Abstract
Critics of the mindreading paradigm have argued that genuine mental-state attribution must be slow and cognitively effortful, and thus could not play a significant role in everyday social cognition. Motivated by this challenge, the two-systems account suggests that we really possess two systems for theory-of-mind: a fast but inflexible “implicit” system that operates in an automatic fashion, and a flexible but slow “explicit” system that involves the effortful use of working memory. In this paper, I will use the case of mature perspective-taking to argue that the two-systems framework is inaccurate. Emerging from this critique is a conception of fast, flexible mindreading that can provide a bulwark against skepticism about the role of mindreading in everyday social cognition.
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Notes
Why is representing “full-blown” propositional attitudes so demanding? Butterfill and Apperly write:
On any standard view, propositional attitudes form complex causal structures, have arbitrarily nestable contents, interact with each other in uncodifiably complex ways and are individuated by their causal and normative roles in explaining thoughts and actions.... If anything should consume working memory and other scarce cognitive resources, it is surely representing states with this combination of properties. (Butterfill and Apperly 2013, pp. 609–610)
See Carruthers (2016) for a critique of this argument.
There are a number of other well-known modularist approaches to theory of mind (Fodor 1992; Leslie et al. 2004; Scholl and Leslie 1999); however, these accounts tend not to sharply distinguish between implicit and explicit mindreading systems, as the two-systems theorists do. Although a discussion of these views is beyond the scope of this paper, it is likely that many of the arguments to come that are directed at the two-systems account will also pose challenges for them as well.
For a recent review of this topic, see Ogilvie and Carruthers (2016).
In their own critique of the two-systems view, Christensen and Michael give a number of examples of well-studied cognitive systems that also succeed in achieving both flexibility and efficiency without the need for strong encapsulation, including the orbitofrontal cortex, the mid-level visual system, and language comprehension (Christensen and Michael 2015).
Since cueing effects can also be triggered by other kinds of directional stimuli, such as arrows (Ristic et al. 2002), some have suggested that this process might be the product of a domain-general covert orienting mechanism (Santiesteban et al. 2014). However, these two types of cueing effects appear to have distinct cognitive, developmental, and neural bases. Specifically, gaze shifts appear to issue in a distinctly spatial cueing effect for the specific location where the eyes look, whereas arrows produce object-based cueing effects for any items that appear on the congruent side, regardless of their specific location (Marotta et al. 2012). Further, while gaze-cueing effects appear even in extremely young infants (Farroni et al. 2009; Hood et al. 1998), cueing effects from other kinds of stimuli do not emerge until much later in development (Jakobsen et al. 2013). Finally, gaze-cueing, but not other kinds of cueing, produces activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a neural region associated with social cognition (Ristic and Kingstone 2005) (see also Michael and D’Ausilio (2015)).
Submitted manuscript: “Automatic Attentional Cueing by a Novel Agent in Preschool-Aged Children and Adults” (personal communication).
Granted, attention can sometimes be “captured” in an automatic, goal-independent manner by environmental stimuli (Knudsen 2011), and it’s conceivable that Level-1 perspective-taking could likewise be the product of purely bottom-up processing. However, many of the gaze-cueing experiments cited above were able to perfectly control for such low-level effects by using perceptually identical stimuli in both experimental and control conditions. The factors that modulated Level-1 perspective taking in these experiments could not have been purely stimulus-driven.
Carruthers does accept that the evidence from the dot-perspective task shows that Level-1 perspective-taking is automatic, although he denies that these results are best explained in terms of a non-representational concept of seeing. On his “one-system” account, the attribution of mental state concepts is automatic when executive resources are not required, and “spontaneous” when they are. However, the argument from gaze-cueing from the previous section shows that even Level-1 perspective-taking is a spontaneous activity, rather than truly automatic.
Christensen and Michael (2015) discuss the use of schemas in mindreading at length in their “cooperative multi-systems architecture” proposal, which they offer as an alternative to the two-systems account.
Interestingly, Michelon and Zacks discovered that subjects also tended to use memory-based strategies in a Level-1 perspective-taking task: instead of calculating the line-of-sight of an agent directly, participants simply memorized the set of objects that the agent could see, and this led to increased performance (Michelon and Zacks 2006). The experimenters, who were interested in studying how line-of-sight is calculated, developed a method to control for this strategy. But it highlights the fact that memory-based perspective-taking strategies provide an ever-present, efficient alternative to the use of more spatial forms of reasoning, whether these involve line-of-sight calculation or mental rotation.
See Thompson (2014) for a detailed critique of this proposal.
Motor intentions are intentions to engage in a particular motor action, such as gras** or throwing. These are distinct from distal or future intentions (what I plan to do at some point in the future) and present intentions (what I plan to do now, framed at a level of abstraction that is independent of any particular motor plan) (Pacherie 2008; Spaulding 2015).
Proponents of the two-systems account would deny that these experiments provide evidence for “belief-tracking,” since they hold that the implicit system does not represent “full-blown” propositional attitudes. Rather, they would describe these results as evidence of the tracking of “registrations,” a quasi-mentalistic, implicit analogue of beliefs represented by the implicit system (Butterfill and Apperly 2013).
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I would like to thank Peter Carruthers for his comments on this paper.
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Westra, E. Spontaneous mindreading: a problem for the two-systems account. Synthese 194, 4559–4581 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1159-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1159-0