eat. Most of the younger half of 18 month olds handed her the crackers, whereas most of the older half handed her the broccoli. This implies an understanding of others’ desires being different to one’s own. Around 1.5 to 2 years of age, children use words that refer to internal states you can’t see. The states most commonly talked about at this early age relate to perception ("I see a car"), desires ("Want juice"), and emotions ("Those scare me"). Around age 2, children acquire a desire or internal-state psychology. This psychology includes a simple conception of desires, emotions and perceptual experience or attention. The conception is simple in that although mentalistic, it is non-representational. Desire is an intentional construct, but the ‘object’ of a desire is the object in the world that the desire is about, rather than a representation of the object in the head of the person. Beliefs are necessarily representational, as the ‘object’ of a belief is a proposition about an object, event or state of the world. “Doll wants rabbit”. 2-year-olds know doll’ll be happier if it gets what it wants but still give the rabbit the same beliefs as they hold, i.e. look for the rabbit where they themselves would. 2 year olds fail in cases that require the inferrer to attribute internal states whose ‘objects’ are not in the external world. A desire psychology will fail to offer an explanation of why two people with the same desire or the same person at different times may act in different ways, of why a person will act in a way which in fact frustrates their own desires, and will also fail to recognise surprise (rather than happiness) when a desire is satisfied.

By 3, children are 'reality psychologists', having a non-representational understanding of beliefs. Three year olds view believability and desirability as an objective feature of the world. By 3 years they’ll use cognitive terms like “think” and “know”. Children begin to talk about beliefs and thoughts as well as desires, and they seem to understand that beliefs are mental representations that can be false as well as true and can differ from person to person. By age 3 they grasp causal relations between desires, outcomes, emotions, and actions. This suggests they are developing something like an implicit theory. E.g. from 2-3 they can predict the emotion or action of a character that either finds, fails to find, or finds a substitute for, a desired object. 3 year olds don’t appreciate that people will act on their beliefs, even when they’re false, just if they’re true. They’re copy theorists, because they believe their beliefs copy the world. They have a copy understanding of representations. Representations are understood as derived directly from the object, exact copies of the reality that provided the representation. Three year olds are therefore able to predict and explain actions which result from either ignorance or incomplete knowledge, as with the former children think that there is no belief and thus no copy of reality, and in the latter that the person has a copy of reality which whilst incomplete is still a copy of the reality the child perceives.

At about age 4, children begin to understand that what people think and believe, as well as what they desire, crucially affects how they behave. 4 year olds pass the false belief task because they understand that people’s beliefs interpret the world, rather than are direct copies. They have an interpretive understanding of representations, i.e. they recognise that representations are interpretations of reality that may differ from person to person. This explains the sudden understanding that others’ beliefs may differ from one’s own as evidenced by the following task: Sally puts an object in box X and then departs. Someone else 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. This 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.

Our understanding of mental states develops into adulthood. E.g. when John thinks that Mary mistakenly thinks… are understood nearer 10 years of age. Children cannot really distinguish more complicated speech acts, like irony from lies. Lies as well as irony are false statements, and they are intended to be false by the speaker. The difference emerges at the second order level: irony is not intended to be believed. Faux pas are understood in one’s teens.

The fact that deaf children and those with autism are as adept as normal 4-year-olds at understanding the representational properties of photographs despite their poorer than normal comprehension of false belief suggests that the development of representational understanding is domain-specific, i.e. different in the physical and person domains. By watching a camera take a picture and viewing the photograph, a child can gain an understanding of the representational nature of photography nonverbally. In a similar way, conversationally restricted deaf or autistic children might be able to, by watching people and conversing about concrete objects, develop a simple "photographic" model of the human mind as a store of reality-based knowledge. This is also possibly what happens in normal 3-year-olds. Most parents of deaf children say that communication with their children is limited to topics with a visual reference. Such a limitation would prevent the mother from sharing any information about her false beliefs and other intangible mental states with her deaf child. In order to understand false belief and other mental states, you may need more sophisticated conversation. The link between language and capacities to explain and predict anothers’ behaviour is further illustrated by the fact that if given the false-belief task solely in verbal form (i.e. the child does not see where objects are hidden or moved to but is merely told so), 3 year olds succeed. If given the task purely in visual form with no verbal input –e.g., a silent film- then 4 and 5 year olds find the task difficult and it is only at close to 6 years that they succeed.

One piece of evidence that only the theory-theory can easily explain is the fact that there is a strong correlation between false-belief task performance and children’s realising their reflexive knee movement is involuntary. The knee-jerk reflex task can be explained using theory-theory’s “theory of mind” ideas of a child’s developing understanding in the domain of knowledge about one’s own thinking and others. Preschoolers are poor at determining when a person (self or other) is thinking and also what the person is and is not thinking about, even when the evidence is quite clear. They understand that thinking is an animates’ in-the-head activity that can take as its objects non-present and non-real things. They seem largely unaware of their own on-going inner speech and may not even know that speech can be covert. They are unaware of the stream of thinking in people who are conscious, e.g. preschoolers do not consistently attribute any mental activity at all to a person who just sits quietly. They do not assume that something must be going on in a person's mind, even when that person is looking at or listening to something, reading, or talking to another person. Younger children are inclined to attribute self-awareness and decision-making abilities to an unconscious person, e.g. most 5-year-olds, and few 8-year-olds and adults, say that people know they are asleep while they are deeply asleep and not dreaming. When a sleeping person stirs in response to a light touch but does not wake up, older children and adults believe that the sleeper sort of felt it but did not consciously think that he or she had been touched; in contrast, preschoolers usually say that the person would experience the conscious thought as well as the low-level feeling. When preschoolers are asked to report their own mental activity they also have difficulties. A group of 5-9 year olds sat in the special “Don’t Think chair” and were told not to think for a while. After a while they were moved over to the normal chair and were asked: "While you were sitting over there in that Don’t Think chair, you tried not to have any thoughts. What happened? Did you have no thoughts at all or did you have some thoughts anyway?" Very few 5-year olds but most 8 year olds and adults admit to having had some thoughts.

The metarepresentation account has an advantage over the other theories in explaining why there’s a roughly two-year age gap between children's comprehension of pretence and their comprehension of false-belief, deception, appearance-reality, and different perceptual perspectives. The metarepresentation account says that pretend play isn’t particularly important for theory of mind development. Pretend play doesn’t require the ability to metareprepresent therefore kids younger than 3 can do it. The modular hypothesis has it that understanding of pretence and understanding false beliefs are both mediated by Leslie's theory of mind mechanisms. The off-line simulation theory says 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 advantage is also a failure, because earlier social flexibility in pretend play correlates with theory-of-mind task performance. Autistic children suffer a deficit in the capacity for pretend-play.

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