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Mindreading in adults: evaluating two-systems views

  • S.I.: Future of Social Cognition
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Abstract

A number of convergent recent findings with adults have been interpreted as evidence of the existence of two distinct systems for mindreading that draw on separate conceptual resources: one that is fast, automatic, and inflexible; and one that is slower, controlled, and flexible. The present article argues that these findings admit of a more parsimonious explanation. This is that there is a single set of concepts made available by a mindreading system that operates automatically where it can, but which frequently needs to function together with domain-specific executive procedures (such as visually rotating an image to figure out what someone else can see) as well as domain-general resources (including both long-term and working memory). This view, too, can be described as a two-systems account. But in this case one of the systems encompasses the other, and the conceptual resources available to each are the same.

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Notes

  1. The explanation sketched here is similar to that provided by Baillargeon et al. (2010), except that it emphasizes the three-way connection between language, executive function, and mindreading, and not just among the latter two.

  2. I gather that a response to these criticisms is forthcoming from Kovács and colleagues. They point out that the printed feedback at the bottom of the screen that accompanied the attention-checks used by Phillips et al. (2015) proved highly distracting, to the point where the resulting data failed even to show any effect of the participants own beliefs. Small wonder, then, that there should have been no effect of the avatar’s beliefs either, in these circumstances.

  3. In contrast with the Kovács et al. (2010) findings, the effect of the avatar’s belief is much smaller than the agent’s own when analyzed using this continuous measure, which could also explain why Phillips et al. (2015) were unable to find any evidence of it using a discrete measure.

  4. While these earlier methods likewise demonstrated task-independent belief-based action prediction, there was no accompanying primary task and no measure of subjects’ awareness. Hence although belief-tracking was task-independent, it is possible that it was nevertheless deliberate and hence neither automatic nor spontaneous.

  5. Note that on this account no special representational resources are required to represent a false belief. Truth and falsity can remain implicit in the procedures for updating, or for not updating, an agent’s belief when circumstances change while the agent is either present or absent. And it may be that infants, too, represent true and false beliefs without predicating truth and falsity as such. (The latter concepts can at some point be introduced through a pair of straightforward definitions: S has a true belief that P = P & S believes that P; S has a false belief that P = not-P & S believes that P. No radical conceptual change—in the sense of Carey (2009)—is therefore required.) This might lead some people to deny that infants are representing beliefs as such. It might be claimed that only when children acquire concepts of truth and falsity and come to understand explicitly that beliefs can be false do they really represent beliefs as such. But as Carruthers (2015) argues at length, this sort of maneuver is merely definitional, and does nothing to support a two-systems account. For it can be the very same representations that are present in infancy that are gradually elaborated and enriched as the child learns more and more about the mind (and acquires explicit concepts of truth and falsity). And then in adulthood, too, people may tap into more or less of this rich body of knowledge depending on task demands. It can still be the same belief-representation that figures both in implicit tasks of the sort discussed in Sect. 3 and also in Sherlock–Holmes-type cases where one reflects consciously about someone’s false beliefs while drawing on a much richer body of background knowledge.

  6. Whether they get consolidated in long-term memory or slowly fade away—hence belonging to what is sometimes called “long-term working memory” (Ericsson and Kintsch 1995)—is another matter, of course, depending on levels of emotional engagement and other factors.

  7. In addition, the account sketched here comports nicely with the finding that people with autistic spectrum disorder do not display implicit false-belief understanding, although they can solve the very same tasks explicitly (Senju et al. 2009). It may be that such people either fail to encode beliefs automatically, or they do not have the standing goal of predicting agents’ behavior, or both.

  8. Of course others, too, have claimed that mindreading depends partly on executive resources (e.g. Carlson et al. 2002, 2004). But this has been in connection with explicit (mostly verbal) mindreading tasks, which will make quite different demands on executive systems. As noted in Sect. 1, explicit tasks require participants to juggle and prioritize representations of the target agent’s mental states, representations of the questioner’s intent, and representations of the likely effect of their own replies on the mind of the questioner. None of this is true of implicit tasks. Nor are implicit tasks likely to require inhibition of a prepotent response.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Peter Carruthers

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Carruthers, P. Mindreading in adults: evaluating two-systems views. Synthese 194, 673–688 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0792-3

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