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Mindreading as social expertise

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Abstract

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading.

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Notes

  1. Evidence for implicit false belief understanding in children as young as 11 months obviously puts pressure on this argument (Michael 2011; for overviews of this research, see Apperly and Butterfill 2009; Bahrami et al. 2010).

  2. Which depends on how narrowly one understands ‘mindreading’. For discussion, see Gordon (2008).

  3. Although this characterization is obviously a gross oversimplification, it does serve to highlight the contrasting profiles that we are interested in here.

  4. This must be qualified: most of the research has focused on syntax, phonology and semantics, while relatively little work has been done on pragmatics (Cf. Brock et al. 2008).

  5. These results are in contrast with earlier findings reported by Karmiloff-Smith et al. (1995), who found that individuals with WS performed well on a series of theory of mind tests. However, the participants in Karmiloff-Smith’s earlier study ranged in age from 9 to 23 years—well beyond the age at which children generally pass such tasks. In Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan’s study (2000; see also Tager-Flusberg et al. 1997) the success rate for four- to nine-year-old children with WS was only 24–29 %—significantly lower than in the two comparison groups, even though the children with WS had higher verbal mental ages. The more recent findings are also corroborated by a further study in which children with WS were found to have greater difficulties (compared to the same control groups) in a task that involved reasoning about mental states, e.g. when asked to judge whether a character in a story was lying or joking (Sullivan et al. 2003). Moreover, in the same study, when asked to justify their interpretations , they made significantly fewer references to mental states than the children in the other two groups (Cf. Reilly et al. 2004 for similar results).

  6. It might be suggested that the joint attention deficits of individuals with WS show that they do not have fully developed ‘smart’ social-perceptual abilities. Admittedly, such a response cannot be ruled out, but it would be hostage to empirical findings that are not entirely straightforward. Note, first of all, that not all studies have found joint attention deficits in children and adults with WS. Gyori et al. (2004) tested 14 participants with WS (9–22 years) and found that they were almost as good as controls at following a speaker’s gaze when determining the object to which the speaker was referring. Where children with WS seem above all to differ from typically developing children is in the use of, and response to, the pointing gesture (Laing et al. 2002). In part, this may simply reflect the fact that they are much less interested in objects than in people (Laing et al. 2002, p. 239; cf. Mervis et al. 2003). Alternatively, it may reflect a difficulty inhibiting their tendency to look at faces, i.e. the kind of higher-level deficit we are suggesting is needed in order to make use of smart perception. Moreover, it might also be because pointing depends on social representational skills that go beyond social perception (Franco and Butterworth 1996). These findings would thus not necessarily undermine the suggestion that individuals with WS have relatively spared social-perceptual abilities of the sort highlighted by Gallagher. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this objection).

  7. This suggestion echoes the James-Lange theory of emotions: according to the James-Lange theory, one perceives one’s own bodily changes and thereby experiences an emotion; according to the present suggestion, one experiences one’s own bodily changes and thereby makes a judgment about the other person’s emotions or intentions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Subjectivity Research University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    John Michael

  2. Macquarie University, University Avenue, Macquarie Park, Sydney, 2113, Australia

    Wayne Christensen

  3. Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Søren Overgaard

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  1. John Michael
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  2. Wayne Christensen
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  3. Søren Overgaard
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Correspondence to John Michael.

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Michael, J., Christensen, W. & Overgaard, S. Mindreading as social expertise. Synthese 191, 817–840 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0295-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0295-z

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