online handout
https://handouts.butterfill.com/docs/potsdam_2023/potsdam_2023
Infants were just under 3 months in this experiment.
I mention this paradigm because it ancient history (1992) and has since been much
replicated.
Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson (1992, p. figure 6 (part))
Spelke et al. (1992, p. figure 7 (part))
Hood, Cole-Davies, & Dias (2003)
There is a surprising discrepancy between infants’ performance on this task and
their performance on object search tasks ...
In this scenario, a cylinder with a smiley face rolls down a ramp and stops behind one
of the doors in the screen.
You can tell which door it stops behind because there is a barrier sticking up above the screen.
Your task is to open a door and retrieve the cylinder, and you may open one door only.
2.5-year-olds appear to open doors at random (often having a favourite door),
and slightly older children opened a door adjacent to the barrier but had no preference for the door
on the correct side of the barrier
(Berthier, De Blois, Poirier, Novak, & Clifton, 2000; Hood et al., 2003).
But what happens if we recast the experiment as a violation-of-expectations task?
In this case, subjects merely observe as the experimenter removes the cylinder from one or
another door.
Of interest is whether they look longer when experimenter removes the cylinder from behind the wrong
door (Hood et al., 2003) or when the experimenter opens the correct door and there is no cylinder
(Mash, Novak, Berthier, & Keen, 2006).
2-year-olds look longer in both conditions (Hood et al., 2003; Mash et al., 2006).
Hood et al. (2003)
So we see the same initially puzzling pattern in the case of knowledge of objects and causation.
If you look just at this pattern, you might suspect that observing R1 gives us a better,
more sensitive and less noisy measure of infants’ competence.
And that would be reasonble except that ...
You can also get the reverse pattern using other tasks!
Importantly, we appear to find much the same initially puzzling pattern in other domains of knowledge.
For example, consider mindreading ...
Here is Jason who wants to retrieve a red robot from under of these boxes.
When these windows light up,
he will reach through one of these windows to retrieve it.
In fact the red robot is in the right box.
But Jason has a false belief about it’s location: he falsely believes that it is in the left box.
We can measure whether you take Jason’s belief into account in two ways.
We can observe where you look in anticipation of Jason’s action when the windows light up
(initial proactive gaze).
And then, a few seconds later, we can ask you where you think Jason will look first.
Extending groundbreaking work by Clements & Perner (1994) and many following them,
Low and colleagues have done several variations on this, with 3- and 4-year-olds as well
as adults and found just the pattern here: an interaction with age.
At this point some are tempted to claim that this pattern of findings is not anomalous at all.
It’s simply a consequence of the fact that the some responses provide a more sensitive measure
of competence, or that other responses require some feature extraneous to the task.
But this claim is less persuasive given a further piece of the evidence.
For some carefully matched tasks, responses like initial proactive gaze and looking time
indicate very poor, below chance performance.
This is hard---not impossible, but hard---to reconcile with the claim that the
these responses simply provide more sensitive measures.
It is also hard to reconcile with the claim that the interaction with age is due to
extraneous features introduced when responses like verbal prediction are involved.
Low et al, 2014 figure 2
(Incidentally, I admint that I’m using a made up figure to illustrate a theoretical point.
But it’s actually not too far from how real data from even a single study
sometimes looks.)
So if a dual-process theory is right,
the development of mindreading looks something like this.
The early-developing,\footnote{The term ‘early-developing’ is potentially misleading. According to the dual-process theory of development,
all processes may be operational from early in development. The difference is just that some
do not undergo significant developmental change. I should really have used a term like
‘developmentally unchanging’.} relatively automatic process is constant over development.
Whereas the less automatic process starts off with an extremely crude model of minds and actions
and only gradually accrues sophistication.
Q1
Why do different responses reveal different developmental patterns?
How does the dual process theory help us with understanding the initially puzzling pattern of
development?
I asked, Why do different responses reveal different developmental patterns?
Predictions:
[1] Where infants can track objects or beliefs, in adults there will be two distinct processes ...
[2] ... and one adult process will have features in common with the infant process.
The core of a dual-process theory of development generates two key predictions.
about relations between adults’ and infants’ performance:%
\footnote{See further Grosse Wiesmann, Friederici, Singer, & Steinbeis (2016).}
\begin{enumerate}
\item Where infants can track beliefs, there will be two (or more) distinct processes in adults ...
\item ... and one adult process will share features with the infant process.
\end{enumerate}
Q1
Why do different responses reveal different developmental patterns?
So far I’ve suggested that
(a) a dual process theory of development can help to explain an initially puzzling
interaction between age and response type concerning performance,
and that (b) by linking infants’ and
adults’ performance, a dual process theory of development generates testable predictions.
[repeat:] In essence, the idea is this. If the processes dominating Response 1 and Response 2 are
different, the different relations between age and performance these responses reveal simply indicate
that the two processes develop differently.
The process or processes dominating Response 1 changes relatively little over development, while the
process dominating Response 2 undergoes gradual change over months or years.
\textbf{It’s not my aim in this talk to defend a dual process theory of the development of
object cognition or mindreading. (I think we should just wait and see how its predictions
hold up.). Instead I want to suggest that any such theory faces a significant challenge
...}
The challenge arises from the various ways in which infants
manifest their abilities to track briefly occluded, causally interacting objects and false
beliefs.
It’s not just initial proactive gaze ...
... they also succeed when you measure relatively long looking times
in a violation of expectations task.
For example,
20 seconds!!!
Why is this relevant?
The early-developing process is supposed to be fast, whereas how long you
look at something appears to depend on how interesting it is to you. (At least when you’re looking
times are in the tens of seconds.)
On the face of it, looking times in the tens of seconds are just
the wrong sort of thing to be an upshot of a fast process.
Spelke et al. (1992, p. figure 6 (part))
in Onishi & Baillargeon (2005), whose subjects were 15-month-olds,
we have looking times of roughly 17 vs 27 seconds.
10 seconds!!!
Why is this relevant?
The early-developing process is supposed to be relatively automatic, whereas how long you
look at something appears to depend on how interesting it is to you. (At least when you’re looking
times are in the tens of seconds.) On the face of it, looking times in the tens of seconds are just
the wrong sort of thing to be an upshot of a relatively automatic process.
Consider also the standard view about why infants look longer. They had an expectation
about how the protagonist would act. They recognise that the expectation is not met. And now they
are wondering whether they have observed the scene correctly and what they might have missed.
This reflection on the violation of an expectation is very much not the sort of thing that an
early-developing, relatively automatic process is supposed to enable.