Metarepresentational Ability Research Articles

Assessing metarepresentational abilities in adolescence: an exploratory study on relationships between definitional competence and theory of mind.

Several developmental changes occur in adolescence, particularly in the metarepresentational domain, which allows and promotes adaptive sociality. We explored the possible relationships between theory of mind (ToM) and definitional competence, both metarepresentational, beyond age and gender effects. To reach our goals, we involved 75 adolescents (age range 14-19 years, M = 15.7, and SD = 1.36). ToM was measured through "The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" (RMET), and definitional competence was assessed through a new instrument, namely, the "Co.De. Scale". Attention was paid to check whether results were different when considering mental states vs. non-mental states of the scale and emotional words vs. non-emotional words. T-tests showed that older adolescents (third grade of high school) performed better than younger ones (first grade of high school) in both tasks. Only in the male group, there were no school grade differences in the ToM task. Regression analyses showed that RMET performance predicted the score of non-emotional mental states definitions and, even if marginally, of ToM word definitions. However, RMET was not a predictor of the general performance of the definitional task or emotion definitions. Connections with global adolescents' development and possible educational implications are discussed.

When children acquire irony: The role of epistemic vigilance

AbstractIrony is a mechanism that, at the same time, says and does not say. It is a case in which the speaker literally expresses a sense that is not what the speaker wants to communicate. It is a case of implicit echoic mention that conveys an attitude toward what is mentioned. Therefore, an utterance that, to be understood, needs contextual elements, meta-communicative elements and a mutual attribution of knowledge, intentions and affective states between speaker and hearer; the elaboration of which requires specific capacities – linguistics as well as cognitive – that allow to recognize the unsaid intentions of the speaker. Even if the ironic speaker expresses an attitude and, in doing this, s/he is ‘honest’ (s/he wants the hearer to recognize the falsehood or the irrelevance of the expressed proposition and to grasp the attitude towards it), most of the time, ironic expressions are sentences that are apparently false. To be able to distinguish between irony and lying, the hearer must determine that the ironic speaker wants the listener to disbelieve the statement, whereas the liar wants the listener to believe just what is said. Distinguishing between a false observation said with a misleading intent and an untrue sentence proffered/uttered with an ironic intent, requires a right attribution of a second-order belief, but it also requires the capacity ofepistemic vigilance, an ability that allows us to evaluate the accuracy of the content of the information provided by others, and to discriminate the reliability of the source of information. The complex abilities, required by irony elaboration, make irony learning during childhood particularly difficult. Acquisition of irony comprehension is more complex than any other form of non-literal speech and, during growth, it reaches its complete development later than many other complex linguistic aspects, only about at the age of ten-twelve. The article wants to show how difficulties of irony elaboration in children are linked not only to the full development of meta-representational abilities, but in addition and especially to the development of epistemic vigilance.

Metarepresentation, trust, and "unleashed expression".

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear - not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.

Pretend play with objects: an ecological approach

The ecological approach to object pretend play, developed from the ecological perspective, suggests an action- and affordance based perspective to account for pretend object play. Theoretical, as well as empirical reasons, support the view that children in pretense incorporate objects into their play in a resourceful and functionally appropriate way based on the perception of affordances. Therefore, in pretense children are not distorting reality but rather, they are perceiving and acting upon action possibilities. In this paper, we argue for the viability of an ecological theoretical framework to pretend object play which has been traditionally understood as a representational and metarepresentational ability. We discuss the origins and basic assumptions of the ecological approach to pretense. We layout details by presenting a qualitative analysis of a pretend play episode and discuss the results of an experimental study inspired by the ecological assumptions. We discuss pretend object play in the context of ecological work on tool use. We address the relationship between the enactive and the ecological approaches to pretend play, pointing out similarities as well as differences. We conclude that ecological and enactive approaches have shown that it is possible to challenge accepted interpretations and seek explanatory frameworks that could move the field in new directions

Relations between intensionality, theory of mind and complex syntax in autism spectrum conditions and typical development

False belief (FB) reasoning emerges around 4−5 years of age in typical development (TD), but has an extended developmental course in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). A body of work suggests that this capacity is related to the comprehension of embedded clauses, as in Children think/say that fairies exist. The development of other metarepresentational capacities, such as thinking about the same objects under different descriptions (‘intensionality’), has been much less studied, particularly in ASC, and its links both to embedding and FB remain to be determined. Here we aimed to study belief-reasoning, intensionality and embedded clause comprehension in conjunction. An additional aim was to compare performance across different types of embedded clauses, specifically relative clauses and three types of complement clauses (embedded under ‘says that’, ‘sees that’ and ‘seems that’, respectively), and to test their predictive relations to metarepresentational abilities. Twenty-five children and early adolescents with ASC (mean age 9;4) as well as a group of twenty-five children with TD, matched on both chronological and verbal mental age (VMA, mean 9;1), were recruited. A maximally analogous picture-matching design was used across all tasks. Results of a series of logistic mixed effect models revealed greater vulnerability in ASC on both metarepresentational tasks (ToM and intensionality) indiscriminately, and within the domain of embedding, on ‘seems that’. Scores on embedding predicted performance on metarepresentation, as did those on Seems that. A pervasive main effect of VMA was seen in all models. These results show that metarepresentational impairments in ASC extend to intensionality and relate to language development, where syntactic construction types referencing appearances prove to be particularly challenging in ASC and TD alike.

Meta-Representational Skills in Bullying Roles: The Influence of Definitional Competence and Empathy.

This study investigated the influence of meta-representational aspects on bullying. Meta-representation was operationalized in terms of the metalinguistic skill to produce conventional definitions, reflecting culturally shared representations and of the meta-level capacity to represent others’ mental states underlying empathic disposition. One hundred and seventeen children, aged between 8;5 and 10;11 years, completed a definitional task and self-report questionnaires on bullying roles and empathic disposition. Descriptive, correlational, and regression analyses were performed. Results confirmed that hostile roles are negatively related to definitional competence and to empathic disposition. Lack of definitional competence was the main predictor (accounting for about 16% of variance), followed by empathy (explaining a further 6% of variance) of Primary School children’s disposition to assume aggressive behaviors. These findings suggest that a lack of general meta-representational abilities may hinder the development of abstract and other-centered perspective taking, and compromise (compromising) social adjustment. This implies the need to work, particularly in school, on enhancing meta-representational and metalinguistic skills, such as the ability to recognize mental states and verbally make explicit cultural-semantic word meaning representations.

Reading against the text? Metarepresentation and patterns of subjectivity in the summarization of Henry James’s tales

AbstractInformed by cognitive narratology and specifically based on our metarepresentational ability, this paper explores how the subjectivity in Henry James’s tales is transferred to the summaries provided by critics for the orientation of readers. Since it enables real, and realistic, minds to process content along with sources and paths of propagation, the metarepresentational skill proves to be an essential instrument for discriminating in narrative texts the authenticated, source-free facts from those which are contingent on the subjective domains of characters and character-narrators. When for a number of reasons this skill is relaxed or altogether deactivated in the act of summarizing, the resulting product will betray the original work by projecting a distorted or reductive image of it, particularly in a writer like James who was increasingly concerned with imparting informational verisimilitude to his fiction. The treatment of metarepresentational sources in the summaries of James’s tales generates perplexing patterns, such as when the handling of sources in a summary contradicts the critic’s own conclusions elsewhere in his or her work. This clash yields insights into the authenticating function of the fictional text in connection with its cognitive rhetoric.

Apes have culture but may not know that they do.

There is good evidence that some ape behaviors can be transmitted socially and that this can lead to group-specific traditions. However, many consider animal traditions, including those in great apes, to be fundamentally different from human cultures, largely because of lack of evidence for cumulative processes and normative conformity, but perhaps also because current research on ape culture is usually restricted to behavioral comparisons. Here, we propose to analyze ape culture not only at the surface behavioral level but also at the underlying cognitive level. To this end, we integrate empirical findings in apes with theoretical frameworks developed in developmental psychology regarding the representation of tools and the development of metarepresentational abilities, to characterize the differences between ape and human cultures at the cognitive level. Current data are consistent with the notion of apes possessing mental representations of tools that can be accessed through re-representations: apes may reorganize their knowledge of tools in the form of categories or functional schemes. However, we find no evidence for metarepresentations of cultural knowledge: apes may not understand that they or others hold beliefs about their cultures. The resulting Jourdain Hypothesis, based on Molière’s character, argues that apes express their cultures without knowing that they are cultural beings because of cognitive limitations in their ability to represent knowledge, a determining feature of modern human cultures, allowing representing and modifying the current norms of the group. Differences in metarepresentational processes may thus explain fundamental differences between human and other animals’ cultures, notably limitations in cumulative behavior and normative conformity. Future empirical work should focus on how animals mentally represent their cultural knowledge to conclusively determine the ways by which humans are unique in their cultural behavior.

A relevance-theoretic perspective on humorous irony and its failure

AbstractThis paper adopts the relevance-theoretic account of irony to describe the features of humorous irony and to elucidate the nuances of its failure. In connection to the humorous potential of irony, a number of properties it shares with some types of humor are discussed, such as exploiting incongruity, being targeted at a victim, being creative, carrying an element of surprise, involving metarepresentational abilities, and establishing a bond between the speaker and hearer. It is further observed that ironic utterances produced for the purpose of generating humor and increasing rapport between interlocutors may fail to achieve this aim to various degrees and due to a number of causes. Analyses of several examples indicate that the various causes of ironic misfires can be traced to failures of the inferential processes postulated by Relevance Theory as responsible for communicating irony: identifying a dissociative propositional attitude, representing the content of the proposition echoed, and attributing it to a source. Besides, it is claimed that humorous irony is used not only to communicate an attitude but also to have it accepted by the hearer, which is why the latter's rejection of the speaker-envisaged ironic attitude counts as another type of irony failure.

Children's use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse: Implications for theory of mind development

This paper refines and extends the empirical base of previous work on children's use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse within the Givenness Hierarchy framework, and further develops implications of this work for our understanding of the development of a theory of mind. The study supports earlier findings that children use definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides further support for two stages in mind-reading ability. The first, implicit and non-representational, includes the ability to assess memory and attention states such as familiarity and attention; the second, representational and more conscious, includes the ability to assess propositional, epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing the two stages provides a possible explanation for why children learn to use forms in ways consistent with their encoded information about how to mentally access an intended referent before they fully exhibit the metarepresentational ability to calculate pragmatic inferences, such as that involved in assessing how much information is relevant for the addressee.

ABSTRACT

The main aims of the current research were to determine when children develop a temporally extended self (TES) and what factors contribute to its development. However, in order to address these aims it was important to, first, assess whether the test of delayed self-recognition (DSR) is a valid measure for the development of the TES, and, second, to propose and evaluate a theoretical model that describes what factors influence the development of the TES. The validity of the DSR test was verified by comparing the performance of 57 children on the DSR test to their performance on a meta-representational task (modified false belief task) and to a task that was essentially the same as the DSR test but was specifically designed to rely on the capacity to entertain secondary representations (i.e., surprise body task). Longitudinal testing of the children showed that at the mental age (MA) of 2.5 years they failed the DSR test, despite training them to understand the intended functions of the medium used in the DSR test; whereas, with training, children at the MA of 3.0 and 3.5 years exhibited DSR. Children at the MA of 4 years exhibited DSR without any training. Finally, results suggest that children's meta-representational ability was the only factor that contributed to the prediction of successful performance on the DSR test, and thus to the emergence of the TES. Furthermore, prospective longitudinal data revealed that caregiver conversational style was the only factor that contributed to the prediction of level of training required to pass the DSR test. That is, children of low-elaborative caregivers required significantly more training to pass the DSR test than children of high-elaborative caregivers, indicating that children who received more elaborative conversational input from their caregivers had a more advanced understanding of their TES.

Cervantes Lands a Left Hook: Baiting the Inquisition with Ekphrastic Subversion

Este estudio utiliza el concepto de of (teoria de la mente) y toma en cuenta el contexto historico de Cervantes para considerar algunas posibles intenciones autoriales en la composicion del Quijote y reflexionar sobre las repercusiones que podrian haber resultado como consecuencia de esos propositos. En particular, se enfoca en las prohibiciones contra la Biblia en lengua vulgar como posible motivacion para algunos aspectos visuales de la primera novela moderna, y examina el uso potencial de la ecfrasis como referencia cifrada a varios simbolos cristianos. En especifico, el simbolo de Cristo llamado Ichthus (el pez) se pone bajo la lupa de la investigacion para indagar la posibilidad de que hubiera sido una fuente de inspiracion para el nombre Quixote, tomando en cuenta citas de la novela y las imagenes que podrian sugerir. Estos elementos visuales son considerados a la luz de recientes avances en el campo de la percepcion visual en cuanto a su impacto inicial en Cervantes, el proceso cognitivo en la imaginacion del autor, y la manera en la cual dichas impresiones podrian haberse manifestado en el consiguiente producto literario. ********** No MATTER HOW MANY advances there are in world of cognitive science, it is highly doubtful that totality of true intentions of any writer will ever be extrapolated purely from words of their texts. What was in (embodied) mind of human being of flesh and blood who authored novel when it was written will always be inaccessible to reader removed in time and place from author. However, the potential empirical difficulties of elucidating fact of matter--the executive intentions of creator--do not negate that there is a fact of matter (Swirski 139). Therefore, arriving at some level of incontrovertible knowledge about artist's thought cannot be only (or even primary) goal of using approaches informed by such research. Rather, taking into consideration of new information gathered by cognitive sciences (which examine how human perception functions and interacts with language) can be impetus for posing new questions that allow for fresh and original interpretations of texts, even those that have been examined and investigated for centuries. With any luck, these new lines of inquiry may bring us closer to understanding authorial objectives. For, as Umberto Eco argues, it is a dangerous critical heresy to read whatever we may want into a text, and it is paramount that reader always be moved by a profound respect for the intention of (5). This study takes as a starting point suggestion of several scholars that certain anti-Inquisitorial critiques (as well as possibly subversive ideas) are present in Don Quixote, written between lines of novel by its author Miguel de Cervantes. By constructing and adapting a working theory of mind of Cervantes, this investigation attempts to uncover ways in which he may have attempted to communicate messages that were decipherable by his intended audience, but which were capable of eluding censors and, thus, possible Inquisitorial retribution. Further, substantial research done on use of ekphrasis by Cervantes to allude to imagery from visual arts within text of his novel is employed to show how author may have utilized similar techniques to refer to images connected to proscribed texts of subversive themes. All of this is subjected to examination through lens of recent findings in cognitive science, with a particular focus placed on how humans process visual information, both as a percept and in imagination. In her groundbreaking study Why We Read Fiction, Lisa Zunshine asserts that detective novel exercises theory of mind of reader in a particularly focused way. If this is indeed case, then perhaps reverse is also true: that investigation of creative mind behind a work of fiction--as if it were deliberately manipulating metarepresentational abilities of reader in order to conceal an esoteric subtext comprehensible only to a select audience attuned to deciphering all of textual clues--could empower analyst to unmask a hermetic intention hidden below surface of a novel. …

Delayed video self-recognition in children with high Vo functioning autism and Asperger’s disorder

Two studies are reported which investigate delayed video self-recognition (DSR) in children with autistic disorder and Asperger's disorder relative to one another and to their typically developing peers. A secondary aim was to establish whether DSR ability is dependent on metarepresentational ability. Children's verbal and affective responses to their image were also measured. Three groups of male children between 5 and 9 years, comprising 15 with high-functioning autistic disorder (HFA), 12 with Asperger's disorder (AspD), and 15 typically developing (TD) children, participated in Study 1. Study 2 included two groups of younger children (18 HFA; 18 TD) aged 4 to 7 years. Participant groups in each study were equally able to recognize themselves using delayed video feedback, and responded to their marked image with positive affect. This was so even amongst children with HFA who were impaired in their performance on false belief tasks, casting doubt on a metarepresentational basis of DSR.

Children with autism's perception and understanding of ambiguous figures: Evidence for pictorial metarepresentation, a research note

A large body of autism research over the last 20 years has shown that people with autism have difficulties understanding mental states. This has been conceived of as a metarepresentational deficit. An open question is whether people with autism's metarepresentational deficit is limited to the mental domain. This research explores individuals with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures. With the use of ambiguous figures, where a single stimulus is capable of representing two distinct referents, we compared metarepresentational abilities in the pictorial and mental domains and the perception of pictorial ambiguity. Our findings indicate that individuals with autism are impaired in mental metarepresentation but not in pictorial metarepresentation. These findings suggest that children with autism understand the representational nature of pictures. We conclude that children with autism's understanding of the representational nature of pictures is in advance of their metarepresentational understanding of mind. Their perception of figure ambiguity is comparable to the typical population.

Procedural Information of Anaphoric Expressions : Pronouns, Ellipses and Metarepresentations

This article examines computational processes of anaphoric expressions (i.e. pronouns and elliptical expressions) through a relevance-theoretic framework. Anaphora resolution regarding pronouns and elliptical expressions undergoes a process of saturation: an instruction on referent identifi cation by way of linguistic clues (i.e. pronouns and ellipses themselves). I propose that computational processes of anaphoric processes are based on ‘metarepresentation’ (i.e. interpreted thought or utterance) (Wilson (2000); Noh (2000)) involving a pragmatic enrichment of the incomplete logical form of anaphoric expressions. Anaphora resolution relies heavily on the hearer’s metarepresentational abilities in the sense that the referents of anaphoric expressions are accessible in the mental representations of the hearer who interprets the utterance in which those expressions are included. In other words, anaphoric expressions, phonologically realized or not, encode a procedure instructing the hearer to access their referent within the metarepresentations in order to reach the intended interpretation of the utterance in which they occur.

Children's Understanding of Referentially Opaque Contexts: The Role of Metarepresentational and Metalinguistic Ability

We investigated whether children's ability to deal with referentially opaque contexts could be predicted by both metarepresentational ability (false-belief understanding) and metalinguistic awareness (the ability to compare and evaluate statements containing referring expressions). Five- to 7-year-olds completed opacity, false-belief, metalinguistic awareness, digit-span, and vocabulary measures. Hierarchical regressions indicated that even after the variability from age, vocabulary, and digit span is taken into account, metarepresentational ability and metalinguistic awareness still significantly, and independently, explain some variability in referential opacity performance. These results are taken as support for the view that both metarepresentational ability and metalinguistic awareness are necessary in order to deal with referentially opaque contexts.

Evidentials and metarepresentation in early child language

This paper examines the developmental relation of the use and understanding of Modern Greek evidential lexical items with varying degrees of metarepresentational ability. Drawing on early natural language production of two 3;6–5;10-year-olds, the paper shows that children’s use of evidentials follows a three-stage metarepresentational development. Comprehension experimental tests suggest a restricted linguistic ability and a reliable reasoning ability to interpret others’ evidential state of mind. McNemar tests which were run for the evidential linguistic pairs tested (Experiment 1) and for the evidential reasoning trials administered (Experiment 2) revealed a higher likelihood for age to affect linguistic development during 4;0–5;10 years of age, than for age to affect cognitive development of evidentiality during 3;0–5;11 years of age. The discrepancy between children’s fragile understanding of lexical evidentials and more robust recognition of consistent/conflicting evidential states is attributed to their immature metarepresentational abilities.

Self–other relations in social development and autism: multiple roles for mirror neurons and other brain bases

Mirror neuron system dysfunction may underlie a self-other matching impairment, which has previously been suggested to account for autism. Embodied Cognition Theory, which proposes that action provides a foundation for cognition has lent further credence to these ideas. The hypotheses of a self-other matching deficit and impaired mirror neuron function in autism have now been well supported by studies employing a range of methodologies. However, underlying mechanisms require further exploration to explain how mirror neurons may be involved in attentional and mentalizing processes. Impairments in self-other matching and mirror neuron function are not necessarily inextricably linked and it seems possible that different sub-populations of mirror neurons, located in several regions, contribute differentially to social cognitive functions. It is hypothesized that mirror neuron coding for action-direction may be required for developing attentional sensitivity to self-directed actions, and consequently for person-oriented, stimulus-driven attention. Mirror neuron networks may vary for different types of social learning such as "automatic" imitation and imitation learning. Imitation learning may be more reliant on self-other comparison processes (based on mirror neurons) that identify differences as well as similarities between actions. Differential connectivity with the amygdala-orbitofrontal system may also be important. This could have implications for developing "theory of mind," with intentional self-other comparison being relevant to meta-representational abilities, and "automatic" imitation being more relevant to empathy. While it seems clear that autism is associated with impaired development of embodied aspects of cognition, the ways that mirror neurons contribute to these brain-behavior links are likely to be complex.

Higher-order preferences and the Master Rationality Motive

The cognitive critique of the goals and desires that are input into the implicit calculations that result in instrumental rationality is one aspect of what has been termed broad rationality (Elster, 1983). This cognitive critique involves, among other things, the search for rational integration (Nozick, 1993)—that is, consistency between first-order and second-order preferences. Forming a second-order preference involves metarepresentational abilities made possible by mental decoupling operations. However, these decoupling abilities are separable from the motive that initiates the cognitive critique itself. I argue that Velleman (1992) has identified that motive (“the desire to act in accordance with reasons”), and that it might be operationalisable as a thinking disposition at a very superordinate cognitive level. This thinking disposition, the Master Rationality Motive, is likely to be of particular importance in explaining individual differences in the tendency to seek rational integration. Preliminary research on related constructs suggests that this construct is measurable.

Attribution of Beliefs by 13-Month-Old Infants

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants' looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when--and only when--the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relation between this early ability and later forms of theory of mind that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators.