Sub-personal Mechanisms Research Articles

Person, Population, Mechanism. A Rejoinder to Critics and an Elaboration of the Three-Branch Model.

In a previous paper (Lundh, 2023), it was argued that psychological science can be seen as having three main branches, corresponding to three levels of research: research at the person level, at the population level, and at the mechanism level. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the critique that has been raised against this model by Lamiell (2024) and Nilsson (2024) and to elaborate and specify the three-branch model in more detail. This is done by an incorporation of Nilsson's concept of person-sensitivity into the model, and by a clearer differentiation between the two contrasts involved: (1) the methodological focus either on individual persons or on populations of individuals; and (2) the theoretical focus either on whole-person functioning or on sub-personal mechanisms.

Person, Population, Mechanism. Three Main Branches of Psychological Science.

There are different ways of dividing psychology into subdisciplines. The purpose of the present paper is to explore one specific meta-perspective on psychological science, seen as having three main branches: person psychology, population psychology, and mechanism psychology, linked to three different levels of research. Person-level research focuses on psychological phenomena as experienced and enacted by individual persons in their interaction with other persons and other parts of the environment, and in their development over time. Population-level research focuses on populations of individuals, frequencies of various psychological phenomena in a population, risk factors, and population-level effects of various psychological interventions. Mechanism-level research focuses on psychological functioning as explained in terms of neurophysiological mechanisms and information processes at a sub-personal level. It is argued that the failure to differentiate clearly between research questions at these three levels lead to questionable research practices. Most notably, a failure to differentiate clearly between the population level and the person level leads to problem-method mismatches in the form of researchers trying to answer questions about persons by research on populations. Also, because of a failure to differentiate between the person level and the mechanism level, explanations in terms of sub-personal mechanisms are too often seen as providing answers about what occurs at the person level, thereby failing to study persons as intentional agents in interaction with other persons and other parts of the environment. It is argued that a clear differentiation between three levels of psychological science - population, person, and mechanism - may contribute to an increased clarity in these matters and may thereby contribute to the development and maturation of psychological science.

J. J. Gibson’s most radical idea: The development of a new law-based psychology

J. J. Gibson spent most of his career developing his own theory of perception. The culmination of his work was the ecological approach to visual perception, but during more than three decades he had challenged many of the central concepts of psychology and his own convictions regarding the foundations of perception. In this article I argue that the driving force of the development of ecological psychology was Gibson’s most radical idea: that psychology needs a law-based explanatory strategy at its own scale to be successful. According to Gibson, instead of pursuing explanations based on the patching up of simple stimulus-response events with the postulation of more or less lawful sub-personal mechanisms, psychology needs its own laws at a proper scale to provide legitimate explanations for perception and action.

Social Cognition: a Normative Approach

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model (by which we infer others’ mental states via sub-personal mechanisms) and the direct social perception model (by which we directly perceive others’ mental states). In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them.

Mechanistic explanation for enactive sociality

In this article we analyze the methodological commitments of a radical embodied cognition (REC) approach to social interaction and social cognition, specifically with respect to the explanatory framework it adopts. According to many representatives of REC, such as enactivists and the proponents of dynamical and ecological psychology, sociality is to be explained by (1) focusing on the social unit rather than the individuals that comprise it and (2) establishing the regularities that hold on this level rather than modeling the sub-personal mechanisms that could be said to underlie social phenomena. We point out that, despite explicit commitment, such a view implies an implicit rejection of the mechanistic explanation framework widely adopted in traditional cognitive science (TCS), which, in our view, hinders comparability between REC and these approaches. We further argue that such a position is unnecessary and that enactive mechanistic explanation of sociality is both possible and desirable. We examine three distinct objections from REC against mechanistic explanation, which we dub the decomposability, causality and extended cognition worries. In each case we show that these complaints can be alleviated by either appreciation of the full scope of the mechanistic account or adjustments on both mechanistic and REC sides of the debate.

Agency is realized by subpersonal mechanisms too.

John Doris argues that, when behaviors are caused by processes that we would not endorse, our agency is defeated. I argue that this test for defeaters is inappropriate. What matters is not what we would but what we should endorse. The subpersonal mechanisms he identifies as defeaters enable us to track and respond to reasons. They realize agency, rather than defeating it.

Choking and The Yips

Sporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailoring of action to circumstance requires intelligent conceptual guidance. I think that both sides are right, and that both are wrong. We need to distinguish different aspects of sporting performance. When we do so, we will see that there are some aspects where thought is indeed the enemy of sporting success, but that there are others where mental control is crucial. I shall assume in what follows that the focus of the debate is ‘personal-level’ mental activity. The controversy is about whether mental entities like ordinary intentions, decisions, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on contribute to sporting performance, not whether the kind of sub-personal mechanisms that might be uncovered by cognitive science do so. We need to formulate the debate in terms of personal-level mental states because otherwise there would be no issue. If we ask whether any psychological activities make Phenom Cogn Sci (2015) 14:295–308 DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9383-x

Czy empatia jest symulacją mentalną? Dyskusja z podejściem reprezentacyjnym ugruntowanym w koncepcji neuronów lustrzanych.

This paper draws on the theoretical achievements of analytic philosophy of mind (simulation theory of knowing other minds) and the empirical results of psychology and cognitive neuroscience (the discovery of mirror neurons and mirror systems) in order to understand the nature of empathy and the sub-personal mechanisms upon which it is based. The paper distinguishes two types of empathy, which are often not sufficiently clearly distinguished in the literature, empathy as a kind of social perception and empathy as compassion. The argument attempts show to that neither of these can be identified with a mental simulation process understood as a sub-personal process. Nevertheless mental simulation may play a limited explanatory role with respect to these two types of empathy.

No Nonsense Neuro-law

In Minds, Brains, and Norms, Pardo and Patterson deny that the activities of persons (knowledge, rule-following, interpretation) can be understood exclusively in terms of the brain, and thus conclude that neuroscience is irrelevant to the law, and to the conceptual and philosophical questions that arise in legal contexts. On their view, such appeals to neuroscience are an exercise in nonsense. We agree that understanding persons requires more than understanding brains, but we deny their pessimistic conclusion. Whether neuroscience can be used to address legal issues is an empirical question. Recent work on locked-in syndrome, memory, and lying suggests that neuroscience has potential relevance to the law, and is far from nonsensical. Through discussion of neuroscientific methods and these recent results we show how an understanding of the subpersonal mechanisms that underlie person-level abilities could serve as a valuable and illuminating source of evidence in legal and social contexts. In so doing, we sketch the way forward for a no-nonsense approach to the intersection of law and neuroscience.

The shared circuits model (SCM): How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation, deliberation, and mindreading

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines. Imitation is surveyed in this target article under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model (SCM) explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation. It is cast at a middle, functional level of description, that is, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The SCM connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other, and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception.;>;>The SCM is developed heuristically, in five layers that can be combined in various ways to frame specific ontogenetic or phylogenetic hypotheses. The starting point is dynamic online motor control, whereby an organism is closely attuned to its embedding environment through sensorimotor feedback. Onto this are layered functions of prediction and simulation of feedback, mirroring, simulation of mirroring, monitored inhibition of motor output, and monitored simulation of input. Finally, monitored simulation of input specifying possible actions plus inhibited mirroring of such possible actions can generate information about the possible as opposed to actual instrumental actions of others, and the possible causes and effects of such possible actions, thereby enabling strategic social deliberation. Multiple instances of such shared circuits structures could be linked into a network permitting decomposition and recombination of elements, enabling flexible control, imitative learning, understanding of other agents, and instrumental and strategic deliberation. While more advanced forms of social cognition, which require tracking multiple others and their multiple possible actions, may depend on interpretative theorizing or language, the SCM shows how layered mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation can enable distinctively human cognitive capacities for imitation, deliberation, and mindreading.