Maybe there is some subtlety here. We will see.
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Pre-school children who have not been taught addition can do this
with accuracy above chance (around 70–80% for large ratios)
if they are asked to guess.
NB: they only do this when asked to guess (and will protest that they
have not learned to add and subtract)
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Spelke discusses this problem, suggesting: lack of confidence in intuitions,
lack of trust in intuitions and lack of awareness of intuitions
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The end-state comfort effect.
We are unaware of the effect, and of the motor representations
responsible for it.
Indeed, motor representations and knowledge are inferentially isolated.
But suppose someone asked you, ‘How would you pick up the mug
if asked to move it to position 1?’ Of course you could answer
this question easily.
But how do you answer the question? I think you imaginatively put
yourself in the situation where you have been asked to do this.
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This can all happen without awareness.
Note how many different things can go wrong:
the simulation might not occur, or might not be suitable for triggering the core system;
you might not detect the disposition to act or experience;
you might not interpret this.
(Spelke’s discussion appears to assume that the intuition is generated but that
it is treated with low confidence or lack of trust.)
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When there is no awareness, the conclusion you reach is an intuition,
that is,
a thought which seems true independently of our being aware of any inferential justification for it.
p ‘intuition’—a thought which seems true independently of our being aware of any inferential justification for it.
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Now let’s go back and apply this to the case of number ...
The only thing we need to add is that the pre-schoolers need some link between
arabic numerals and shapes of different sizes. This is so that the stimuli
can trigger the simulation of a situation that will trigger the core system.
I couldn’t find the actual stimlus materials that Gilmore et al used,
but you can see from their schematic representation of them that they are
likely to promote visualising quantities—the Arabic numerals are carefully
placed so that you could easily translate them into a scene.
Crudely put, the pre-schoolers just have to expand the bags with larger numerals
or shrink bags with smaller numerals
Actually there are two points here:
1. visually expand or contract bags
2. they are drawn to the larger bags for reasons that have nothing
to do with addition (they like candies or whatever; prediction: it would
not work with broccoli or brussel sprouts; or neutral things)
PREDICTIONS:
(i) encase bags so size cannnot change, or give them physical bags to hold;
(ii) swap the candies for neutral objects in which the children have no interest,
or train with desirable (candies) then introduce replusive (broccoli) to see whether
they can even be tipped to get things systematically wrong with a replusive object.
(iii) interrupting the display, to interfere with visualisation, between explaining the scene
and asking for the responses.
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I want to make three claims about this process
First, it provides a way for core systems to influence conscious thoughts without
inferential integration
Second, none of the evidence requires us to go substantially beyond this process
and postulate more direct links between core systems and conscious thoughts.
Third, it involves intentional isolation between core systems and knowledge ...
the concepts and principles involved in core systems do not feed in to
knowledge (so we still have a really difficult question about the origins of
knowledge).m
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We have reason to doubt this claim: no reason that core systems,
even if they are the same in all humans, will give rise to the same intuitions.
Indeed, in the case of ethical cognition we seem to have exactly this—core systems
giving rise to liberal vs conservative moral principles.
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Much harder to see cases where children relied on core systems
to solve theory of mind tasks by answering verbal questions.
To this end, we need a situation where fast processes and slow processes
generate conflicting action predictions.
The current replication crisis makes it difficult to be confident that we could
find such situations is ... but anyway ...
imagine you create stimulus materials which maximally encourage
simulation;
you attempt to enhance subjects’ sensitivity to dispositions to act;
and you attempt to block or dampen explicit theory of mind reasoning processes,
which could drown out the intuition.
Could you then get children to be above chance in giving ‘correct’ answers whereas
they usually are around chance in giving incorrect ones? (As in Gilmore et al. (2007)).
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This is puzzling.
(Also Knudsen and Liszkowski and Buttelmann et al).
Puzzle: fast processes (core systems) are not supposed to feed into
deliberation; but it looks like placing the boxes or pointing or helping actions
are driven by deliberation.
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Zani et al important because it shows that there are bodily
consequences of fast processes,
which are revelatory in the sense of being correlated with false beliefs (or other mental states),
and therefore fast mindreading processes could trigger
awareness.
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‘The fact that the mediolateral difference between true belief
condition and false belief condition disappears when manipulating the
agent’s ability to move (i.e., TBT = FBT) is suggestive of an
attenuation of participants’ ability to motorically represent the goal
of the observed action. However, the lack of a significant effect
within conditions (i.e., TBU = TBT; FBU = FBT) also indicates that the
effect of constraint on the ability to generate motor predictions
about observed belief based actions is not conclusive.’
(Zani PhD, forthcoming)
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EXPLANATION OF HOW IT WORKS
(work through the process from simulation to intuition)
1. you simulate the dog appearing
2. this triggers fast mindreading
3. fast mindreading generates a bodily shift in the direction that the fast mindreading process predicts the dog will appear
4. you detect the bodily lean, (or maybe it even biases you towards one of two spatially arranged responses: in which case no intuition is needed)
5. you interpret the lean as relevant to choosing the location
PREDICTIONS
0. encouraging children to guess, and perhaps to think about what their bodies
are telling them, might improve performance. (Maybe even draw attention to which
way they are leaning by putting them on a wii balance board and showing them
slight leans?)
1. different spatial arrangement of alternatives (not left–right) will make it harder
2. introducing delays will make it harder (breaking the flow between detecting intuition and acting)
[need to think about this more]
3. Bodily constraints (but we have not had a very good run with these)
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Question is, How do core systems support learning?
Underappreciated problem is inferential isolation.
Potential solution is simulation plus an ability to detect
the bodily and experiential side-effects of core systems’ operation.
This potential solution generates plenty of testable predictions.
There is also a good chance that the potential solution is wrong,
so we should it would be good to have alternatives to pit against it.
