Hannes Rakoczy

The sources of normativity: young children's awareness of the normative structure of games.

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old childrens awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Childrens normative responses to the puppets acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities.

What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality

It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief–desire psychology of four–year–old children and adults (so–called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old childrens understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating childrens understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective–shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions.

Young children’s understanding of violations of property rights

The present work investigated young childrens normative understanding of property rights using a novel methodology. Two- and 3-year-old children participated in situations in which an actor (1) took possession of an object for himself, and (2) attempted to throw it away. What varied was who owned the object: the actor himself, the child subject, or a third party. We found that while both 2- and 3-year-old children protested frequently when their own object was involved, only 3-year-old children protested more when a third partys object was involved than when the actor was acting on his own object. This suggests that at the latest around 3 years of age young children begin to understand the normative dimensions of property rights.

Young children know that trying is not pretending: A test of the behaving-as-if construal of children's early concept of pretense

In 3 studies, young children were tested for their understanding of pretend actions. In Studies 1 and 2, pairs of superficially similar behaviors were presented to 26- and 36-month-old children in an imitation game. In one case the behavior was marked as trying (signs of effort), and in the other case as pretending (signs of playfulness). Three-year-olds, and to some degree 2-year-olds, performed the real action themselves (or tried to really perform it) after the trying model, whereas after the pretense model, they only pretended. Study 3 ruled out a simple mimicking explanation by showing that children not only imitated differentially but responded differentially with appropriate productive pretending to pretense models and with appropriate productive tool use to trying models. The findings of the 3 studies demonstrate that by 2 to 3 years of age, children have a concept of pretense as a specific type of intentional activity.

Taking Fiction Seriously: Young Children Understand the Normative Structure of Joint Pretence Games

Joint pretence games are implicit rule-governed activities with a normative structure: Given shared fictional stipulations, some acts are appropriate moves, others are inappropriate (i.e., mistakes). The awareness of 2- and 3-year-old children of this normative structure was explored, as indicated by their ability to not only act according to the rules themselves but to spontaneously protest against 3rd party rule violations. After the child and a 2nd person had set up a pretence scenario, a 3rd character (a puppet controlled by another experimenter) joined the game and performed acts either appropriate or inappropriate to the scenario set-up. Children in both age groups protested specifically against inappropriate acts, indicating they were able to not only follow pretence stipulations and act in accordance with them but to understand their deontic implications. This effect was more pronounced in the 3-year-olds than in the 2-year-olds. The results are discussed in the broader context of the development of social understanding and cultural learning.

Why do children overimitate? Normativity is crucial

Recent research has documented that children readily engage in overimitation, that is, the reproduction of causally irrelevant elements within a bigger action sequence. Different explanations have been put forward. Affiliation accounts claim that children overimitate to affiliate with the model. Causal confusion accounts claim that children mistakenly perceive causally irrelevant elements as causally relevant and, thus, imitate them. Normativity accounts claim that overimitation arises when children view causally irrelevant elements as an essential part of an overarching conventional activity. To test among these accounts, we had children watch a model produce some effect by performing a sequence of causally irrelevant and relevant acts, with the latter resulting in some effect. In two conditions, the model presented the action sequence as focused either more on the method or more on the goal, with the normativity account predicting that children should interpret the causally irrelevant element as essential more often in the method condition than in the goal condition. Three measures were used: (a) childrens own overimitation, (b) their spontaneous responses to a puppet engaging in or refraining from overimitation, and (c) their explicit judgments about the puppets behavior. Results revealed that overimitation was frequent in both conditions. In addition, however, children protested against the puppet only when she did not overimitate, they did so more in the method condition than in the goal condition, and they explicitly judged omission of the irrelevant actions to be a mistake in the method condition. These results are not readily compatible with affiliation and causal confusion accounts, and they speak in favor of normativity accounts.

Young children's understanding of the context-relativity of normative rules in conventional games

We investigated young childrens awareness of the context-relative rule structure of simple games. Two contexts were established in the form of spatial locations. Familiar objects were used in their conventional way at location 1, but acquired specific functions in a rule game at location 2. A third party then performed the conventional act at either of the two locations, constituting a mistake at location 2 (experimental condition), but appropriate at location 1 (control condition). Three-year-olds (but not 2-year-olds) systematically distinguished the two conditions, spontaneously intervening with normative protest against the third party act in the experimental, but not in the control condition. Young children thus understand context-specific rules even when the context marking is non-linguistic. These results are discussed in the broader context of the development of social cognition and cultural learning.

Pretend play and the development of collective intentionality

Young childrens pretend play is considered in the context of the development of collective intentionality. It is argued that (i) early pretending is an essentially social and culturally acquired form of action, and (ii) early social pretend play can be considered as the first form of true collective intentionality in ontogeny - involving shared cooperative activities and even some rudimentary form of joint creation of status functions. Recent experimental studies are reported that provide evidence for the claims. Finally, philosophical implications of these claims and findings are discussed. The most important implication that emerges is that existing conceptual analyses of collective intentionality stand in need of being supplemented by more fain-grained taxonomies for the description of such early forms of collective intentionality.

The decline of theory of mind in old age is (partly) mediated by developmental changes in domain-general abilities

Following up on existing, mixed findings in the literature on social cognition in old age different aspects of theory of mind were investigated in younger and older adults. In line with some previous findings, older participants--though matched with the younger ones on crystallized abilities--performed significantly worse both on tasks requiring the ascription of complex intentional attitudes to story protagonists and on tasks of recognizing subtle emotional expressions from video displays. Control analyses showed, however, that these deficits are partly explained by domain-general declines in processing speed and executive function. The implications of these findings for the nature of social cognition and its fate in old age are discussed.

Minds, persons, and space: An fMRI investigation into the relational complexity of higher-order intentionality

Mental state reasoning or theory-of-mind has been the subject of a rich body of imaging research. Although such investigations routinely tap a common set of regions, the precise function of each area remains a contentious matter. With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we sought to determine which areas are involved when processing mental state or intentional metarepresentations by focusing on the relational aspect of such representations. Using non-intentional relational representations such as spatial relations between persons and between objects as a contrast, the results ascertained the involvement of the precuneus, the temporal poles, and the medial prefrontal cortex in the processing of intentional representations. In contrast, the anterior superior temporal sulcus and the left temporo-parietal junction were implicated when processing representations that refer to the presence of persons in relational contexts in general. The right temporo-parietal junction, however, was specifically activated for persons entering spatial relations. The level of representational complexity, a previously unexplored factor, was also found to modulate the neural response in some brain regions, such as the medial prefrontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction. These findings highlight the need to take into account the critical roles played by an extensive network of neural regions during mental state reasoning.