Claudia Chiavarino

Is Belief Reasoning Automatic

Understanding the operating characteristics of theory of mind is essential for understanding how beliefs, desires, and other mental states are inferred, and for understanding the role such inferences could play in other cognitive processes. We present the first investigation of the automaticity of belief reasoning. In an incidental false-belief task, adult subjects responded more slowly to unexpected questions concerning another persons belief about an objects location than to questions concerning the objects real location. Results in other conditions showed that responses to belief questions were not necessarily slower than responses to reality questions, as subjects showed no difference in response times to belief and reality questions when they were instructed to track the persons beliefs about the objects location. The results suggest that adults do not ascribe beliefs to agents automatically.

Exploring the functional and anatomical bases of mirror-image and anatomical imitation: The role of the frontal lobes

Humans are the most imitative species on earth, but how imitation is accomplished and which areas of the brain are directly involved in different kinds of imitation is still under debate. One view is that imitation entails representing observed behaviours as a set of hierarchically organised goals, which subsequently drive the construction of an action pattern [Bekkering, H., Wohlschläger, A., & Gattis, M. (2000). Imitation of gestures in children is goal-directed. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 153-164; Wohlschläger, A., Gattis, M., & Bekkering, H. (2003). Action generation and action perception in imitation: An instance of the ideomotor principle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 358, 501-515]. On this view, when working memory resources are limited, only the goals at the top-end of the hierarchy will be accurately reproduced. In the present study, neurologically intact participants and patients with frontal and non-frontal lesions were asked to make imitative responses that were either mirror-image (e.g., the observers right side corresponding to the models left side) or anatomically (e.g., the observers right side corresponding to the models right side) matching. Experiment 1 confirmed that individuals with brain damage, though globally impaired compared with neurologically intact controls, nevertheless followed the same goal hierarchy. However, there was a selective deficit in performing anatomical imitation for the frontal group. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the problem for frontal patients stemmed from an impaired ability to remember and reproduce incompatible stimulus-response mappings, which is fundamental for the selection of the appropriate frame of reference during anatomical imitation.

Understanding Intentions: Distinct Processes for Mirroring, Representing, and Conceptualizing

We provide converging evidence from developmental, imaging, and lesion studies that intentions can be processed at three distinct levels: a mirroring level, which infers immediate action goals on the basis of observed actions; a representational level, which is concerned with the psychological—rather than merely behavioral—representation of the mental states that underlie those actions; and a conceptual level, which allows people to reason about the semantic and logical properties of mental states. Together, the representational and conceptual levels form what is currently referred to as the mentalizing system. We argue that although the mirroring and mentalizing systems may work independently of each other, within the mentalizing system, the representational level subserves the conceptual level.

Distinguishing intentions from desires: contributions of the frontal and parietal lobes.

The ability to represent desires and intentions as two distinct mental states was investigated in patients with parietal (N=8) and frontal (N=6) lesions and in age-matched controls (N=7). A task was used where the satisfaction of the desire and the fulfilment of the intention did not co-vary and were manipulated in a 2 × 2 set. In two experiments we show that lesions to the frontal lobe may impair the ability to deal with desires when their outcome is not congruent with that of the intention, and that parietal damage - especially if it encompasses the left temporo-parietal junction - may cause severe difficulties in the processing of both desires and intentions. The implications of the results for the neuropsychological and the developmental literature are discussed.

Frontal and parietal lobe involvement in the processing of pretence and intention.

We assessed whether different processes might be at play during pretence understanding by examining breakdowns of performance in participants with acquired brain damage. In Experiment 1 patients with frontal or parietal lesions and neurologically intact adults were asked to categorize videos of pretend and real actions. In Experiment 2 participants saw three types of videos: real intentional actions, real accidental actions, and pretend actions. In one session they judged whether the actions they saw were intentional or accidental, and in a second session they judged whether the actions were real or pretend. Parietal patients had particular difficulties in the identification of pretend actions, and both parietal and frontal patients were more impaired than controls in understanding the intentional nature of pretence. Analyses of individual patients’ performance revealed that parietal lesions, and in particular lesions to the temporo-parietal junction, impaired the ability to discriminate pretend from real actions. However, this did not necessarily affect the discrimination of intentional from unintentional actions, which instead may be independently disrupted by damage to frontal areas. Moreover, spared ability to discriminate pretend actions from real actions, and intentional actions from accidental actions, did not grant a full conceptual understanding of the intentional nature of pretence. The implications for pretence understanding are discussed.