Terms Of Mental States Research Articles

Mentalising music in frontotemporal dementia

Despite considerable recent interest, the biological basis and clinical diagnosis of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) pose unresolved problems. Mentalising (the cognitive capacity to interpret the behaviour of oneself and others in terms of mental states) is impaired as a prominent feature of bvFTD, consistent with involvement of brain regions including ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), orbitofrontal cortex and anterior temporal lobes. Here, we investigated mentalising ability in a cohort of patients with bvFTD using a novel modality: music. We constructed a novel neuropsychological battery requiring attribution of affective mental or non-mental associations to musical stimuli. Mentalising performance of patients with bvFTD (n = 20) was assessed in relation to matched healthy control subjects (n = 20); patients also had a comprehensive assessment of behaviour and general neuropsychological functions. Neuroanatomical correlates of performance on the experimental tasks were investigated using voxel-based morphometry of patients' brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Compared to healthy control subjects, patients showed impaired ability to attribute mental states but not non-mental characteristics to music, and this deficit correlated with performance on a standard test of social inference and with carer ratings of patients' empathic capacity, but not with other potentially relevant measures of general neuropsychological function. Mentalising performance in the bvFTD group was associated with grey matter changes in anterior temporal lobe and ventro-medial PFC. These findings suggest that music can represent surrogate mental states and the ability to construct such mental representations is impaired in bvFTD, with potential implications for our understanding of the biology of bvFTD and human social cognition more broadly.

A Critique of Embodied Simulation

Social cognition is the capacity to understand and interact with others. The mainstream account of social cognition is mindreading, the view that we humans understanding others by interpreting their behavior in terms of mental states. Recently theorists from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have challenged the mindreading account, arguing for a more deflationary account of social cognition. In this paper I examine a deflationary account of social cognition, embodied simulation, which is inspired by recent neuroscientific findings. I argue that embodied simulation fails to present an adequate alternative to mindreading accounts of social cognition. I defend a philosophically and empirically plausible two-systems account of social cognition, which holds that even very young children are capable of mindreading.

What to Expect When You Pick up a Graphic Novel

What to Expect When You Pick up a Graphic Novel Lisa Zunshine (bio) We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unawares, gropingly, inescapably. A stranger sitting across the table at the library turns away from her laptop screen, extends her forearm, and begins to move her eyes from the tip of her index finger to her nose and back. It's a kind of eye calisthenics; she obviously wants to keep her nearsightedness under control. I sigh and look away: I really should do the same exercises, but I am too lazy. When I look at her again, I see that she sees me looking at her, so I let my glance slide past her casually: I don't want her to think that I am staring. Our daily lives are unimaginable without such constant nonverbal interactions. We explain other people's observable behavior in terms of unobservable mental states and assume that they explain our behavior the same way. Mental states: thoughts, desires, feelings, intentions. She does that exercise because she wants to improve her eyesight. I sigh because I feel bad about my laziness. I don't know what she thinks when she notices my look, but I think up a little narrative about what she might think and what I should do so that she doesn't think this. Note that to describe this for you now I construct a neat sequence of sentences, making it seem like an evenly paced, conscious, and fully verbalized process, but when it was actually happening it was fast, messy, intuitive, not particularly conscious, and certainly not verbalized. We've been doing this daily for hundreds of thousands of years. (Nightly too: we attribute intentions to creatures populating our dreams.) Psychologists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us see behavior as caused by underlying mental states. They call it theory of mind, also known as folk psychology and mind-reading. The latter term is particularly inapt. Given how many of our attributions and interpretations of thoughts and feelings are wrong or only approximately correct, they might as well call it mind-misreading. But since evolution doesn't deal in perfection, we have to fumble through by "reading minds" as well as we can. Because when we can't do it—that is, when the cognitive architecture that makes an automatic attribution of mental states possible [End Page 114] is impaired, as it appears to be with autism spectrum condition—we are faced with social challenges of a different order of magnitude.1 In the last five years, theory of mind has become a major research topic among cognitive, developmental, comparative and social psychologists, as well as cognitive neuroscientists.2 Though everything they learn opens up more questions and will remain the subject of debates for years to come, theory of mind is increasingly thought of as a crucial cognitive endowment of our species—a cornerstone of imagination, pretense, morality, and language, indeed of every aspect of human sociality. The emphasis on the social aspect of mind-reading is central to the argument of this essay. I suggest that graphic narratives build on theory-of-mind adaptations to offer their readers a pleasurable exercise in navigating complex social situations. I also suggest that these narratives use a variety of visual cues to signal to their readers what levels of mind-reading complexity—I call it sociocognitive complexity—they may expect when they pick up a particular graphic novel or memoir. The overarching claim of my essay is that all narrative-oriented cultural representations, such as fiction, movies, plays, team sports broadcasts, as well as some forms of art, singing, and dance, reflect the workings of our theory of mind. This means that we can understand better how specific representations, such as graphic narratives, affect us if we ask how they engage our theory of mind. I lay out this larger claim in the first part, in which I invite you to imagine what our culture would be like if our theory-of-mind adaptations were magically turned off. The second part elaborates the concept of sociocognitive complexity with a particular emphasis on the pleasure...

The adversarial activity model for bounded rational agents

Multiagent research provides an extensive literature on formal Beliefs-Desires-Intentions (BDI) based models describing the notion of teamwork and cooperation. However, multiagent environments are often not cooperative nor collaborative; in many cases, agents have conflicting interests, leading to adversarial interactions. This form of interaction has not yet been formally defined in terms of the agents mental states, beliefs, desires and intentions. This paper presents the Adversarial Activity model, a formal Beliefs-Desires-Intentions (BDI) based model for bounded rational agents operating in a zero-sum environment. In complex environments, attempts to use classical utility-based search methods with bounded rational agents can raise a variety of difficulties (e.g. implicitly modeling the opponent as an omniscient utility maximizer, rather than leveraging a more nuanced, explicit opponent model). We define the Adversarial Activity by describing the mental states of an agent situated in such environment. We then present behavioral axioms that are intended to serve as design principles for building such adversarial agents. We illustrate the advantages of using the model as an architectural guideline by building agents for two adversarial environments: the Connect Four game and the Risk strategic board game. In addition, we explore the application of our approach by analyzing log files of completed Connect Four games, and gain additional insights on the axioms' appropriateness.

Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness

In studying folk psychology, cognitive and developmental psychologists have mainly focused on how people conceive of non-experiential states, such as beliefs and desires. As a result, we know very little about how the non-philosophers (or the folk) understand the mental states that philosophers typically classify as being phenomenally conscious. In particular, it is not known whether the folk even tend to classify mental states in terms of their being or not being phenomenally conscious in the first place. Things have changed dramatically in the last few years, however, with a flurry of ground-breaking research by psychologists and experimental philosophers. In this article, I will review this work, carefully distinguishing between two questions: First, are the ascriptions that the folk make with regard to the mental states that philosophers classify as phenomenally conscious related to their decisions about whether morally right or wrong action has been done to an entity? Second, do the folk tend to classify mental states in the way that philosophers do, distinguishing between mental states that are phenomenally conscious and mental states that are not phenomenally conscious?

Seeing other minds: attributed mental states influence perception

A current consensus views social perception as a bottom-up process in which the human brain uses social signals to make inferences about another's mental state. Here we propose that, contrary to this model, even the most basic perceptual processing of a social stimulus and closely associated automatic responses are modulated by mental-state attribution. We suggest that social perception is subserved by an interactive bidirectional relationship between the neural mechanisms supporting basic sensory processing of social information and the theory-of-mind system. Consequently, processing of a social stimulus cannot be divorced from its representation in terms of mental states. This hypothesis has far-reaching implications for our understanding of both the healthy social brain and characteristic social failures in psychopathology.

COMMUNICATION LANGUAGES FOR MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have recently acquired a primary role in open multiagent systems, which need a standard communication framework shared by all interacting heterogeneous agents. According to the most important ACL standard proposals so far, agents are supposed to carry out the communication process by performing actions of a specific type, namely, communicative acts, whose semantics is defined in terms of the agents' mental states. Although following the mainstream guidelines inspired by the Speech Act Theory, our work illustrates an alternative model of agent communication, by shifting the focus from agents' mental states to their social state. Taking an existing communicative act library, we provide a semantics for a significant set of acts based on the concept of commitment, and prove that our approach tackles some issues that have not been dealt with in an effective way yet and that may have hindered the rise of an universally accepted ACL standard.

False-belief understanding in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

The ability to understand other people's behavior in terms of mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, is central to social interaction. It has been argued that the interpersonal problems of patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b) are due to a dysfunction of that system. We used first- and second-order false-belief tasks to assess theory-of-mind reasoning in a group of patients with FTD-b and a cognitively matched group of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both patient groups were equally impaired relative to a healthy elderly group in the cognitively demanding second-order false-belief tasks, revealing that cognitive demands are an important factor in false-belief task performance. Both patient groups reached ceiling performance in the first-order false-belief tasks with minimal cognitive demands, despite the striking difference in their social graces. These results suggest that a conceptual deficit in theory of mind—as measured by the false-belief task—is not at the core of the differences between FTD-b and AD.

MINDING THE BABY

The primary aim of this article is to give a theoretical and empirical background for clinical interventions in family-oriented treatment for substance use disorders. The article refers to an ongoing research project, which is based on the concepts of mentalization and parental reflective functioning. Theory of mentalization and attachment theory is explored as explanatory tools of both addictive problem and risk/resilience factors in offspring. Mentalization is defined as the competence to envision mental states in self and others and to understand behaviour in terms of mental states. Substance use is discussed as clinical expressions of impaired mentalizing skills and disorders of state- and affect regulation. Parental reflective function particularly refers to parents’ competences to interpret the mind of their own infant or child. Parental reflective functioning, as ‘minding the baby’, promotes sensitive care, which again serves to protect the infant and the immature brain from potentially dangerous stress and physiological arousal. Substance use often makes the parent ‘absent-minded’ and thus imposes a risk of impaired interactions between caregivers and the extra vulnerable substance exposed child.Without a lifeline to the caregivers’ mind, the development of self regulation and social competences is endangered. High-risk families need substantial support to break the burden of intergenerational transmission of internal representations of caregiving experiences, and to promote good enough care for the infant. The mentalization-based treatment programs (MBT) briefly outlined here, propose a long-term multidisciplinary treatment and follow-up.

The Development of Borderline Personality Disorder—A Mentalizing Model

This paper describes a mentalization-based model of the development of borderline personality disorder (BPD). The model takes into account constitutional vulnerability and is rooted in attachment theory and its elaboration by contemporary developmental psychologists. The model suggests that disruption of the attachment relationship early in development in combination with later traumatic experiences in an attachment context interacts with neurobiological development. The combination leads to hyper-responsiveness of the attachment system which makes mentalizing, the capacity to make sense of ourselves and others in terms of mental states, unstable during emotional arousal. The emergence of earlier modes of psychological function at these times accounts for the symptoms of BPD. The model has clinical implications and suggests that the aim of treatment is not only to encourage development of mentalizing but also to facilitate its maintenance when the attachment system is stimulated.

Expressivism and the Limits of Moral Disagreement

This paper argues that expressivism faces serious difficulties giving an adequate account of univocal moral disagreements. Expressivist accounts of moral discourse understand moral judgments in terms of various noncognitive mental states, and they interpret moral disagreements as clashes between competing (and incompatible) attitudes. I argue that, for various reasons, expressivists must specify just what mental states are involved in moral judgment. If they do not, we lack a way of distinguishing moral judgments from other sorts of assessment and thus for identifying narrowly moral disagreements. If they do, we can construct cases of intuitively real dispute that do not rest on the theory’s preferred mental states. This strategy is possible because our intuitions about moral concept-ascription do not track speakers’ noncognitive states. I discuss various ways of developing this basic argument, then apply it to the work of the two most sophisticated proponents of expressivism, Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn. I argue that neither is successful in meeting the challenge.

The image, mentalisation and group art psychotherapy

This article presents a pilot project of a combined treatment programme to treat clients with personality disorder. It consisted of an art psychotherapy group alongside individual verbal psychotherapy sessions. A description of the first two art therapy group sessions is provided. The clinical material is informed by theoretical concepts that draw together attachment theory and recent discoveries in neuroscience. In particular the capacity to ‘mentalise’ is central to thinking about the role of the image within art therapy. Mentalisation is seen as the capacity to perceive and understand self and others in terms of mental states. Significant interpersonal conflict associated with personality disorder, represents failure of mentalisation, and examples are presented here. The article draws on the contemporary work of Bateman and Fonagy in treating people with personality disorder. Outcome measures used to evaluate the project are briefly presented.

Key psychological issues in the study of religion

The current article considers the role of scientific (experimental) psychology in the study of religion and argues that many of the questions central to the history, sociology and anthropology of religion are often psychological and hence require the use of appropriate psychological methods. Psychological study of religion differs from those other disciplines by virtue of its (a) definition of religion (in terms of individual mental states rather than culturally transmitted teachings and socially acquired behaviors), (b) methods of research (designed to elicit and examine relevant mental states), and (c) explanatory aims (concerned with the origin and development of specific cognitive events). Whilst the distinction between individual and social origin of concepts is central to psychological accounts of religion, non-psychological accounts of religion actually dwell on an interaction between the two. It is further argued that some of the key issues in the study of religion -- origin of religious concepts, core religious beliefs, and universality of religious beliefs -- can be most adequately tackled within the framework of cognitive developmental psychology. Possible explanations are suggested for hitherto insufficient involvement of those psychological approaches in the study of religion. .

On pedagogy

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of 'motherese', and being addressed by one's own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such 'ostensive' cues that signal the teacher's communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others' object-directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person's mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14-month-olds' interpretation of others' object-directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far-reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social-cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.

The Mentalization-Focused Approach to Self Pathology

Our approach to understanding self pathology in personality disorder assumes that the capacity to mentalize, that is, the capacity to conceive of mental states as explanations of behavior in oneself and in others, is a key determinant of self-organization. Along with contributory capacities of affect regulation and attention control mechanisms, the capacity for mentalization is acquired in the context of early attachment relationships. Disturbances of attachment relationships will therefore disrupt the normal emergence of these key social-cognitive capacities and create profound vulnerabilities in the context of social relationships. Ours is fundamentally a psychoanalytic approach but we have elaborated our model of social development on the basis of empirical observations as well as clinical work. We define mentalization as a form of mostly preconscious imaginative mental activity, namely, perceiving and interpreting human behavior in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons). Mentalizing is imaginative because we have to imagine what other people might be thinking or feeling; an important indicator of high quality of mentalization is the awareness that we cannot know absolutely what is in someone else’s mind. We suggest that a similar kind of imaginative leap is required to understand one’s own mental experience, particularly in relation to emotionally charged issues. In order to conceive of others as having a mind, the individual needs a symbolic representational system for mental states and also must be able to selectively activate states of mind in line with particular intentions, which requires attentional control.

Theory of mind

Theory of mind

Unity within psychology, and unity between science and practice.

The unity of psychology as a science is to be found in its definition as the science of mental life, and its explanation of individual behavior in terms of mental states. This disciplinary focus will help negotiate psychology's relations with other disciplines, such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The unity within psychology between science and practice is to be found in a focus on scientific evidence as the source of the status, autonomy, and privileges of professional practitioners. Psychology should avoid the temptations of reductionism, and assert (and enjoy) its twin status as both a biological science and a social science.

Affection for cohabitant toy dolls

AbstractIn an unprecedented phenomenon characterizing a new kind of relationship between humans and artifacts, a craze within middle‐aged people for a toy doll is analyzed. In this paper, we deal with a talking toy doll. Specifically, 51 fan letters and 271 web site postings spontaneously sent to the toy company are analyzed in terms of their communicative functions and affective‐cognitive contents. The results indicate that (a) the doll is simultaneously seen as both an artifact and a cohabitant (b) the doll owners attribute positive feelings in terms of both mental and physical states to the doll, (c) the doll owners believe that the utterances of the doll facilitate interaction with family members and with friends, and that (d) affections are evoked through owner actions toward the artifact. Based on these results, we propose a cognitive model of cognitive activity with artifacts. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Citizenship in practice.

The idea of citizenship dates back to classical antiquity. It was originally concerned to address legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere. Our empirical study contributes to the project of developing a social psychology of the citizen by focusing on the dynamics of such membership, specifically rights and identities. The authors briefly describe a number of existing psychological models of the citizen. Drawing on the main theoretical principles of discursive psychology, rather than asking, 'who is the citizen?' in terms of mental states, we suggest a shift in focus to the more social question, 'how do people claim citizenship and to what ends?'. We present an analysis of private letters of complaint that formed part of a larger mixed data set used in a recent research programme centred on disputes over Britain's newer travellers' rights of settlement. Specifically our analysis demonstrates how some of the letter writers generate a basis for claims-making by making relevant a citizenship/ governance alignment of identities. We also demonstrate how the entitlements associated with the category citizen are built up and action-oriented rather than flowing from the (unproblematic) assumption of citizenship. Finally we discuss how citizenship can be used for the purposes of inclusion and exclusion.

We Don’t Need a Microscope to Explore the Chimpanzee's Mind

Abstract: The question of whether chimpanzees, like humans, reason about unobservable mental states remains highly controversial. On one account, chimpanzees are seen as possessing a psychological system for social cognition that represents and reasons about behaviors alone. A competing account allows that the chimpanzee's social cognition system additionally construes the behaviors it represents in terms of mental states. Because the range of behaviors that each of the two systems can generate is not currently known, and because the latter system depends upon the former, determining the presence of this latter system in chimpanzees is a far more difficult task than has been assumed. We call for recognition of this problem, and a shift from experimental paradigms that cannot resolve this question, to ones that might allow researchers to intelligently determine when it is necessary to postulate the presence of a system which reasons about both behavior and mental states.