Language in Mind

Theory of Mind and the Psychoanalytic Model

A capacity to act for reasons is a key indicator of intelligence. A leaf floats this way and that as the wind currents shift, a drone moves up or down with the movements of its controller, but a cognitive agent decides to walk to the store to get some food. This deliberative capacity to think through hypothetical situations, to choose between the grocery store or the restaurant, requires representational intentionality, the ability to think about real and possible situations in the world. According to the mainstream zeitgeist in the cognitive sciences, this capacity exhaustively reduces to lower level processes and, as a consequence, cognitive research has been driven increasingly inwards and downwards to focus on activity at the neural and molecular levels. Here, Nancy Salay argues that this move is deeply misguided. After revealing the central problems with this internalist idea, Salay puts forward an externalist paradigm of intentionality supported by recent empirical work in neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, animal cognition and developmental psychology. Drawing all of these insights together, she provides a unified framework in which to situate externalist views of intentionality, making progress towards a viable theory of cognition. This is a comprehensive theoretical guide and a valuable empirical resource for those who view cognition through an extended and enactive lens.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 crystallized the concern for accountability in education. National testing was mandated as a way to improve the “broken” educational system. Publicly funded early education programs were not spared from such testing. While the positive effects of high-quality early education on children’s later school achievement is well demonstrated, too many early care and educational settings in the United States are of minimal or poor quality. Accountability is clearly important for increasing the quality of our early childhood programs, however, it is not yet evident how best to formulate a standard of accountability that reflects the body of knowledge we have gained concerning how young children learn. In this report, we propose two major thrusts designed to bring about a more scientifically informed accountability system: reconceptualizing the ways in which we think about the validity of our test instruments, and reconceptualizing markers of development from products of learning (performance standards) to processes of learning. We introduce the term “empirical validity” to draw attention to the fact that assessments should be built on current empirical work in the various developmental domains. This report focuses on the domains of language and literacy, two areas of major concern for the Federal Head Start program and for which there is an abundance of current research. This body of knowledge provides many examples illustrating how an emphasis on process rather than product can be vital for improving the quality of education. For example, although vocabulary is centrally important and psychometrically adequate tests of early vocabulary exist, these tests do not measure essential aspects of word learning that have been identified as predictive of later language and reading success in early language learning literature. Our case study of language and literacy illustrates how today’s developmental science offers a new knowledge that can be strategically incorporated in assessments for empirically valid testing of children’s competencies. The same argument for “empirically valid” and evidence-based assessments applies to other domains of cognitive growth and to socio-emotional development. The future of preschool assessment would be well served by attention to primary research that focuses on the processes of learning. In this report, we also suggest that one possible avenue for progress in assessment would center on integrative and dynamic assessment techniques that would comprehensively capture the nature of children’s learning, minimize validity concerns related to context and culture, and evaluate how competencies in different developmental domains interact for optimal learning. To bridge the gap between science and policy, developmental scientists and test developers are urged to work together to create innovative ways to chart the developmental processes that support learning and progress toward social maturity in ways designed to ensure that research findings are continuously reflected in current assessments.

The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species

It has been argued (e.g., by De Villiers and colleagues) that the acquisition of sentence embedding is necessary for the development of first-order Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to attribute beliefs to others. This raises the question whether the acquisition of double embedded sentences is related to, and perhaps even necessary for, the development of second-order ToM: the ability to attribute beliefs about beliefs to others. This study tested 55 children (aged 7-10) on their ToM understanding in a false-belief task and on their elicited production of sentence embeddings. We found that second-order ToM passers produced mainly double embeddings, whereas first-order ToM passers produced mainly single embeddings. Furthermore, a better performance on second-order ToM predicted a higher rate of double embeddings and a lower rate of single embeddings in the production task. We conclude that children’s ability to produce double embeddings is related to their development of second-order ToM.

The development of thinking with all its different aspects is not alone a theme of cognitive psychology, but more and more of developmental psychology, in particular with psychoanalytic background. At the latest since the important work by Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist and Target (2004) we are aware of the possible impact of an impaired mentalisation capacity for psychic development. In this article we discuss three aspects of thinking: narrative competence, representations and mentalisation and theory of mind; we will limit ourselves to children in first and second year of Kindergarten who are between 5 and 6 years old. The narrative competence is a really rich and interesting construct as well as a psychic ability connecting cognitive and affective aspects in a most interesting way. Representations of relationships are the main issue of several theories in developmental psychology. The concept of theory of mind has become very significant in cognitive psychology. After a detailed introduction of the central concepts, in the empiric part we will show how aspects of narrative competence are associated with advanced theory of mind skills. Children having passed a theory of mind test respond more to the conflict of the story and show less avoidant strategies in their narratives. Further analyses revealed that only girls showed the expected differences. Therefore an advanced theory of mind capacity gives girls a scope for development to get involved with more difficult conflicts in stories, which enables them to work through more contentious situations.

Summary : Common sense, cognitive psychology and the philosophy of psychology : Beliefs, materialism and externalism. Concepts of propositional altitudes such as intentions, beliefs, desires, are common sense psychological concepts. According to some philosophers and psychologists, they are part of a folk or naive psychological theory. However, such concepts are also used in the scientific psychological study of deductive and inductive reasoning, cognitive dissonance and in "theories of mind". Beliefs and propositional attitudes have contents or intentional properties. And they are supposed to be causes of intentional actions or behavior. The philosophical problem dealt with in this paper arises front the tension between two views : on the one hand, it is plausible to assume that causation is a local process. On the other hand, most contemporary philosophers of mind accept an externalist view of content (or intentional properties) of beliefs such that intentional properties are not local properties of an individual's brain. The basic dilemma one faces is thus the following : either revise the assumption that intentional properties of beliefs are relevant to the causal explanation of intentional actions or behavior ; or revise the assumption that local properties of an individual's brain are relevant to the causal explanation of an individual's intentional actions. Key-words : intentionality, functionalism, externalism, physicalism, causal explanation.

Does the language you speak affect the way you think? According to the Principle of Linguistic Relativity, it does. Whether, however, the principle holds, has for several decades been one of the most controversial issues in cognitive science (for overviews, see Lucy, 1997; Wolff & Holmes, 2011). At the risk of oversimplifying its history, ideas linked to linguistic relativity can be traced back to philosophical writings in the German Romanticism of the 19th century (such as by Wilhelm von Humboldt) and became more widely known when ethno-linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated on them in their scientific work in the first half of the 20th century. While popular in the humanities, the proposition that speakers of different languages might perceive the world differently was untenable in early cognitive science. It was regarded as incommensurate with the assumption of a unified mind operating on a universal language of thought and hence simply inconceivable. When linguistic relativity eventually was put on the agenda in the 1990s (Gumperz & Levinson, 1991; Lucy, 1992), it was still met with substantial dissent (e.g., Pinker, 1994; overview in Gleitman & Papafragou, 2005); and although the antagonism of the early days has since given way to a more constructive exchange in which both opponents and supporters are increasingly seeking the middle ground and are even beginning to collaborate (e.g., Malt & Majid, 2013; Regier & Kay, 2009), the topic remains hotly debated. The current issue of Topics in Cognitive Science aims to make a productive contribution to this debate, both in format and content. In terms of format, this topic is one of only two that the journal has published featuring a target article, followed by a range of commentaries and a response to those commentaries by the author of the target article. This setup, known from Current Anthropology and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is ideal for assembling multiple perspectives on controversial topics of broad interest across disciplines. The target article around which the current issue is structured (Kemmerer, 2023), is authored by linguist David Kemmerer (Purdue University, US). He develops a theoretical argument in support of linguistic relativity as deriving from the Grounded Cognition Model, a theory on conceptual knowledge that is highly influential within cognitive science. The argument entails a novel prediction that has the potential to inspire new experimental work across a range of academic communities that work on topics as diverse as perception, action, memory, emotion, language, culture, development, and evolution. For bringing together responses across such a wide field, Topics in Cognitive Science is the optimal forum. And, indeed, the eight commentaries accompanying this target article do reflect a wide variety of perspectives, authored by scholars who represent research communities on four continents and from across the social sciences, information sciences, and cognitive sciences, including linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Credit for this topic goes to Asifa Majid (Oxford University, UK), a member of the Senior Editorial Board of Topics in Cognitive Science, who herself is a pioneer and leading figure in this subfield of cognitive science. She has been a strong voice for taking (linguistic) diversity and its consequences for cognition seriously (Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson, 2004), and yet she is also respected across camps for placing empirical evidence higher than theoretical ideology and for remaining open to a middle ground (e.g., Majid, 2021; Malt, Gennari, Imai, Ameel, Tsuda, & Majid, 2008). It was she who recruited the target article from David Kemmerer for Topics in Cognitive Science, suggested the format, handled the reviewing process, invited the commentaries with a clear objective for diversity, and monitored the compilation of the entire topic. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).

Does the search for perlocutionary effectiveness (getting people to agree with a claim, to buy a product, etc.) without truth or morality playing a decisive role constitute what some call manipulation? Precisely because he is interested in the mechanisms of persuasion, Steve Oswald has woven links between cognitive science and rhetoric around this notion. Drawing on theories of cognitive pragmatics and work in psychology, this researcher goes off the beaten track of rhetoric by opening what is for many a black box: the question of the effects of discursive strategies. He has approached this question first by attempting to explain the mechanism theoretically, but more recently also experimentally. Examining the question of rhetorical effects in this way makes it possible not only to revitalise the discipline by documenting the intuitions or empirical findings of the old rhetoricians, but also to build bridges between approaches that sometimes ignore each other: informal logic, cognitive psychology, cognitive pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

Thomas Suddendorf

Book Review| October 01 2013 Animals Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures. By Virginia Morell. 2013. Crown Publishers. (ISBN 9780307461445). 291 pp. Hardback. $26.00. [Due out in paperback in early 2014.] Gail Baker Gail Baker 1Lane Community College, Eugene, OR 97405 bakerg@lanecc.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The American Biology Teacher (2013) 75 (8): 591–592. https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2013.75.8.13 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gail Baker; Animals. The American Biology Teacher 1 October 2013; 75 (8): 591–592. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2013.75.8.13 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe American Biology Teacher Search “The question now is not ‘Do animals think?’ It’s ‘How and what do they think?’” With this statement, Virginia Morell sets the theme of her book and the path of inquiry explored by the scientists she interviewed. To answer the latter question, researchers study ants, fish, birds, rats, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, dogs, and wolves. Each chapter introduces us to an animal group and associated cognitive studies. We also meet the scientists and learn about the challenges and controversies with which they grapple. It takes creativity, passion, and dedication to the years of observation required to design and implement compelling scientific studies about cognition. We have to be satisfied with the journey of discovery in this field because there are only tentative emerging answers to the how and maybe the what of animal thought. Two other interesting themes in this book are how changes and biases in the process of scientific... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods that are non-verbal, and thus might easily be labelled 'implicit' using the terminology of traditional human cognition. However, comparative psychology has developed several non-verbal methods that are designed to test for aspects of meta-cognition that - while perhaps not fully explicit - go beyond the merely implicit or associative. We believe similar methods might be useful to developmental researchers who work with young children, and may provide a sound empirical alternative to verbal reports. Comparative psychology has moved away from all-or-none categorical labels (e.g., 'implicit' vs. 'explicit') towards a theoretical framework that contains a spectrum of mental abilities ranging from implicit to explicit, and from associative to cognitive to fully conscious. We discuss how this same framework might be applied to developmental psychology when it comes to implicit versus explicit processing and ToM.

abduction action activation/inhibition ageing animal cognition artificial life aspect attention autism automatism belief cate gorization causality, mental causation cognitive development cognitive psychiatry cognitivism communication competence, performance complexity computational analysis concept connectionism consciousness constrai nt constructivism context and situation control counterfactual creativity desire d ifferentiation discourse distributed intelligence domain specificity dualism, monism emergence emotion epiphenomenalism epistemic epistemology experience explanation expressiveness ex ternalism, internalism foetal cognition frame problem function functional neuroimaging functionalism fuzzy goal-directed behaviour grammar holism identity individualism infa nt cognition information inheritance intentionality inte raction interpretation introduction (of Dictionary) introspection knowledge acquisition knowledge base language language of thought learning lexicon localization of function logic logicism, psychologism meaning memory mental imagery metacognition mind modality model modularity morphology naturalization neural Darwinism neural network neuropsychology normativity number object or al pattern recognition perception phenomenalism physicalism prag matics problem solving propositional attitude propositional format psychophysics qualia qualitative physics reading realism reasoning and rationality reductionism relevance representational r obotics schizophrenia semantic case, thematic relation semantic network semantics semiotics sense sense, reference sign social cognition space subdoxastic supervenience symbol syn tax text theory of mind time and tense truth Turing machine type, token validation will writing

In cognitive psychology, studies concerning the face tend to focus on questions about face recognition, theory of mind (ToM) and empathy. Questions about the face, however, also fit into a very different set of issues that are central to ethics. Based especially on the work of Levinas, philosophers have come to see that reference to the face of another person can anchor conceptions of moral responsibility and ethical demand. Levinas points to a certain irreducibility and transcendence implicit in the face of the other. In this paper I argue that the notion of transcendence involved in this kind of analysis can be given a naturalistic interpretation by drawing on recent interactive approaches to social cognition found in developmental psychology, phenomenology, and the study of autism.

This interdisciplinary research, drawing on cognitive psychology and linguistics, extended to middle childhood past research during early childhood or adulthood on thinking aloud prior to written composing. In year 5 of a longitudinal study of typical writing, when cohort 1 was in grade 5 (n = 110 ten year-olds) and cohort 2 in grade 7 (n = 97 twelve year-olds), a cross-sectional study was conducted. Children were first asked to think aloud while they generated ideas and second while they planned their essays to express and defend their opinions on a controversial topic in the region of the United States where they lived. Third, they wrote their essays. Their think-aloud protocols were audio-recorded and later transcribed into writing for analysis. The authors developed and applied rating scales for quality of idea generating and planning in the written transcriptions and quality of opinion expression, opinion defense, organization, and content in the essays children wrote after thinking aloud; total number of words in essays was also counted. Seventh graders scored significantly higher than fifth graders on quality of idea generation but not planning, and higher on all variables rated for quality in the written essays including length. Quality of expressing opinions and defending opinions were uncorrelated in grade 5, but moderately correlated in grade 7. Whether idea generating or planning quality explained unique variance in essays varied with coded written essay variables and grade. Educational applications of results for assessment, assessment-instruction links, instruction in social studies, and theory of mind in persuasive essay writing are discussed.