A Different Approach

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Earlier I mentioned this way of setting up the debate. If you think about the requirements, I think you can see that this is not a productive way to shape the debate.

What do infants, chimps and scrub-jays reason about, or represent, that enables them, within limits, to track others’ perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and other propositional attitudes?

The standard debate

-- Is it mental states?

-- Or only behaviours?

What models of minds and actions, and of behaviours,

and what kinds of processes,

underpin mental state tracking in different animals?

In answering this question, we need to satisfy three requirements ...

Requirement 3: Predict Dissociations

Let me explain by pointing to some cases in which chimpanzees fail to track others’ beliefs according to one measure but may succeed according to another ...

Krachun et al, 2009 figure 2 (part)

Chimpanzee anticipatory looking indicates tracking others’ false beliefs.

“Looking. Our second measure was whether participants looked at least once at the container the competitor was not reaching for during the couple of seconds it took E to slide the platform towards them.” “Note that proportions are based only on trials in which participants chose the same container as the competitor [ie: incorrect trials], and for apes in version A the measure was face rather than eye orientation. Bars show standard error. * p < .05.”

Contrast performance on a competitive object choice task. Ropey looking time measure, but nice to have looking time and action measures for a single scenario.

[NB: This quote is from another paper.]

This seems reasonable: just as there are dissociations among different measures of mindreading in adults, and developmental dissociations, so it is plausible that there will turn out to be dissociations concerning the tasks that adult humans and adult nonhumans can pass.

Requirement 3: Predict Dissociations

Which tasks should chimps and jays pass and fail?

This requires a theory of processes

Requirement 2: Models

The second question concerns how various individuals (or systems within them) model minds and actions. Let me explain with an illustration ...

‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge,

Call & Tomasello, 2008 p.~191

‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge,’ but ‘chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology’ \citet[p.~191]{Call:2008di}.

After claiming that ‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge,’ \citet{Call:2008di} qualify their claim by adding that ‘chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology’ (p.~191).

This is true. The emergence in human development of the most sophisticated abilities to represent mental states probably depends on rich social interactions involving conversation about the mental \citep{Slaughter:1996fv, peterson:2003_opening, moeller:2006_relations}, on linguistic abilities \citep{milligan:2007_language,kovacs:2009_early}, (\citet[p.~760]{moeller:2006_relations}: ‘Our results provide support for the concept that access to conversations about the mind is important for deaf children’s ToM development, in that there was a significant relationship between maternal talk about mental states and deaf children’s performance on verbal ToM tasks.’) and on capacities to attend to, hold in mind and inhibit things \citep{benson:2013_individual, devine:2014_relations}. These are all scarce or absent in chimpanzees and other nonhumans. So it seems unlikely that the ways humans at their most reflective represent mental states will match the ways nonhumans represent mental states. Reflecting on how adult humans talk about mental states is no way to understand how others represent them. But then what could enable us to understand how nonhuman animals represent mental states?

Requirement 2: Models

How do chimps or jays variously model minds and actions?

‘Nonhumans represent mental states’ is not a hypothesis

... or at least not one that generates readily testable predictions.

‘the core theoretical problem in contemporary research on animal mindreading is that the bar—the conception of mindreading that dominates the field—is too low, or more specifically, that it is too underspecified to allow effective communication among researchers, and reliable identification of evolutionary precursors of human mindreading through observation and experiment’

\citep[p.~318]{heyes:2014_animal}

Heyes, 2014, p. 318

Requirement 2: Models

Requirement 1: Diversity in Strategies

Requirement:

We can distinguish,

both within an individual

and between individuals,

mindreading which involves representing mental states

from

mindreading which does not.

Three Requirements

1. Diversity in Strategies

2. Models

3. Predict Dissociations

What models of minds and actions, and of behaviours,

and what kinds of processes,

underpin mental state tracking in different animals?

Way forward:

1. Construct a theory of behaviour reading

2. Construct a theory of mindreading

This would be the logical place to start, but like the BBC I want to educate, inform *and* entertain so ...

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