Abstract
In contrast with the two dominant views in Theory of Mind development, the Perceptual Access Reasoning hypothesis of Fabricius and colleagues is that children don’t understand the mental state of belief until around 6 years of age. Evidence for this includes data that many children ages 4 and 5, who pass the standard 2-location false belief task, nonetheless fail the true belief task, and often fail a 3-location false belief task by choosing the irrelevant option. These findings can be explained by the PAR hypothesis but pose challenges for the two dominant views. I argue against an alternate hypothesis which is proposed by Anika Fiebich in a recent paper. According to Fiebich, PAR is not a distinct transitional stage in children’s theory of mind development, but is a fast and frugal System 1 heuristic which fades once children become fluent in social reasoning. However, I point out a number of problems with Fiebich’s proposal and argue for the superiority of the PAR hypothesis. I also present five reasons to be skeptical about the findings of Perner and Horn which purportedly show that 4- and 5-year-olds can pass the 3-location false belief task when suitably modified. This is a further difficulty for Fiebich’s proposal, since she relies on these findings in her fluency theory. Finally, I sketch a dual systems theory of mind account based upon the PAR hypothesis which is different from Fiebich’s.
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Notes
For example, Henry Wellman, one of the pioneers of the ToM field, and his colleagues recently write (Wellman et al. 2011)…
Our measure of theory of mind is a battery of false belief tasks. Explicit false-belief understanding is a milestone, universal theory-of-mind achievement of the preschool years (Wellman et al. 2001), and is the most commonly used measure in research examining individual differences in theory of mind during the preschool years… (p. 321)
Perner and Horn (2003) tested the PAR hypothesis using a variation of the three-alternative false belief procedure designed to be simpler than that used by Fabricius and Khalil, and they concluded that their findings refuted the hypothesis. However, I provide a number of reasons to doubt these findings in Section 4.1 below.
Dennett (1978), Harman (1978), Bennett (1978), and Pylyshyn (1978), commenting on studies of chimpanzee theory of mind, all suggested that an adequate test of belief understanding should involve the ability to predict the actions of an agent with a false belief. The false belief task (Wimmer and Perner 1983) was based upon the suggestions of these philosophers. Some philosophers had already stressed the importance of understanding false belief in order to count as having the concept BELIEF; Donald Davidson (1975), e.g., argues that “Someone cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires grasping the contrast between truth and error—true belief and false belief” (p. 170).
Other versions of the false and true belief tasks were used by Fabricius and Khalil (2003) and Fabricius et al. (2010), but they have been left out of this streamlined exposition in order to keep it simple. These included for example the false contents or “Smarties” task (Hogrefe et al. 1986), the appearance/reality or false identity task (Flavell et al. 1983), and modified versions of these as true belief tasks (Fabricius et al. 2010). For descriptions and discussion see also Hedger and Fabricius (2011) and Fiebich (2014).
Of course, according to Perner and Horn (2003) children use BR consistently at this stage, and according to Fabricius and colleagues children use PAR consistently at this stage, while Fiebich’s idea contains a switching back and forth between the two reasoning strategies, depending upon the task. I am tempted to appeal to parsimony here, but I’m also aware that these sorts of debates all too often become an irreconcilable conflict of intuitions, and so I set that worry aside for the remainder of the paper.
For those interested in the details, the standard 2-option false contents task (or Smarties task) is a second false belief task (Hogrefe et al. 1986). The child is shown a familiar candy container, such as an M&M bag, and asked what he thinks is inside. After the child says “M&M’s,” it is revealed that something unexpected is inside, such as a pencil. After the pencil is placed back inside the bag, the subject is informed that a friend of the experimenter’s (named “Elmo” e.g.,) is waiting outside. The test question is: “If he just looks at it, what will Elmo think is inside the bag?” The correct answer is to attribute to Elmo a false belief that M&M’s are inside the bag. The “typical box” task of Perner and Horn (2003) followed this procedure, except that in the 3-option version the protagonist removes the pencil and exchanges it with a pebble before asking the test question. This was similar to the 3-option contents task used by Fabricius and Khalil (2003), and in both studies some subjects chose the irrelevant option (a pencil in this particular case), which is consistent with what the PAR hypothesis would predict. (A child using PAR should reason that Elmo doesn’t see what’s inside the container, and therefore won’t know what’s in the container and will “get it wrong.” Thus, given a forced choice she should choose randomly between the false belief contents and the irrelevant contents, since both options are incorrect.) In the neutral box task of Perner and Horn (2003), a plain box with no markings or color was used in place of the familiar candy container.
Out of 21 subjects, 14 passed the two option location task and 8 passed each of the two versions of the two option contents tasks (for a total of 16 out of 42). Subjects also found the three option location task to be much easier than the three option contents tasks.
Perner and Horn (2003) admit that they don’t have an explanation for this anomaly (p. 269).
It has long been pointed out by anti-realists that we find widespread disagreement amongst professional philosophers, and yet we seem to find no discomfort or attempt to reconcile beliefs in Western philosophy’s 2700 year history. The same is true in the political sphere, or at any time when people are aware of disagreeing with someone else.
I must admit, however, that as an anonymous reviewer points out this evidence is only suggestive and not decisive. Nonetheless, I do not find the reviewer’s examples convincing. For instance, it is suggested that agents can be conscious of a process which is not under conscious control, such as a knee-jerk reflex. The issue though is that although subjects can be aware of the outputs of these processes, they are not aware of the processing itself. For example, people are aware that they recognize faces and judge language strings as ungrammatical. However, subjects are unable to report about how they do it. In contrast, subjects in Fabricius et al. (2010) are not only aware of the predictions about where Maxi will look (and the judgments about what Maxi knows)—i.e., the outputs of PAR reasoning—they are also aware of the steps of the reasoning itself, and the process by which they arrive at those predictions and judgments.
He also says in Chapter 5 that repeated experience is a cause of cognitive ease.
I strongly disagree with this manner of speaking, because I don’t think a child using RR or PAR thinks or attributes anything about beliefs; but I’ll reluctantly adopt it throughout the rest of this paragraph for ease of explanation. However, if the PAR hypothesis is correct (and children at this stage aren’t reasoning about beliefs), then this provides another reason to reject the dissonance story.
Of course, the concept used by children in the PAR stage of development is not the same concept of knowledge used by adults. The limited conceptions of perception and knowledge used in PAR is an important topic, but one that would take us too far astray from the main points of this paper.
In other words, Rule A may exist simultaneously in adult cognition along with BR, along the lines of a Dual Systems model such as Kahneman (2011). This could be tested by using the “eye gaze” methodology developed for children under 4 years of age (Clements and Perner 1994; Garnham and Perner 2001; Garnham and Ruffman 2001; Ruffman et al. 2001), in which they have passed two-option false belief tasks by showing unconscious anticipatory looking to the correct location. However, in order to know whether correct anticipatory looking in the false belief task indicates attribution of false beliefs or use of Rule A, the methodology needs to include a true belief task in which there is some interruption in the agent’s connection to the situation that is comparable to what occurs in the false belief task. The previous eye gaze studies have not included such true belief tasks.
Although the sketch of a dual-systems account presented here is superficially similar to the one proposed by Fiebich (2014), they are importantly different for at least four reasons: According to my proposal (but not Fiebich’s) (1) Rule A and PAR are distinct psychological mechanisms, (2) when using a conscious process as in a psychological test such as the verbal false belief task, subjects will use the effortful, deliberative reasoning process, (3) this latter process is different depending upon which stage of theory of mind development a subject is in—RR, PAR, or BR, and (4) the features that might make a BR subject revert to Rule A would be perhaps time constraints or anticipatory looking procedures, but not features of a particular task. Thus, 3-year-olds fail the 2-location false belief task when tested using a verbal report method (by using RR), but pass using an AL measure (by using Rule A).
The PAR/ Rule A hypothesis also seems to be consistent with the general considerations raised by De Bruin and Newen (2014), although I am unsure about the specifics of their Association Module/ Operating System account (but see footnote 21 below).
On the hypothesis that ToM ability is the result of a module, see Baron-Cohen (1995), Carruthers (2013) and Leslie (1994). The details of Baron-Cohen’s view are unimportant for our purposes, but it should perhaps be noted that his model includes four separate mindreading components, some of which (e.g., the Shared Attention Mechanism) are impaired in ASD while others (such as the Intentionality Detector) remain intact (Baron-Cohen 1995).
Neurotypical adults did demonstrate anticipatory looking toward the correct location during the false belief task (which they also verbally passed), but a true belief task was not used in this study.
See Perner and Ruffman (2005) for one attempt to salvage the Traditional View in light of the infant studies; I argue against this putative explanation in an unpublished manuscript.
Insofar as the Rule A conjecture and Carey’s explanation are correct, that would seem to be evidence against Georgieff and Jeannerod (1998)’s shared representation hypothesis that perception systems and action systems utilize the same representational space. Because of this, the PAR Hypothesis dual-systems account may be incompatible with the specifics of De Bruin and Newen (2014)’s proposal (see e.g. p. 307).
As an anonymous reviewer points out, Fiebich (2014) proposes an empirical test of her Fluency hypothesis (pp. 941–942). I believe that the reasoning in Section 4 of this paper is sufficient to show that the hypothesis is implausible, but even if one disagrees with that, there are other problems with the first of Fiebich’s experimental paradigms. First she suggests testing whether 4- and 5-year-olds experience more cognitive strain in the 2-location false belief task than in the true belief task of Fabricius et al. (2010). The difficulty here is that, first, I’m not sure that there are accepted objective signals of cognitive strain in general, much less in children. Second, even if we did find more cognitive strain in the false belief task, that would not in any way count as evidence against the PAR hypothesis.
She also suggests adding variables that induce cognitive strain to the true belief task in order to test whether that allows 4- and 5-year-olds to pass. Again, even if this test confirmed Fiebich’s hypothesis I’m not sure that would count as evidence against PAR, but I do accept that it would perhaps lend support to the fluency hypothesis, if the internal inconsistencies of the theory could somehow be resolved. If we indeed found that making a task more difficult improved the performance of 4- and 5-year-olds, then that would seem to at least be evidence for a 2-systems account of some kind or other, and could perhaps be some evidence against the Rule A 2-systems proposal of Hedger and Fabricius (2011).
Thanks to Bill Fabricius, Bob Van Gulick, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Jesse Prinz for a helpful conversation about this project.
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Hedger, J.A. Perceptual access reasoning: developmental stage or system 1 heuristic?. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 207–226 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9412-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9412-4