Representation In Mind Research Articles

Social Mind Representation: Where Does It Fail in Frontotemporal Dementia?

We aimed at investigating social disability and its cerebral correlates in frontotemporal dementia (FTD). To do so, we contrasted answers of patients with early-stage FTD and of their relatives on personality trait judgment and on behavior prediction in social and emotional situations. Such contrasts were compared to control contrasts calculated with answers of matched controls tested with their relatives. In addition, brain metabolism was measured in patients with positron emission tomography and the [(18)F]fluorodeoxyglucose method. Patients turned out to be as accurate as controls in describing their relative's personality, but they failed to predict their relative's behavior in social and emotional circumstances. Concerning the self, patients were impaired both in current personality assessment and in prediction of their own behavior. Those two self-evaluation measures did not correlate. Only patients' anosognosia for social behavioral disability was found to be related to decreased metabolic activity in the left temporal pole. Such results suggest that anosognosia for social disability in FTD originates in impaired processing of emotional autobiographical information, leading to a self-representation that does not match current behavior. Moreover, we propose that perspective-taking disability participates in anosognosia, preventing patients from correcting their inaccurate self-representation based on their relative's perspective.

Other minds: how humans bridge the divide between self and others

Part 1. Questions About the Phenomenon. L.J. Moses, Executive Functioning and Children's Theories of Mind. B.F. Malle, Three Puzzles of Mindreading. M.H. Davis, A Constituent Approach to the Study of Perspective Taking: What Are its Fundamental Elements? D.D. Hutto, Starting Without Theory: Confronting the Paradox of Conceptual Development. Part 2. Reading Behavior, Reading Minds. D. Fernandez-Duque, J.A. Baird, Is There a Social Brain? Lessons From Eye-Gaze Following, Joint Attention, and Autism. S.R. Fussell, R.E. Kraut, D. Gergle, L.D. Setlock, Visual Cues as Evidence of Others' Minds in Collaborative Physical Tasks. G.D. Reeder, D. Trafimow, Attributing Motives to Other People. S.J. Read, L.C. Miller, Explanatory Coherence and Goal-based Knowledge Structures in Making Dispositional Inferences. Part 3. Reading One's Own Mind, Reading Other Minds. J. Decety, Perspective Taking as the Royal Avenue to Empathy. D.R. Ames, Everyday Solutions to the Problem of Other Minds: Which Tools Are Used When? J. Perner, A. Kuhberger, Mental Simulation: Royal Road to Other Minds? R.J. Bogdan, Why Self-ascriptions Are Difficult and Develop Late. Part 4. Language and Other Minds. J.W. Astington, E. Filippova, Language as the Route into Other Minds. M. Barker, T. Givon, Representation of the Interlocutor's Mind During Conversation. M.F. Schober, Conceptual Alignment in Conversation. J.S. Uleman, On the Inherent Ambiguity of Traits and Other Mental Concepts. Part 5. Limits of Mindreading. D.J. Barr, B. Keysar, Mindreading in an Exotic Case: The Normal Adult Human. L. Van Boven, G. Loewenstein, Empathy Gaps in Emotional Perspective Taking. S.D. Hodges, Is How Much You Understand Me in Your Head or Mine? W. Ickes, J.A. Simpson, M. Orina, Empathic Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Close Relationships. R. Langdon, Theory of Mind in Schizophrenia.

선행과 구원의 연관성 연구

Why do religions emphasize good deeds like charity or love? What kind of relation are there between good deeds and salvation? Early Buddhism stresses that the deed of mortal cannot escape retribution. And deeds are intentional act, so those are representation of mind. Therefore an issue of mind raises its head before action. The extinction of ignorance and thirsty gives rise to good mind, and the good mind produces good deed. Mahāyāna Buddhism accentuates charity. It signifies that the mind of oneself sympathizes the mind of others. That is impossible unless one throws away attachment to oneself. The alms deed makes that possible. In Roman Catholicism Ten Commandments assert absolute worship to god. The transcendental merits devaluate worldly ones, so the mind can obtain calmness. Protestant claims the one can acquire salvation only by faith. And the salvation leads human to good deed. In conclusion good deeds are not ways and means to mokṣa or grace, but identical with them in Early Buddhism and Mahāyāna Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism and Protestant.

Relative roles of general and complementation language in theory-of-mind development: evidence from Cantonese and English.

Complex complements are clausal objects containing tensed verbs (e.g., that she cried) or infinitives (e.g., to cry), following main verbs of communication or mental activities (e.g., say, want). This research examined whether English- and Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds' complement understanding uniquely predicts their representation of other minds (i.e., theory of mind). Results showed that neither meaning of main verbs (communication vs. desire) nor complement structure (tensed vs. infinitival) affected the correlation between complement understanding and theory of mind. More important, the correlation became insignificant after controlling for general language comprehension. These findings led to the conclusion that the syntax of complement per se does not contribute uniquely to theory-of-mind development; general language comprehension is a more important factor to consider.

Minds: contents without vehicles

This paper explores a new understanding of mind or mental representation by arguing that contents at the personal level are not carried by vehicles. Contentful mental states at the personal level are distinctive by virtue of their vehicle‐less nature: the subpersonal physiological or functional states that are associated with and enable personal level contents cannot be understood as their vehicles, neither can the sensations or the sensory conditions associated with perceptual contents. This result is obtained by first extending the interpretationist ideas of Davidson and Dennett to show that subpersonal physiological or functional states cannot be construed as the vehicles of personal level contents. Then the anti‐foundationalist arguments of Sellars are extended to show that sensory states cannot stand as vehicles to perceptual contents. The line of argumentation extended from Sellars also provides a critique of the current trend to posit non‐conceptual contents.

BOOK REVIEW: "Evolution (or Not?) of the Representational Mind"

(2004). BOOK REVIEW: 'Evolution (or Not?) of the Representational Mind' Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 166-169.

Mental self: The person within.

Some brain regions can map nothing but the body, and are the body's captive audience. These regions may form the basis of the mind's representation of the 'self'.

Pictures and the Representational Mind

Pictures and the Representational Mind

Six-year-olds' difficulties handling intensional contexts

Previous research shows that children have difficulties handling intensional contexts even when they can pass a test of false belief (e.g. Cognition 67 (1998) 287; Cognition 25 (1987) 289). Some authors (Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Cognition 25 (1987) 289) place these difficulties in the linguistic and not the mental representational domain. The experiments reported here examined whether 6-year-old children could answer questions in an intensional context that did not require the explicit verbal characterization of a belief. We replicated previous findings and found that children answered according to their own knowledge in an intensional context. This occurred even though they responded by choosing a picture to insert into a protagonist's thought bubble rather than report the belief verbally. Children could correctly answer questions about the knowledge state of the protagonist and pass a test of false belief. Further experiments ruled out methodological explanations. Experiment 2 showed that the difference in answering according to own knowledge between the false belief and intensional stories is not accounted for by procedural factors in the two types of test. Experiment 3 revealed that children did not answer according to their own knowledge by default. Experiment 4 suggested that answering according to own knowledge was not a result of pictorial salience. Results are discussed in relation to the simulation-theory debate.

Skills, spills and the nature of mindful action

Hubert Dreyfus offers a potent and important challenge to the fans of internal representation. Learning and skillful action, Dreyfus argues, can be effectively explained “without recourse to mind or brain representations” (p. ?). In place of internally represented knowledge we are to imagine experience as leading to fine-grained dispositions to respond to the precise details of the current situation. Thus tuned, the expert practitioner is keyed to the world in which she must live and act. This tight fit (Merleau-Ponty’s “intentional arc”) is not magical, but neither does it require us to posit anything worth calling “internal representations”. Instead, it can be fully explained and understood by reference to artificial neural networks and recent accounts of brain dynamics. As some of you might guess, I rather like this story. But I have two misgivings. First, I think it moves too quickly from the rejection of inner propositional data structures to the rejection (in these cases) of anything worth calling internal representation . Second, and relatedly, I think it calls for a long, difficult and overdue discussion of the very idea of mindful action. For it seems unclear, on Dreyfus’ account, where mind, cognition and intelligence stop and the nonmental world begins.

A Topological Model of Epistemic Intentionality

Beyond their linguistic and rhetorical uses, the mental epistemic verbs to knowand to believe reveal a basic conceptual system for human intentionality and the theory of representational mind. Numerous studies, particularly in the field of child development, have been devoted to the conditions under which knowledge and belief are acquired. Upstream of this empirical approach, this paper proposes a topological model of the conceptual structure underlying the linguistic use of to know and to believe. A cusp model of catastrophe theory is chosen to model the formation of epistemic states. Its main characteristic is considering to believe as an intermediate state which lacks stability and presents the delayed effect of hysteresis. The attribution of mental states to the other (viewpoint of the third person) is obtained by the crossing of first and third person knowledge and belief, which gives rise to new categories (to know if and to falsely believe) and closes the system. Another merging of the beliefs of persons A and B, using the butterfly catastrophe, provides a model of interpersonal belief appreciated by an independent observer along a potential evolving from agreement to disagreement.

Secondary representation: continued…

For better or, perhaps, worse, we are cognitively equipped to take other minds into account as we negotiate the social world. But what is behind the emergence of this ability to recognize mind in others? It might have arisen de novo in our species, with no precursors in primate phylogeny, but such a drastic discontinuity is not likely. On the basis of evidence from children and primates, Suddendorf and Whiten propose that a homology exists between apes and humans in the development of ‘secondary representation’ capacities, of which representation of other minds is an important concomitant in humans [ 1 Suddendorf T. Whiten A. Mental evolution and development: evidence for secondary representation in children, great apes, and other animals. Psychol. Bull. 2001; 127: 629-650 Crossref PubMed Scopus (218) Google Scholar ].

Representations of Mind: C. S. Sherrington and Scientific Opinion, c.1930–1950

Recent writers in the brain sciences and the philosophy of mind contrast modern biological theories of consciousness with a mind-body dualism supposedly dominant half-a-century ago which they regard as scientifically sterile. Reference to C. S. Sherrington often signals the rejected dualism. This paper re-examines Sherrington's highly qualified position and links it to the arguments of British scientists for whom he was a figurehead in the 1930s and 1940s. I interpret the mind-body literature as ancillary to debates about cultural values. From this perspective, dualism represents a defense of a threatened conservative culture. Dismissal of scientists' supposed "dualism" does little to illuminate the tension in their thought between defense of values traditionally associated with mind and hope for an integrated mind-body science. This leads to comments on Sherrington's own concept of integration. The conclusion relates these points to the new research in the brain sciences evident by the end of the 1940s.

Eichmann's Mind: Psychological, Philosophical, and Legal Perspectives

This essay discusses various representations of Eichmann's mind that were fashioned on the occasion of his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Gideon Hausner the prosecutor presented the defendant as demonic. Hannah Arendt, the German-born American Jewish philosopher portrayed him as banal or thoughtless. Limiting themselves to the issue of mens rea in their judgment, the Israeli Supreme Court justices described Eichmann's mind as controlled by criminal intent.

Formation des enseignants : l'apprentissage réflexif à partir de la biographie et du contexte

Reflection has been a key concept in the literature on teacher education for almost 20 years now, but both in theory and practice it is often reduced to a technical issue. Starting from a concept of teacher education as a process of lifelong professional development, the author argues for a broader and deeper concept of reflection. The broad concept not only acknowledges the technical aspects of knowledge and skill in teaching, but also takes into consideration the inevitable moral, political ana emotional aspects. The deep concept of reflection not only looks at changes in teaching behaviour, but focuses even more on changing the ideas, concepts and representations in the teachers' mind. This new concept of reflection is further linked to the so-called "narrative-biographical approach". The spontaneous narrative accounts by teachers about the experiences in their "careers" as pupils, students and teachers constitute a powerful entry to better understand their actions and reflections, as well as to influence them during teacher education and in-service training.

From synonyms to homonyms: exploring the role of metarepresentation in language understanding

Doherty and Perner (Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: just two words for the same thing? Cognitive Development, 13 (1998), 279–305) report that children’s understanding of synonyms and false belief is dependent on an understanding of the representational mind. Experiment 1 extends this finding by examining children’s understanding of homonyms. Children aged 3 and 4 years were asked to judge whether a puppet correctly selected the second member of a homonym pair. Performance on this task was strongly associated with performance on the false belief task even after chronological and verbal mental age had been accounted for. Experiment 2 incorporated two new tasks: a synonyms task and an adjectives task. Understanding of synonyms and homonyms significantly predicted performance on the false belief task. However, once chronological age was accounted for, only performance on the homonyms task did so. The difficulty experienced on the homonyms task was not due to a reluctance to acknowledge that the puppet can point to a different picture when the the same word label is used twice. Children had no difficulty on the adjectives task when the puppet had to point to a different picture described using the same adjective. The suggestion that the understanding of synonyms, homonyms and false belief are related by a common insight into the representational mind is therefore not supported.

The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (review)

Reviewed by: The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling Kwok-kan Tam (bio) Kirk A. Denton . The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. x, 324 pp. Hardcover $49.50, ISBN0-8047-3128-4. Kirk Denton's The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling merits the double attention of scholars and students in modern Chinese studies. To begin with, it is much more than a study of modern Chinese literature, for it attempts to chart cultural change in modern China in terms of the transformation in Chinese subjectivity. In doing this difficult job, Denton offers an "interpretive social science" perspective in delineating the cultural dimension of the modern Chinese self as a problematic caught between tradition and modernity. In many other studies on Chinese modernity, scholars tend to adopt theoretical models that account for changes in modern China in terms of social continuities and discontinuities, which are more often than not represented as acultural in orientation. In this respect, Denton's book is not only a major contribution to the study of modern China, it also provides a model for placing literature in the broader context of sociocultural developments. The book consists of two parts: "Modernity and Cultural Politics" and "Lu Ling and the Problematic of the Subject." In part 1, there is a detailed discussion of Hu Feng's and Lu Ling's views of subjectivism in the context of cultural politics in modern China, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. This part serves as historical background for the study of Hu Feng and Lu Ling, and also as a theoretical discussion of how to define Chinese modernity. As Denton says, "By modernity I mean the rhetoric of newness, progress, enlightenment, revolution and self received from Western sources but remodeled by intellectuals in response to a specific historical context of imperialism and domestic social decay" (p. 7). Anything that was Western was thus new and exotic to the Chinese from the late Qing through the 1940s. Defined as such, many aspects of Chinese modernity cannot be regarded in the same way as the modernity that occurred in the West at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, even European Romanticism was received as modern in China in the 1920s and 1930s. Such a view sheds much light on the nature and context of modernity in China. For many scholars working in the field of modern Chinese culture, how to define Chinese modernity remains a problem of central importance. If Chinese modernity can include various aspects of European Romanticism, then how can it still be called modernity? Should Chinese modernity be called something else? If there is something in Chinese modernity that parallels modernity in the Western sense, then what is it? Denton gives the answer that it is the changing Chinese concept of self that marks a cultural shift from tradition to modernity in China; as he puts it: "Chinese modernity and its literature, with their attention to the individual [End Page 434] and the representation of mind, clearly marks a break from tradition. But underlying this radically new narrative orientation lay profound continuities with traditional views of mind, particularly its 'linkage' to the external world of others and the cosmos. . . . This dual nature of self, at once transcendent and determined, and attempts to reconcile this duality inform the writing of modern literary critics" (p. 41). This view of duality and the conflicts that have ensued have been discussed in many books and essays, including the volume edited by Roger T. Ames et al., Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (1998). In part 2, Denton focuses on two novels, Children of the Rich and Hungry Guo Su'e, both by Lu Ling. In his reading of these two novels, Denton shows that the changing modern Chinese self is represented as a duality between individualism and collectivism, between the subjective and the objective aspects of the mind, and is caught in the conflicts thus involved. Such conflicts actually are not limited to the characters of Lu Ling's fiction. They can also be found in the...

Changing focus on the representational mind: Deaf, autistic and normal children's concepts of false photos, false drawings and false beliefs

We report two experiments designed to explore further the parallels noted previously between deaf and autistic children's mastery of a theory of mind and to compare their emerging concepts of false belief with their understanding of false representation in the photographic and artistic domains. In Expt 1, standard false‐belief and false‐photograph tasks were given to 21 high functioning autistic children, 35 normal preschoolers and 30 signing deaf children from hearing families. The children with deafness performed similarly to those with autism. The vast majority of both groups passed the false‐photograph test, but less than half displayed a correspondingly accurate understanding of false belief. Normal 4‐year‐olds did equally well on photo and belief tasks, significantly surpassing deaf and autistic children's performance on the latter. However, in contrast to some previous research, the normal 3‐year‐olds also found the false‐photograph task easier than the false‐belief task in Expt 1. Experiment 2 was therefore designed to provide a more tightly controlled comparison of the relative difficulty of concepts of false representation in three modalities— photographic, mental and pictorial—using identical procedures in each modality so as to equate the tasks' conceptual, syntactic and pragmatic demands. A total of 24 deaf children, 21 autistic children and 47 normal preschoolers participated in Expt 2. The results replicated those of Expt 1 by showing no difference between deaf and autistic children, both of whom displayed a poorer understanding of false beliefs than of false photographs. But the normal 3‐year‐olds in Expt 2 did no better on the photo than the belief tasks, suggesting procedural factors as an explanation for this age group's Expt 1 performance. The absence of significant differences among the diagnostic groups on the false‐drawing task highlighted the need for further research into the development of representational concepts in the artistic domain. Consideration was given to how impoverished early conversational experience and selective deprivation of talk about intangible mental states might influence deaf and autistic children's development of a theory of mind.

Children's mental representation of referential relations

We identify a surprising discrepancy in children's performance in two tasks which appear superficially to require handling of the same properties of the representational mind. Four- to six-year-olds made judgements about the knowledge of a protagonist who had only partial information about an object: the child knew that an object in a box had two descriptions, X and Y (e.g. dice and eraser), but the protagonist had access to only one of these, X. In Experiment 1, children who passed a standard false-belief task also judged correctly that the protagonist did not know the X was Y, but often judged wrongly that he did know there was a Y in the box. In Experiment 2, children predicted wrongly where the protagonist would look for a Y: the problem was not purely linguistic. We argue that success on standard theory-of-mind tasks can be supported by a more basic representing ability than is assumed in current theories, and that children's mental representation of referential relations between the world and the mind subsequently undergoes important change.

On the Evolution of Reality—Some Biological Prerequisites and Evolutionary Stages

The discussion of the evolutionary origins of consciousness has largely been concentrated to the human mind, and it is only in recent years that a comparative ethological view has come into play. Even here, a tendency has been to look mainly at the primates. There is a vast literature that discusses the differences between human consciousness and cognition, compared with that of the other primates, but much less attention has been given to the fact that evolutionary gaps—fulgurations, emergences, new systems—have occurred at many stages in the evolution of cognition. More especially, the complexity of rather simple cognitive systems in lower animals has been underestimated, as well as the necessary prerequisites for a cognition worthy of the name to exist. Of particular interest in the discussion has been the views from evolutionary epistemology and radical constructivism, since they support the ethologically founded view that mind representations do not depict reality, but are adaptations for a successful way ofbehavingin the physical world, that reality in this sense is in the mind, that there are many realities, varying for different species—rich or poor in complexity—but all of them basically of the same nature. Even such human achievements as mathematics or logic thus may be seen as specific cognitive adaptions in our species, not as independent aspects of the physical world.