How Do Core Systems Support Learning?

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How Do Core Systems Support Learning?

How do core systems support learning?

‘Core knowledge systems [...] their outputs give rise to the concepts and beliefs that populate our thoughts.’

Spelke (2022, p. 199)

Maybe there is some subtlety here. We will see.

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.

‘preschool children recruited the core number system, on the fly, to perform approximate symbolic arithmetic.’

NB: they only do this when asked to guess (and will protest that they have not learned to add and subtract)

But ‘no awareness of number’ [from earlier]

and

when learning arithmetic, ‘children [...] often make errors that yield wildly wrong answers.’

Spelke discusses this problem, suggesting: lack of confidence in intuitions, lack of trust in intuitions and lack of awareness of intuitions

Spelke (2022, pp. 174, figure 4.5(a)) from Gilmore, McCarthy, & Spelke (2007)

an easier case: action

Zhang & Rosenbaum (2007)

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.

1. you simulate being in a situation

2. the situation triggers a core system

3. the core system generates a disposition to act, or an experience

4. you detect the disposition to act (or the experience)

5. you interpret this, generating an intuition

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.)

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.

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.

‘preschool children recruited the core number system, on the fly, to perform approximate symbolic arithmetic.’

But

when learning arithmetic, ‘children [...] often make errors that yield wildly wrong answers.’

Spelke (2022, pp. 174, figure 4.5(a)) from Gilmore et al. (2007)

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

1. you simulate being in a situation

2. the situation triggers a core system

3. the core system generates a disposition to act, or an experience

4. you detect the disposition to act (or the experience)

5. you interpret this, generating an intuition

intentional isolation

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.

‘These systems give rise to our deepest intuitions, as adults, about the nature of the world and ourselves. The core systems, therefore, provide a common ground for communication between people in different cultures, with different beliefs and values.’

Spelke (2022, p. ixx)

Can we apply this to theory of mind (not just number)?

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)).

A neglected puzzle ...

Barone, Wenzel, Proft, & Rakoczy (2022)

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.

How are children able to show correct action anticipation on the basis of placing sieves, pointing and helping?

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.

Zani, Butterfill, & Low (2020) (see also Zani, Butterfill, & Low (2023))

What if we bind the protagonist?

‘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)

Barone et al. (2022)

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)

Garnham and Perner 2001, figure 1

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.

Inferential Isolation Is a Barrier to Understanding Cognitive Development

notes

‘core systems give rise to simulations that prepare infants for learning from their encounters with objects, places, and other entities.’

Spelke (2022, p. xxiv)

‘These systems give rise to our deepest intuitions, as adults, about the nature of the world and ourselves. The core systems, therefore, provide a common ground for communication between people in different cultures, with different beliefs and values.’

Spelke (2022, p. ixx)

‘These ancient systems [core systems] [...] give rise to mental representations that are deeply inaccessible to our human, conscious minds. We can discover them through experiments, but not by introspection.’

Spelke (2022, p. xx)