Mental State Attribution Research Articles

The Civil and Criminal Applications of the Identification Doctrine: Arguments for Harmonization

The identification doctrine refers to the attribution of mental states to a corporation. This article analyzes the two types of situations in which this doctrine is used. Tlte first is where the Crown wishes to hold a corporation liable for crimes requiring proof of mental fault. Canadian Dredge & Dock Co. Ltd. v. R. serves as the cornerstone case in which the doctrine is firmly established as a "sword" against corporations in the criminal law. The second situation in which the doctrine has been used is where the corporation sues in tort, and the defendant wishes to say that the mental state of the plaintiff corporation disentitles recovery. In other words, the doctrine can be used as a "shield" for individuals against claims in tort by corporations.Legislative amendments to the Criminal Code have altered criteria for the doctrine in the criminal law. These changes do not affect the "shield" use of the doctrine, which is still governed by the common law.The author argues for the harmonization of the common law doctrine with its criminal legislative counterpart.

Conversations about mental states and theory of mind development during middle childhood: A training study

Despite 30years of productive research on theory of mind (ToM), we still know relatively little about variables that influence ToM development during middle childhood. Recent experimental studies have shown that conversations about the mind affect ToM abilities, but they have not explored the mechanisms underlying this developmental effect. In the current study, we examined two potential mechanisms through which conversations about mental states are likely to influence ToM: an increased frequency of references to mental states when explaining behavior and an increased accuracy of mental-state attributions. To this aim, we conducted a training study in which 101 children were assigned to either an intervention condition or a control condition. The conversation-based intervention was made up of four sessions scheduled over 2weeks. Children completed a battery of assessments before and after the intervention as well as 2months later. The groups were equivalent at Time 1 (T1) for age, family affluence, vocabulary, and executive functions. The ToM group showed an improvement in ToM skills (as evaluated on both the practiced tasks and a transfer task). Mediation analyses demonstrated that the accuracy of mental-state attributions, but not the mere frequency of mental-state references, mediated the positive effect of conversations about the mind on ToM development. Our results indicate that conversational experience can enhance mental-state reasoning not by simply drawing children’s attention to mental states but rather by scaffolding a mature understanding of social situations.

Modulation of Neural Activity in the Temporoparietal Junction with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Changes the Role of Beliefs in Moral Judgment.

Judgments about whether an action is morally right or wrong typically depend on our capacity to infer the actor’s beliefs and the outcomes of the action. Prior neuroimaging studies have found that mental state (e.g., beliefs, intentions) attribution for moral judgment involves a complex neural network that includes the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). However, neuroimaging studies cannot demonstrate a direct causal relationship between the activity of this brain region and mental state attribution for moral judgment. In the current study, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to transiently alter neural activity in the TPJ. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three stimulation treatments (right anodal/left cathodal tDCS, left anodal/right cathodal tDCS, or sham stimulation). Each participant was required to complete two similar tasks of moral judgment before receiving tDCS and after receiving tDCS. We studied whether tDCS to the TPJ altered mental state attribution for moral judgment. The results indicated that restraining the activity of the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) or the left the temporoparietal junction (LTPJ) decreased the role of beliefs in moral judgments and led to an increase in the dependance of the participants’ moral judgments on the action’s consequences. We also found that the participants exhibited reduced reaction times both in the cases of intentional harms and attempted harms after receiving right cathodal/left anodal tDCS to the TPJ. These findings inform and extend the current neural models of moral judgment and moral development in typically developing people and in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.

Experimental Approaches to Moral Standing

AbstractMoral patients deserve moral consideration and concern – they have moral standing. What factors drive attributions of moral standing? Understanding these factors is important because it indicates how broadly (or narrowly) individuals conceptualize the moral world, and suggests how they will treat various entities, both human and non‐human. This understanding has recently been advanced by a series of studies conducted by both psychologists and philosophers, which have revealed three main drivers of moral standing: the capacity to suffer (psychological patiency), intelligence or autonomy (agency), and the nature of an entity's disposition (whether it is harmful). These studies have also revealed causal links between moral standing and other variables of interest, namely, mental state attributions and moral behavior. In this review, I consider this recent research, aiming to clarify what the balance of evidence indicates about how moral standing is judged and about its links to mind perception and behavior. I conclude by suggesting open questions for future research on this exciting topic.

The mind behind anthropomorphic thinking: attribution of mental states to other species

Humans readily attribute intentionality and mental states to living and nonliving entities, a phenomenon known as anthropomorphism. Recent efforts to understand the driving forces behind anthropomorphism have focused on its motivational underpinnings. By contrast, the underlying cognitive and neuropsychological processes have not been considered in detail so far. The marked increase in interest in anthropomorphism and its consequences for animal welfare, conservation and even as a potential constraint in animal behaviour research call for an integrative review. We identify a set of potential cognitive mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to nonhuman animals using a dual process framework. We propose that mental state attributions are supported by processes evolved in the social domain, such as motor matching mechanisms and empathy, as well as by domain-general mechanisms such as inductive and causal reasoning. We conclude that the activation of these domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms depend on the type of information available to the observer, and suggest a series of hypotheses for testing the proposed model.

Supplemental Material for Altercentric Interference in Level 1 Visual Perspective Taking Reflects the Ascription of Mental States, Not Submentalizing

Supplemental Material for Altercentric Interference in Level 1 Visual Perspective Taking Reflects the Ascription of Mental States, Not Submentalizing

Individual differences in response of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex predict daily social behavior.

The capacity to accurately infer the thoughts and intentions of other people is critical for effective social interaction, and neural activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) has long been linked with the extent to which people engage in mental state attribution. In this study, we combined functional neuroimaging and experience sampling methodologies to test the predictive value of this neural response for daily social behaviors. We found that individuals who displayed greater activity in dmPFC when viewing social scenes spent more time around other people on a daily basis. These findings suggest a specific role for the neural mechanisms that support the capacity to mentalize in guiding individuals toward situations containing valuable social outcomes.

Factors contributing to social cognition impairment in borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia

Social cognition (SC) deficits have been described both in patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, while the former tend towards simplistic mental state attributions (undermentalizing), the latter are more likely to make overly complex mental state inferences (overmentalizing). Performance on complex SC tasks has been shown to correlate with neurocognitive ability, emotion perception, a history of trauma, and overconfidence in errors. However, it is unclear how these factors relate to different aspects of SC deficits. Aim of the present study was to examine the pathways of SC impairment by investigating performance profiles and their predictors comparatively in BPD and schizophrenia. Participants were 44 patients with BPD, 36 patients with schizophrenia, and 38 healthy controls. Undermentalizing and overmentalizing were assessed with an ecologically valid SC task. Patients with BPD exhibited increased overmentalizing, whereas patients with schizophrenia showed a more extensive deficit pattern, their main error type being undermentalizing. Overconfidence in errors was the most important predictor for overmentalizing, while undermentalizing depended mainly on verbal memory and emotion perception. Thus, BPD und schizophrenia exhibited different SC impairment patterns, and different types of SC errors were predicted by different factors. These findings have implications for the optimization of treatment approaches.

Direction of Biological Motion Affects Early Brain Activation: A Link with Social Cognition.

A number of EEG studies have investigated the time course of brain activation for biological movement over this last decade, however the temporal dynamics of processing are still debated. Moreover, the role of direction of movement has not received much attention even though it is an essential component allowing us to determine the intentions of the moving agent, and thus permitting the anticipation of potential social interactions.In this study, we examined event-related responses (ERPs) in 15 healthy human participants to light point walkers and their scrambled counterparts, whose movements occurred either in the radial or in the lateral plane. Compared to scrambled motion (SM), biological motion (BM) showed an enhanced negativity between 210 and 360ms. A source localization algorithm (sLORETA) revealed that this was due to an increase in superior and middle temporal lobe activity. Regarding direction, we found that radial BM produced an enhanced P1 compared to lateral BM, lateral SM and radial SM. This heightened P1 was due to an increase in activity in extrastriate regions, as well as in superior temporal, medial parietal and medial prefrontal areas. This network is known to be involved in decoding the underlying intentionality of the movement and in the attribution of mental states. The social meaning signaled by the direction of biological motion therefore appears to trigger an early response in brain activity.

EEG oscillations reflect the complexity of social interactions in a non-verbal social cognition task using animated triangles

The ability to attribute independent mental states (e.g. opinions, perceptions, beliefs) to oneself and others is termed Theory of Mind (ToM). Previous studies investigating ToM usually employed verbal paradigms and functional neuroimaging methods. Here, we studied oscillatory responses in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in a non-verbal social cognition task.The aim of this study was twofold: First, we wanted to investigate differences in oscillatory responses to animations differing with regard to the complexity of social “interactions”. Secondly, we intended to evaluate the basic cognitive processes underlying social cognition. To this end, we analyzed theta, alpha, beta and gamma task-related de-/synchronization (TRD/TRS) during presentation of six non-verbal videos differing in the complexity of (social) “interactions” between two geometric shapes. Videos were adopted from Castelli et al. (2000)and belonged to three conditions: Videos designed to evoke attributions of mental states (ToM), interaction descriptions (goal-directed, GD) and videos in which the shapes moved randomly (R).Analyses revealed that only theta activity consistently varied as a function of social “interaction” complexity. Results suggest that ToM/GD videos attract more attention and working-memory resources and may have activated related memory contents. Alpha and beta results were less consistent. While alpha effects suggest that observation of social “interactions” may benefit from inhibition of self-centered processing, oscillatory responses in the beta range could be related to action observation. In summary, the results provide insight into basic cognitive processes involved in social cognition and render the paradigm attractive for the investigation of social cognitive processes in non-verbal populations.

Reward modulates the mirror neuron system in schizophrenia: A study into the mu rhythm suppression, empathy, and mental state attribution

Impairments in the mirror neuron system (MNS) have been implicated as a possible underlying neurological basis for deficits in higher-level social cognition in schizophrenia. Previous work testing this hypothesis has used the electroencephalographic mu rhythm as an index of MNS activity, with studies showing mixed results. Here we investigated the role that reward plays in modulating the mu rhythm, and its association with empathy and emotional mental state reasoning. A group of schizophrenia patients and a healthy control group completed an action observation paradigm in which they watched actions that were financially rewarding, punishing, or neutral. Patients showed intact reward-related modulation of the mu rhythm, and greater mu suppression was associated with greater negative symptoms. There was also a trend for reduced mu suppression in patients. Furthermore, both empathy and emotional mental state reasoning were associated with the degree of mu suppression, but only in healthy controls. These findings confirm the association between the mu suppression and high-level social cognition. It is possible that schizophrenia patients utilize different cognitive routes to infer mental states. The demonstration that reward influences the degree of mu suppression in schizophrenia patients may help to account for previous conflicting findings in the literature.

Social cognition dysfunctions in patients with epilepsy: Evidence from patients with temporal lobe and idiopathic generalized epilepsies.

Despite an extensive literature on cognitive impairments in focal and generalized epilepsy, only a few number of studies specifically explored social cognition disorders in epilepsy syndromes. The aim of our study was to investigate social cognition abilities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Thirty-nine patients (21 patients with TLE and 18 patients with IGE) and 21 matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. All subjects underwent a basic neuropsychological battery plus two experimental tasks evaluating emotion recognition from facial expression (Ekman-60-Faces test, Ek-60F) and mental state attribution (Story-based Empathy Task, SET). In particular, the latter is a newly developed task that assesses the ability to infer others' intentions (i.e., intention attribution - IA) and emotions (i.e., emotion attribution - EA) compared with a control condition of physical causality (i.e., causal inferences - CI). Compared with HCs, patients with TLE showed significantly lower performances on both social cognition tasks. In particular, all SET subconditions as well as the recognition of negative emotions were significantly impaired in patients with TLE vs. HCs. On the contrary, patients with IGE showed impairments on anger recognition only without any deficit at the SET task. Emotion recognition deficits occur in patients with epilepsy, possibly because of a global disruption of a pathway involving frontal, temporal, and limbic regions. Impairments of mental state attribution specifically characterize the neuropsychological profile of patients with TLE in the context of the in-depth temporal dysfunction typical of such patients. Impairments of socioemotional processing have to be considered as part of the neuropsychological assessment in both TLE and IGE in view of a correct management and for future therapeutic interventions.

Faces in the mirror, from the neuroscience of mimicry to the emergence of mentalizing.

In the current opinion paper, we provide a comparative perspective on specific aspects of primate empathic abilities, with particular emphasis on the mirror neuron system associated with mouth/face actions and expression. Mouth and faces can be very salient communicative classes of stimuli that allow an observer access to the emotional and physiological content of other individuals. We thus describe patterns of activations of neural populations related to observation and execution of specific mouth actions and emotional facial expressions in some species of monkeys and in humans. Particular attention is given to dynamics of face-to-face interactions in the early phases of development and to the differences in the anatomy of facial muscles among different species of primates. We hypothesize that increased complexity in social environments and patterns of social development have promoted specializations of facial musculature, behavioral repertoires related to production and recognition of facial emotional expression, and their neural correlates. In several primates, mirror circuits involving parietal-frontal regions, insular regions, cingulate cortices, and amygdala seem to support automatic forms of embodied empathy, which probably contribute to facial mimicry and behavioural synchrony. In humans these circuits interact with specific prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortical regions, which facilitates higher order cognitive functions such as cognitive empathy and mental state attribution. Our analysis thus suggests that the evolution of higher forms of empathy, such as mentalizing, is also linked to the coupling between the perceptual and motor system related to face processing, which may have undergone a process of exaptation during primate phylogeny.

Executive dysfunction predicts social cognition impairment in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder of the motor system with recognised extra-motor and cognitive involvement. This cross-sectional study examined ALS patients' performance on measures requiring social inference, and determined the relationship between such changes and variations in mood, behaviour, personality, empathy and executive function. Fifty-five ALS patients and 49 healthy controls were compared on tasks measuring social cognition and executive function. ALS patients also completed measures examining mood, behaviour and personality. Regression analyses explored the contribution of executive function, mood, behaviour and personality to social cognition scores within the ALS sample. A between-group MANOVA revealed that, the ALS group was impaired relative to controls on two composite scores for social cognition and executive function. Patients also performed worse on individual tests of executive function measuring cognitive flexibility, response inhibition and concept formation, and on individual aspects of social cognition assessing the attribution of emotional and mental states. Regression analyses indicated that ALS-related executive dysfunction was the main predictor of social cognition performance, above and beyond demographic variables, behaviour, mood and personality. On at least some aspects of social cognition, impaired performance in ALS appears to be secondary to executive dysfunction. The profile of cognitive impairment in ALS supports a cognitive continuum between ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

In our own image? Emotional and neural processing differences when observing human-human vs human-robot interactions.

Notwithstanding the significant role that human–robot interactions (HRI) will play in the near future, limited research has explored the neural correlates of feeling eerie in response to social robots. To address this empirical lacuna, the current investigation examined brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging while a group of participants (n = 26) viewed a series of human–human interactions (HHI) and HRI. Although brain sites constituting the mentalizing network were found to respond to both types of interactions, systematic neural variation across sites signaled diverging social-cognitive strategies during HHI and HRI processing. Specifically, HHI elicited increased activity in the left temporal–parietal junction indicative of situation-specific mental state attributions, whereas HRI recruited the precuneus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) suggestive of script-based social reasoning. Activity in the VMPFC also tracked feelings of eeriness towards HRI in a parametric manner, revealing a potential neural correlate for a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. By demonstrating how understanding social interactions depends on the kind of agents involved, this study highlights pivotal sub-routes of impression formation and identifies prominent challenges in the use of humanoid robots.

Self-Interpretation as First-Person Mindshaping: Implications for Confabulation Research

It is generally acknowledged that confabulation undermines the authority of self-attribution of mental states. But why? The mainstream answer is that confabulation misrepresents the actual state of one’s mind at some relevant time prior to the confabulatory response. This construal, we argue, rests on an understanding of self-attribution as first-person mindreading. Recent developments in the literature on folk psychology, however, suggest that mental state attribution also plays an important role in regulating or shaping future behaviour in conformity with normative expectations. We explore an analogue understanding of self-attribution of mental states in terms of first-person mindshaping. The main aim of this paper is to explore how this insight alters the implications of empirical confabulation studies on first-person authority. We also indicate how this sheds new light on the phenomenon of confabulation itself.

Slave Revolt, Deflated Self-deception

The problem of self-deception lies at the heart of Nietzsche's account of the slave revolt in morality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. The viability of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality is thus crucially dependent on a successful explanation of the self-deception the slaves of the first essay are caught in. But the phenomenon of self-deception is notoriously puzzling. In this paper, after critically examining existing interpretations of the slaves’ self-deception, I provide, by drawing on Alfred Mele's work on self-deception, a deflationary account of the slaves’ self-deception; an account which explains the slaves’ self-deceived predicament but without either the attribution of contradictory mental states or an intention to produce or to facilitate the production of the belief the self-deceived subjects end up holding. In light of my account of self-deception, I interpret Nietzsche's intriguing claim that the slaves’ revaluation of ressentiment amounts to their ‘most mendacious artistic stroke’.

Mental state attribution and the gaze cueing effect.

Theory of mind is said to be possessed by an individual if he or she is able to impute mental states to others. Recently, some authors have demonstrated that such mental state attributions can mediate the "gaze cueing" effect, in which observation of another individual shifts an observer's attention. One question that follows from this work is whether such mental state attributions produce mandatory modulations of gaze cueing. Employing the basic gaze cueing paradigm, together with a technique commonly used to assess mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals, we manipulated whether the gazing agent could see the same thing as the participant (i.e., the target) or had this view obstructed by a physical barrier. We found robust gaze cueing effects, even when the observed agent in the display could not see the same thing as the participant. These results suggest that the attribution of "seeing" does not necessarily modulate the gaze cueing effect.

Recent trends in testing social cognition.

Social cognition refers broadly to the way in which we process social information, and is a critical predictor of social competency. This article provides an overview of some of the assessment approaches that have been developed to assess this construct. A variety of well validated assessment approaches are now available. The most frequently used methods index explicit emotion recognition and/or mental state attribution. There has also been an increasing emphasis on the need to better understand the role of specific perceptual features and cognitive task demands in social cognitive difficulties. In the past 20 years, research on social cognitive function has grown exponentially, reflecting an increased recognition that social cognitive skills are critical for communicative discourse, and in turn mental health and well-being. Accordingly, a large number of measures are now available to quantify social cognitive function. This review shows that many of these measures have good psychometric properties, and appear to have at least moderate sensitivity. However, the review also highlights the importance of using appropriate control tasks to assess the specificity of any observed social cognitive failures, as well as the need for the continued development of measures with greater ecological validity.

Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character.