Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind

We use mental files theory to provide an integral theory of children’s diverse dual naming problems and why these problems are overcome when children pass the false belief test. When an object is encountered under different appearances or given different verbal labels, two distinct representations (mental files) may be deployed for that single object. The resulting files refer to the same object but capture different perspectives on the object. Such coreferential files can thus be used to represent people’s differing perspectives (e.g., belief). Typically the existence of different files indicates the existence of two separate objects. To mark that only a single object is involved, coreferential files need to be linked. Development of the ability to link files provides a powerful developmental explanation for success on dual labelling and perspective tasks at the same age, around 4 years: processing identity statements, overcoming mutual exclusivity (accepting different labels for an object), visual perspective taking, and understanding differences of belief. Mental files also provide a new framework for understanding conceptual pacts and their relation to mutual exclusivity in children and adults

Do infants understand that external goals are internally represented?

Evidence for infants’ sensitivity to behavior being goal oriented leaves it open as to whether they see such behavior as being designed to lead to an external goal or whether they see it, in addition, as being directed by an internal representation of the goal. We point out the difficulty of finding possible criteria for how infants or children view this matter

Belief and Counterfactuality: A teleological theory of belief attribution

The development and relation of counterfactual reasoning and false belief understanding were examined in 3- to 7-year-old children (N=75) and adult controls (N=14). The key question was whether false belief understanding engages counterfactual reasoning to infer what somebody else falsely believes. Findings revealed a strong correlation between false belief and counterfactual questions even in conditions in which children could commit errors other than the reality bias (rp=.51). The data suggest that mastery of belief attribution and counterfactual reasoning is not limited to one point in development but rather develops over a longer period. Moreover, the rare occurrence of reality errors calls into question whether young children's errors in the classic false belief task are indeed the result of a failure to inhibit what they know to be actually the case. The data speak in favour of a teleological theory of belief attribution and challenges established theories of belief attribution

Route Optimization in Free Route Airspace

PERNER, J. Optimalizace trasy ve vzdušném prostoru volných tratí: bakalářská práce. Ostrava: VŠB – Technická univerzita Ostrava, Fakulta strojní, Institut dopravy, 2021, 52s. Vedoucí práce: doc. Ing. Dušan Teichmann, Ph.D. V dnešní době je moderní zavádět FRA nad územím daných Evropských států, neboť evropský vzdušný prostor je dnes velmi přeplněný a dochází k neefektivnímu vyplnění vzdušného prostoru. Obsahem této bakalářské práce bude nalézt vhodné algoritmy a jako důkaz efektivity těchto algoritmů bude jeden vybrán a aplikován na danou trasu, kde bude nalezena minimální cesta. Důkazem, že se jedná o minimální cestu, bude ta samá trasa propočítána také v opačném směru.PERNER, J. Route Optimalization in the Free Route Airspace: Bachelor Thesis. Ostrava: VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Transport, 2021, 52p. Thesis head: doc. Ing. Dušan Teichmann, Ph.D. Nowadays, it is modern to introduce FRA over the territory of the some European states, because the European airspace is very crowded today and it is filled inefficiently. The content of this bachelor thesis is to find suitable algorithms and to prove the effectiveness of these algorithms will be selected and applied to one of the route where it will find the minimum path. As proof that this is a minimum route, the same route will also be calculated in the opposite direction.342 - Institut dopravyvýborn

Helping as an early indicator of a theory of mind: Mentalism or Teleology?

This article challenges Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello’s (2009) claim that young children’s helping responses in their task are based on ascribing a false belief to a mistaken agent. In the first Study 18- to 32-month old children (N = 28) were more likely to help find a toy in the false belief than in the true belief condition. In Study 2, with 54 children of the same age, we assessed the authors’ mentalist interpretation of this result against an alternative teleological interpretation that does not make this assumption of belief ascription. The data speak in favor of our alternative. Children’s social competency is based more on inferences about what is likely to happen in a particular situation and on objective reasons for action than on inferences about agents’ mental states. We also discuss the need for testing serious alternative interpretations of claims about early belief understanding

An evaluation of neurocognitive models of Theory of Mind

Matthias Schurz, Josef Perne

Counterfactual Reasoning: Sharpening Conceptual Distinctions in Developmental Studies

ABSTRACT-Counterfactual reasoning (CFR)-mentally representing what the world would be like now if things had been different in the past-is an important aspect of human cognition and the focus of research in areas such as philosophy, social psychology, and clinical psychology. More recently, it has also gained broad interest in cognitive developmental psychology, mainly focusing on the question of how this kind of reasoning can be characterized. Studies have been inconsistent in identifying when children can use CFR. In this article, we present theoretical positions that may account for this inconsistency and evaluate them in the light of research on counterfactual emotions

Pro-social cognition: helping, practical reasons, and ‘theory of mind’

There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show precocious abilities in two different domains: they reflect complex ‘theory of mind’ abilities as well as ‘altruistic motivation’. Our aim in this paper is to present a theoretical hypothesis that bears on both kinds of developments. The suggestion is that children’s ‘instrumental helping’ reflects their budding understanding of practical reasons (in the standard sense of ‘considerations that count in favour of’ someone’s acting in a certain way). We can put the basic idea in the familiar terminology of common coding: toddlers conceive of the goals of others’ actions in the same format as the goals of their own actions: in terms of features of their situation that provide us with reasons to act

The practical other : teleology and its development

We argue for teleology as a description of the way in which we ordinarily understand others’ intentional actions. Teleology starts from the close resemblance between the reasoning involved in understanding others’ actions and one’s own practical reasoning involved in deciding what to do. We carve out teleology’s distinctive features more sharply by comparing it to its three main competitors: theory theory, simulation theory, and rationality theory. The plausibility of teleology as our way of understanding others is underlined by developmental data in its favour

Measuring visual perspective taking in the brain with avatars and arrows::Which question are we asking?

There is an ongoing debate about the involvement of Theory of Mind (ToM) processes in Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). In an fMRI study (Schurz et al., 2015), we borrowed the positive features from a novel VPT task – which is widely used in behavioral research – to study previously overlooked experimental factors in neuroimaging studies. However, as Catmur et al. (2016) rightly argue in a comment on our work, our data do not speak strongly to questions discussed in the original behavioral studies, in particular the issue of implicit mentalizing. We appreciate the clarification of these interpretational limitations of our study, but would like to point out the differences between questions emerging from behavioral and neuroimaging research on VPT. Different from what Catmur et al. (2016) discuss, our study was not intended as a test of implicit mentalizing. In fact, the terms “automatic” and “implicit mentalizing” were never mentioned in our manuscript. Our study addressed a methodological gap between ToM and VPT research, which we identified in two previous meta-analyses on the topics (Schurz et al., 2013, 2014). With this difference in mind we show that the critical points levelled by Catmur et al. (2016) cease to apply