Here - an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Table of Contents

Program Overview ........................................................................................... 1

Invited Lectures................................................................................................ 9

Invited Symposia ............................................................................................ 15

(1) Crossmodal Perception .............................................................................. 16 (2) Joint Action, Joint Thinking, and Joint Agency ....................................... 19 (3) Nature and Culture in Language Acquisition ............................................ 22 (4) Concepts and Nonlinguistic Inferences in Animals .................................... 25

Contributed Symposia ................................................................................... 29 (1) Perceptual Uncertainty ............................................................................. 30 (2) What Is a Deduction? ............................................................................... 42 (3) Being Addressed as You ............................................................................ 48 (4) The Psychology and Philosophy of Property Ownership ........................... 56 (5) Universal and Cultural Determinants of Social Interaction & Perception . 60 (6) Causality within the Brain and between the Brain and the Limbs .......... 64 (7) Thinking and Motor Control ..................................................................... 70 (8) Constructive Memory ................................................................................ 76

Paper Sessions ................................................................................................ 83

(1) Infant and Non-Human Animal Reasoning ................................................ 84 (2) Categories & Semantics 1 .......................................................................... 87 (3) Extended Mind 1 ....................................................................................... 91 (4) Perspectives on Reality ............................................................................. 97 (5) Propositions & Attitudes ......................................................................... 101 (6) Social Judgments ..................................................................................... 105 (7) Experience and the Senses ....................................................................... 110 (8) Extended Mind 2 ..................................................................................... 114 (9) Consciousness .......................................................................................... 116 (10) Theory of Mind and Mental States ........................................................ 119 (11) Emotions ............................................................................................... 125 (12) Experience and Emotion ........................................................................ 130 (13) Theory of Mind and Language .............................................................. 132 (14) Cognitive Penetration ............................................................................ 136 (15) Morality and Empathy .......................................................................... 140 (16) Uncertainty ............................................................................................ 144

(17) Biological Categories.............................................................................. 149 (18) Categories & Semantics 2 ...................................................................... 154 (19) Theory of Mind and Communication ..................................................... 158 (20) Cognition & Action ............................................................................... 164 (21) Conditionals & Word Learning .............................................................. 168 (22) Pragmatics ............................................................................................. 170 (24) Theories of Social Cognition .................................................................. 174 (25) Extended Mind 3 ................................................................................... 178 (26) Categories & Semantics 3 ...................................................................... 182 (27) Linguistic Knowledge ............................................................................. 186 (28) Realisation and Causation ..................................................................... 191 (29) Explanation ........................................................................................... 193

Poster Sessions.............................................................................................. 197

Poster Session 1 ............................................................................................ 198 Poster Session 2 ............................................................................................ 228

Service (Travelling, Map of the Area, Restaurants) ............................................. Author Index ......................................................................................................

2

Wednesday, 25th of August, Bochum 9.00 – 10.20

Opening Remarks: Prof. Dr. Elmar Weiler, Rector of the Ruhr-University Bochum page 10; Room 2a (Level 4)

Invited Lecture 1 Andy Clark (Edinburg)

Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive

Science

10-20 – 10.45 Coffee Break

10.45 – 13.00

page 16 Room 2a (Level 4)

Invited Symposium 1 Crossmodal Perception

Chair: Barry Smith (London) Speakers: Charles Spence, Fiona Newell, Casey O’Callaghan

13.00 – 14.30 Lunch Break

14.30 – 16.00

page 84 Room 82 (Level 4)

Paper Session 1

Infant and Non-Human Animal Reasoning

Mourenza Starzak

Varga (et al.)


Paper Session 2

Categories & Semantics 1

Macia Plebe (et al.) Pinna (et al.)

page 91 Room 2b (Level 4)

Paper Session 3 Extended Mind 1

Marstaller Freudenberger Brozzo (et al.)


Paper Session 4

Perspectives on Reality Doherty (et al.)

Nudds Moll


Paper Session 5

Propositions & Attitudes Hall

Sacchi Ueda


Papers Session 6 Social Judgments

Gabalda (et al.) Ervas (et al.)

Rosell

3

Wednesday, 25th of August, Bochum page 198

Coffee Break & Poster Session 1 Schulz Schuhmacher Junge Grazzani Bizarro Martin

Stemmler Kavanagh Kästner Schmidt Sevdalis Tarlowski (2x) Krzyzanowska Rueschemeyer Florek

Moore Juanchich Ciaunica Beni Urbanski Apse

16.00 – 17.15

page 41Room 2a (Level 4)

Contributed Symposium 2 What Is a Deduction?

Catarina Dutilh Novaes Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson Andrew J.B. Fugard

page 110Room 2 (Level 1)

Paper Session 7 Experience and the Senses

Richardson

Dorsch Meadows

Wong

17.15 – 19.15

page 114Room 2b (Level 4)


Zednik

Theiner Kästner


Paper Session 9 Consciousness

Irvine

Werning Pöyhönen Grünbaum

page 119

Room 82 (Level 4)

Paper Session 10 Theory of Mind

and Mental States

Wang (et al.) Paulus (et al.)

Arcangeli Stöckle-Schobel


Paper Session 11 Emotions

Barlassina Burns (et al.)

Pompe Kettner

Welcome Reception 19.15

4

Thursday, 26th of August, Essen 9.00 – 11.15

page 19 Room: Glaspavillon (R12 S00 H12, Building R12, Ground Floor)

Invited Symposium 2 Joint Action, Joint Thinking, and Joint Agency

Chair: Günther Knoblich (Nijmegen) Speakers: Natalie Sebanz, Elisabeth Pacherie,

Stephen Butterfill, Ian Apperly

11.15 – 11.45 Coffee Break

11.45 – 13.15

page 130Room I

Paper Session 12 Experience and Emotion

Muñoz

Wilkinson Welpinghus

page 132 Room II

Paper Session 13

Theory of Mind and Language

Özoran (et al.) Kraus (et al.)

Cuccio

page 136Room III

Paper Session 14 Cognitive Penetration

Raftopoulos

Voltolini Deroy

page 140 Room IV

Paper Session 15

Morality and Empathy

Zalla Reisenzein

Cavojova (et al.)

page 144Room V

Paper Session 16 Uncertainty

Wollermann (et al.)

Gourdon (et al.) Juanchich (et al.)

page 149 Room VI

Papers Session 17 Biological Categories

Bayindir (et al.)

Badger (et al.) Kokkonen (et al.)

13.15 – 14.00

Short Lunch Break

5

Thursday, 26th of August, Essen page 154Room I

Paper Session 18 Categories and Semantics 2

Kompa

Trafford Łupkowski

page 158Room II

Paper Session 19 Theory of Mind and

Communication Peters (et al.)

Moore Orban

14.00 – 15.30

page 164Room III

Paper Session 20 Cognition and Action

Christensen

Stoettinger (et al.) Apse (et al.)

page 168Room IV

Paper Session 21 Conditionals and Word Learning

Leahy Merin

Grassman

page 170Room V

Papers Session 22 Pragmatics

Schulze (et al.)

Lassiter Unterhuber (et al.)

Coffee Break

15.30 – 16.00

page 11Room: Glaspavillon (R12 S00 H12, Building R12, Ground Floor)

Invited Lecture 2 Linda B. Smith (Indiana University)

Grounding Toddler Learning in Sensory Motor Dynamics

16.00 – 17.30

Guided Tour through the Zeche Zollverein

18.00 – 20.00

Conference Dinner 20.00

6

Friday, 27th of August, Bochum 9.00 – 11.15


Invited Symposium 3 Nature and Culture in Language Acquisition

Chair: Bernhard Schröder (Essen) Speakers: Tecumseh Fitch, Elena Lieven, Keith Stenning

11.15 – 11.45

Coffee Break

11.45 – 13.15


Paper Session 24 Theories of Social Cognition

de Bruin (et al.)

Rakoczy Blomberg

page 178 Room 2b (Level 4)


Williamson

Jung Godwyn

page 182

Room 1 (Level 4)

Paper Session 26 Categories and Semantics 3

Kjoll

Decock (et al.) Müller


Paper Session 27

Linguistic Knowledge

Blitman Uchida (et al.)

Lobina


Paper Session 28 Realisation and Causation

Vision

Schlosser Hoffmann-Kolss


Papers Session 29

Explanation Bukow (et al.)

Verdejo Reuter

13.15 – 14.30

Lunch Break

7

Friday, 27th of August, Bochum page 12

Room 2a (Level 4)Invited Lecture 3

Michael Tomasello (MPI Leipzig) Communication before Language

14.30 – 15.45

page 228

Coffee Break & Poster Session 2 Ionescu Hauswald Colomina-Almiñana Diaz-Leon Lüdmann Prause-Stramm Filippi Saint-Germier Ayala Kolodziejczyk

Milkowski Tillas Ikaheimo Shagrir Hufendiek Cappuccio Gerstenkorn Gervais Seuchter

Przyrembel Schmidt Behne Maja

15.45 – 17.00


Contributed Symposium 1 Perceptual Uncertainty

Joëlle Proust Simon Barthelmé Anna Loussouarn Kathrin Glüer


Contributed Symposium 3 Being Addressed as You

Tobias Schlicht Leonhard Schilbach Alan Costall Vasudevi Reddy

17.00 – 19.15


Contributed Symposium 4 The Psychology and Philosophy

of Property Ownership

Patricia Kanngiesser Chris Bertram Ori Friedman Federico Rossano


Contributed Symposium 6 Universal and Cultural

Determinants of Social Interaction and Perception

Anika Fiebich Leon de Bruin Gary Bente Louise Röska-Hardy Marc Slors

Business Meeting 19.30 –

20.30

8

Saturday, 28th of August, Bochum 9.00 –10.15


Invited Lecture 4 Mark Steedman (Edinburgh)

The Formal Foundation of Grammar in Communicative Action

10.15 – 10.45

Coffee Break

10.45 – 13.00


Invited Symposium 4 Concepts and Nonlinguistic Inferences in Animals Chair: Albert Newen and Tobias Starzak (Bochum)

Speakers: Albert Newen, Josep Call, Colin Allen

13.00 – 14.00

Lunch Break

14.00 – 16.15


Contributed Symposium 5

Causality within the Brain and between the Brain and the Limbs

Aaron Schurger Marc Pavlopoulos John-Dylan Haynes Tillmann Vierkant



Thinking and Motor Control

Gottfried Vosgerau Matthis Synofzik S. Schütz-Bosbach


Contributed Symposium 8 Constructive

Memory

Fiona Gabbert Lorraine Hope K. Michaelian John Sutton

ESPP2010

10

Wednesday, August 25th 9.00 – 10.20 Room 2a (Level 4)

Invited Lecture 1

ANDY CLARK Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science

Brains, according to an increasingly influential research program in computational neuroscience (see e.g. Lee and Mumford (2003), Friston (2005)) are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells whose evolved role is to enable the right action to occur at the right time, and this is achieved by minimizing prediction error (thus minimizing informational surprise) within a hierarchy of cortical processing regions. This ‘hierarchical prediction machine’ approach yields a unifying model of perception and action, and may neatly capture the special contribution of neural processing to adaptive success. In this talk, I first lay out some key elements of this approach, noting some potentially problematic elements along the way. Putting the problems aside, I then ask what such a model would imply for our general vision of brains, minds, and situated agents. References: Friston, K (2005). A theory of cortical responses.

Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 369(1456): p. 815 -836.

Lee, T.S., Mumford, D. (2003) Hierarchical Bayesian inference in the visual cortex. Journal of Optical Society of America, A. . 20(7): 1434-1448.

Bochum & Essen

11

Thursday, August 26th 16.00 – 17.30 Glaspavillon (R12 S00 H12, Building R12, Ground floor)

Invited Lecture 2

LINDA B. SMITH Grounding Toddler Learning in Sensory Motor Dynamics

Most theories of cognitive development are “cogni-tive” in the sense of being about internal models, propositions, and inferences. It is not at all clear that these theories can explain real world lear-ning. Children learn in a physical world – about objects, actions, other social beings, and language – through their second-by-second, minute-by-minute sensorimotor interactions in that work. They create their own experiences through their own actions. This talk considers how the body – and physical actions – may play a special role in – and indeed simplify – learning objet names. The body’s momentary actions and appear to play a direct role in what might seem to be cognitive operations – attention and binding bind objects in the physical environment to internal cognitive operations. The domain used to illustrate these points is toddler word learning. Using tiny video-cameras placed low on the forehead of the child to capture the dynamic first person view, measures of eye-gaze direction, motion sensors on heads and hands, and success in word learning tasks, the experiments shows learning that is inseparable from – and made in – embodied interaction in the world.

ESPP2010

12

Friday, August 27th 14.30 – 15.45 Room 2a (Level 4)

Invited Lecture 3

MICHAEL TOMASELLO Communication before Language

Before they use any conventional language, almost all young children communicate richly and effectively using the pointing gesture. Pointing can be used successfully only if it takes place within some kind of joint attention or common conceptual ground between participants. From around their first birthdays, a few months before language acquisition begins in earnest, young children show evidence that they can create such common ground with their interlocutor – some-times even taking the perspective of the interlocutor in the process. Since joint attention, common ground, and perspective taking are foundational for early language acquisition, the conclusion is that the prag-matic infrastructure for language acquisition is already in place before children start actually talking. Com-parison to the gestural communication of great apes suggests further that the pointing gesture and it’s pragmatic foundations are unique to the human spe-cies and may have preceded language evolutionarily.

Bochum & Essen

13

Saturday, August 28th 9.00 – 10.15 Room 2a (Level 4)

Invited Lecture 4

MARK STEEDMAN The Formal Foundation of Grammar in Communicative Action

There is a long tradition associating language and other serial cognitive behavior with an underlying motor planning mechanism (Piaget 1936, Lashley 1951, Miller et al. 1960, passim). The evidence is evolutionary, neurophysiological, and developmental. It suggests that language is much more closely related to embodied cognition than current linguistic theories of grammar suggest.

The paper will argue that practically every aspect of language reflects this connection transparently. It will discuss planning as it is viewed in Robotics and AI, with some attention to applicable machine learning techniques. Two operations, which can be identified with notions of seriation and affordance, will be shown to provide the basis for both plan-composition in animals, and long-range dependency in human language, of the kind found in constructions like relative clauses and coordination.

A connection this direct raises a further obvious question: If language is so closely related to animal planning, why don’t any other animals have language? The paper will argue that collaborative planning, requiring communicative acts depending on a deep understanding of other minds that has been found to be lacking in other animals, provides a distinctively semantic precursor for recursive aspects distinguishing human language from animal communication.

ESPP2010

14

If there is time, I’ll touch on ongoing work with Kwiat-kowski and colleagues showing that how this theory of grammar allows us to treat language acquisition as the acquisition of a uniform probabilistic parsing model over the entire space of universal grammar, in which the appearance of switch-like parameter-setting (and unsetting) is an emergent property of Bayesian learning.

ESPP2010

16


Invited Symposium 1 Crossmodal Perception

CHAIR: BARRY SMITH

Individuation of the senses has become increasingly difficult in the light of recent findings in neuroscience. The merging of sensory information at early and late stages of perceptual processing casts doubt on traditional ways of diving up the sensory modalities, and a new approach to the study of the senses is needed. Neuroscientists stress that multisensory integration in perception is the rule and not the exception, but they are not always careful to distinguish multisensory integration from the cross-modal effects of one sense on the other. We know that vision can influence what we hear, what we hear can influence what we see, and the aromas we smell can influence how sweet something tastes. Are these cross-modal effects examples of perceptual illusions, synesthesia or neither? Philosophers and psychologists have begun to address these questions, and this session will explore the nature of cross-modal effects and consider whether such cases should be classed as fusions or confusions of the sensory inputs. Further, we will examine what recent findings about cross-modal effects and multisensory integrationcan tell us about experience and the individuation of our sensory modalities.

CHARLES SPENCE Integration, expectation, and the multisensory perception of flavour

Traditionally, there has been little interest amongst either philosophers or psychologists in the study of flavour perception. This is rather surprising given the fact that flavours constitute some of the most pleasurable and arguably most multisensory of our everyday experiences. In this talk, I will review the

Bochum & Essen

17

psychology and neuroscience of multisensory flavour perception in humans. I will consider the thorny question of whether flavour should be considered as a separate sense, as first suggested by Brillat-Savarin (1835), or whether instead we might all perhaps be considered as synesthetes when it comes to flavour. I will also question whether audition and vision ought to be included in our definition of flavour. Differences in the relative importance of multisensory integration and expec-tation to flavour perception will be highlighted and the possibi-lity that there may actually be more than one flavour system will be raised. By the end, I hope to have convinced you (at the very least) that the perception of flavour represents a fundamentally interesting and important (if somewhat neglect-ted) areas of research, and also that the study of flavour consti-tutes an important area of research in which psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have much to offer each other.

FIONA NEWELL High-level visual perception is modulated by cross-sensory information Just over 300 years ago, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley published his essay on A new Theory of Vision in which he set out to show whether there be any “ideas” in common between vision and touch (Berkeley, 1709). He concluded that these senses have no “ideas” in common and that any associations between these senses were arbitrary and dependent on experience. The issues raised in his essay resonate in modern approaches to the study of multisensory influences in the perception of objects, people, scenes and events. In my talk, I will present evidence to suggest that, contrary to Berkeley’s opinion, the visual recognition and detection of objects and people can be affected by information from other sensory sources, particularly touch and audition. Moreover, with the advent of neuroimaging, evidence is emerging that these cross-modal influences are underpinned by shared neural resources which merge at very early stages in the information processing

ESPP2010

18

heirarchy. Finally, I will discuss our more recent work which suggests that multisensory processes are susceptible to developmental changes such as ageing and that, in accordance with Berkeley’s theory, cross-modal associations are indeed subject to experience.

CASEY O’CALLAGHAN Multimodality in Perception

My talk focuses on crossmodal perceptual illusions and their consequences for theorizing about perception. Crossmodal illusions demonstrate that perceptual systems associated with different sense modalities interact and cooperate in a way that impacts conscious perceptual experience. I argue that explai-ning crossmodal illusions challenges traditional accounts on which the senses are discrete, experientially encapsulated modes or channels of awareness that can be treated as explana-torily independent. In particular, I discuss consequences concer-ning perceptual content and phenomenology, and I defend an account that makes room for a surprisingly rich form of multi-modal perceptual experience. I conclude with open questions and directions for future work.

Bochum & Essen

19

Thursday, August 26th 9.00 – 11.15 Glaspavillon (R12 S00 H12, Building R12, Ground floor)

Invited Symposium 2

Joint Action, Joint Thinking and Joint Agency

CHAIR: GÜNTHER KNOBLICH

This symposium explores how the specific requirements of joint action shape action planning, how joint action alters the subjective experience of controlling one’s actions, and how common plans and common knowledge may generate new ways of social understanding.

NATALIE SEBANZ

Joint action: What is shared? For two agents to perform a joint action, each must form an action plan that specifies her part of the task in relation to the expected outcome of the joint action. Often, however, agents seem to ‘share’ action plans, representing each other’s tasks in substantial detail. I will review empirical evidence do discuss a) under which circumstances others’ tasks are co-represented, b) which aspects of others’ tasks are co-represented, and c) how representations of others’ tasks and own tasks are related. I will discuss the possibility that in the context of inter-group interactions, agents treat their own group as an entity and specify what this group entity should be doing in relation to other groups.

ESPP2010

20

ELISABETH PACHERIE Sense of agency in joint action: from self-agency to we-agency

How does the sense of agency we experience when we are engaged in joint actions differ from the sense of agency we have for our own individual actions? On some occasions, participants in joint actions report feeling a loss of agency but, on other occasions, they report experiencing an increased sense of agency. Sometimes but not always, a loss in the sense of I-agency translates as a gain in a sense of we-agency.

This talk aims at investigating some of the factors that contribute to these variations in the sense of agency for joint action and characterizing the precise nature of their contri-bution. Its focus will be on joint action control, the different forms it may take in different types of joint actions and the phenomenological differences this may in turn give rise to.

STEPHEN BUTTERFILL Joint action and knowing others’ minds

How could abilities to engage in joint action foster developments in understanding minds? Several researchers have argued that joint action does in fact foster mentalistic understanding, but few if any have explained in detail how it could do so. In this talk I elaborate a conjecture: abilities to engage in joint action provide a route to knowledge of others’ goals distinct from ordinary third-person interpretation.

IAN APPERLY Joint representations all the way up? How mindreaders know what’s relevant

Fodor, among others, suggests that working out what to believe encounters the frame problem, or “problem of rele-vance”, and so argues that belief fixation must be a “central” rather than “modular” process. It would seem to follow quite naturally that mindreading - the task of ascribing mental states as inferences to the best explanation for people’s behaviour –

Bochum & Essen

21

likewise comes up hard against the problem of deciding what is relevant. So how do people do this? I suggest that we rely upon knowledge about people’s “ways of thinking” that includes social scripts, schemas and norms. If we have reasonable knowledge of someone’s ways of thinking, then we are in a good position to identify what information is relevant if we wish to make specific inferences about what they are in fact thinking. Critically, I suggest that we are in the best position to have such knowledge when other people’s ways of thinking converge with our own, and such convergence is underwritten by the fact that ways of thinking are often shared social constructs. I shall use this to reflect upon the roles of language and social experience in the development of mindreading, and why it can be difficult to interact with someone from an alien culture even though they are not, themselves, an alien.

ESPP2010

22


Invited Symposium 3

Nature and Culture in Language Acquisition

CHAIR: BERNHARD SCHRÖDER

The considerations on the human faculty to acquire a natural language were traditionally guided by two main dichotomic positions, which can be traced back to the beginnings of philosophical thinking about language:

The nativists postulate an innate learning faculty specialized on natural languages. This language acquisition device (LAD), as Chomsky called it, limits the languages which can be learnt by humans and therefore constrains linguistic structures. Nativists argue that the learnability of complex linguistic structures requires specialized strategies to extract features from the linguistic input to be generalized by the learner.

Their opponents, on the contrary, propose that language acquisition does not rely on a mechanism distinct from other learning faculties. Structural similarities between natural languages are not caused by a LAD or an innate universal grammer but are a consequence of the interaction of linguistic cognition with other cognitive modules, e.g. the way how we analyse and categorize events prelinguistically. This view groups language together with other cultural techniques deve-loped in our cultural evolution.

Recent developments in cognitive science and linguistics question this dichotomy from various perspectives. The roots of universal constraints on the structure of human languages are sought in cognitive and social preconditions of linguistic interaction.

Bochum & Essen

23

W. TECUMSEH FITCH Nature via Nurture:

Integrating Unity and Diversity in Human Language Human language is both highly diverse – different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals – and easily learnable. Any human language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render language unique in the biological world. Under-standing the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally interesting. I review the litera-ture on linguistic diversity and language universals, suggesting that an adequate notion of “formal universals” provides a promising way to both understand the facts of language acquisition, offering order in the face of the diversity of human languages. Formal universals are cross-linguistic generaliza-tions, often of an abstract or implicational nature. They derive from cognitive capacities to perceive and process particular types of structure, and biological constraints upon integration of the multiple systems involved in language. Such formal universals can be understood on the model of general solutions to a set of differential equations; each language is a particular solution. An explicit formal conception of human language that embraces both considerable diversity and underlying biological unity is both possible, and fully compatible with modern evolutionary theory.

ELENA LIEVEN Language acquisition:

Emergent abstraction from conventional communicative contexts Children’s language learning has deep evolutionary roots. How-ever I shall argue that these do not lie in an innate and encap-sulated syntax module, but rather in the cognitive and social adaptations that characterise human evolution. Ontogene-tically, language learning is initially driven by the child’s ability to take part in shared intention reading. This results initially in the mapping of child-identified forms to child-identi-

ESPP2010

24

fied meanings, with grammar as emergent abstraction from conventional communicative contexts. In defending this posi-tion I shall briefly address the main arguments for an innate syntax that have been proposed: the form of the adult gram-mar; poverty of the stimulus; speed of language learning; and the nature of overgeneralisation errors. I will then turn to out-standing questions for a ‘usage-based’ theory of language acqui-sition including the cultural prerequisites for successful language learning and the implications of individual differences in syntax acquisition.

KEITH STENNING If ‘innateness’ is not a modern biological concept, just why should we be interested in questions about the innateness of language?

Biology has disposed of innateness in favour of the concept of heritability. It is very clear that heritability is not the concept that cognitive scientists are concerned with in discussions of the innateness of language. So what is at stake in those discussions, if anything? This talk will sketch the biological background of the concept of heritability and why it is not what is needed for discussing language ontogeny. It will con-sider some of baggage of the concept of innateness in the social sciences and medicine, and consider what might replace these concepts in a cognitive science of language.

Bochum & Essen

25


Invited Symposium 4

Concepts and Nonlinguistic Inferences in Animals

CHAIR: ALBERT NEWEN AND TOBIAS STARZAK

In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of radical new insights concerning the cognitive abilities of animals. In this symposium we will focus on the specific topic of concept possession on the one hand, and nonlinguistic inference on the other. The main species we will discuss these topics in relation to are not only chimpanzees but also birds since it is clear nowadays that some kind of birds possess astonishing abilities. Central questions are: how can we adequately describe and theoretically evaluate these abilities? How can we make sure that we are not just relying on an anthropomorphic description of the phenomena? What can we learn from a comparative perspective on cognitive and social abilities?

ALBERT NEWEN Animal Minds: Concepts and Nonlinguistic Inference in Animals

What does it mean to possess a concept? First, an epistemic theory of concept possession is introduced that allows us to define the constitutive criteria of concept possession on the basis of nonlinguistic abilities. This definition allows for a comparative perspective concerning several concepts. Then a more general framework to characterize complex concepts is introduced: the central idea is to distinguish perception-based concepts, inference-based concepts and theory-based concepts. On the basis of this distinction we can characterize specific human abilities in contrast to animal abilities. It will also be

ESPP2010

26

shown by some striking examples that all human abilities have significant roots in the realm of animal abilities. Therefore, it is argued that we will not find a clear anthropological border line to separate humans and animals.

JOSEP CALL Causal inferences in the great apes

Much of the research on causal knowledge in nonhuman primates has been based on individuals using tools to get out-of reach rewards. Another approach that has received much less attention in comparative research is based on presenting simple natural causality problems without requiring subjects to use tools to get the reward, but instead select between two alternatives. I will present several studies in which we investigated the ability of apes to make causal inferences regarding the location of hidden food. In these studies subjects had to choose between two containers (one of which was baited) after they witnessed the effect that various manipulations had on the containers. Subjects consistently performed better when the food presence caused the observed effect as opposed to when the food presence co-varied with the observed effect. I propose that these results indicate that apes possess knowledge about the effects that the food reward causes in the environment, and that they can infer the location of the food reward based on those effects.

COLIN ALLEN Unlabeled Possibilities: Reasoning and Concepts without Words

Among cognitive psychologists, only one of the three main approaches to concepts is overtly linguistic, namely the classical (rule/definition) model. Neither prototype nor exemplar models depend essentially on linguistic represen-tation, but rather on representation within a space of feature combinations – and while either the features or their combi-nations might be labeled linguistically, they perhaps need not be. In contrast, from Aristotelian syllogisms onwards, models

Bochum & Essen

27

of reasoning have been almost exclusively linguistic in nature, and focused like the classical model of concepts on the application of rules. In this talk, I will explore the idea that reasoning can instead be understood as exploiting abstract patterns in perceptual feature spaces that might be represented linguistically (with benefits to doing so), but perhaps need not be. Psychologists in the audience will rightly want to know how all this theorizing translates into experiments, and philosophers will want to know how patterns that are so firmly anchored in feature perception can be abstract enough to support reasoning. I will attempt to address both concerns.

ESPP2010

28

ESPP2010

30



Perceptual Uncertainty: From Metaperception to Epistemology

CHAIR: JOËLLE PROUST

Our interdisciplinary symposium deals with the psychological and epistemological status of self-confidence in perception. Uncertainty has been studied in different areas of cognitive research. In signal detection theory, in experimental and comparative psychology, in cognitive economics, subjects are invited to adjust their response to the objective probability of a phenomenon. They are also often asked to evaluate their confidence in having correctly detected, or categorized a stimulus. Very little has been done yet, however, to identify the cognitive underpinnings of perceivers’ confidence. The goal of this symposium is to discuss alternative theories on how sub-jects calibrate their perceptual confidence, and to examine the epistemological relevance of such abilities in perceptual justification.

Two forms of perceptual uncertainty

A main function of perception is to reduce objective uncer-tainty about the world; it consists in extracting informational patterns, i.e. world properties, from the stimulations in various modalities. Detecting a pattern, recognizing it as an F, allows a system to predict its environment and adjust its behavior to it. Success in extracting patterns through one or several sensory channels, however, depends on how each channel transmits the signals, i.e. on how reliable it is, and on how the information is processed at higher levels. Internal noise is inevitably generated at each level of the causal mechanisms involved. The environmental conditions may also create noise by making stimulations insufficiently discriminative, thus affecting

Bochum & Essen

31

informational quality. Two main types of perceptual uncer-tainty thus need to be distinguised. (1) Objective uncertainty originates in world variability: it is inversely related to the amount of task-relevant information available in the stimulus. (2) Internal uncertainty originates in the system’s variable efficiency, related to the amount of task-relevant resources available and, in particular, to attentional allocation.

Self-confidence and Signal Detection Theory Self-confidence in perception has been mainly studied in Signal Detection Theory paradigms. (Green and Swets,1966). In a typical psychophysical task, an observer is invited to detect small contrast increments near threshold. The standard “yes-no” signal-detection experiment involves two stimulus classes: signal plus noise, and noise alone; and two response classes: “yes” (there was a signal) and “no” (there was no signal). Four types of responses can thus be observed: hits and correct rejections lead to rewards; false alarms and misses lead to penalties. A distinctive feature of signal-detection research, as opposed to classical psychophysics, is its emphasis on immediate, trial-by-trial feedback, in the form of rewards and penalties for each response. The overlap between noise and signal obliges the agent to choose a decision criterion as a combined function of the global (objective + internal) uncertainty of the associated response and of the expected risk and pay-off. There are two decision strategies that can be chosen: security in signal (strict criterion) or security in response (lenient criterion).

Signal detection theory also emphasizes that, independently of the subject’s decision to move the criterion as a function of utility, a signal can vary in discriminability according to the distribution of noise and signal in a given context. Discriminability (d') depends on the strength of a signal and on the amount of noise. Success in signal detection tasks of all kinds thus depends on the observer’s ability to cope with noise. Metaperception, i.e., the control and monitoring of one’s perception, may have evolved as a normative capacity whose function is to allow perceivers to assess their subjective confidence in a given detection or recognition task. Empirical

ESPP2010

32

studies have started to explore metaperception in detecting change, a task where overconfidence seems to prevail (Levin ed., 2004). Other studies, in contrast, explore metaperception in detecting spatial orientation in stimuli, and find it quite reliably correlated with objective uncertainty (Barthelmé & Mamassian, 2009).

The sources of perceptual confidence This symposium will present recent empirical research aimed at exploring implicit or explicit forms of metaperception. One presentation will explore, in a psychophysical task, the basis on which subjects implicitly express preferences for certain visual stimuli, where the task consists in detecting the orientation of degraded patterns. Which heuristics do perceivers use when feeling confident in their perception? The authors examine the respective merits of a cue-based and a probabilistic base of peerceivers’ feeling of confidence. A second presentation will use a flicker paradigm to examine how two varieties of perceptual feedback influence perceivers’ performance in detecting changes and self evaluation. The first kind is control-based, and is manipulated through objective gradient of difficulty; the second is monitoring-based, and is manipulated by introducing a bias in the subjects’ self-evaluations.

Perceptual belief and subjective confidence

A third presentation will discuss some fundamental epistemological implications of subjective confidence. One of the most basic problems for traditional epistemology is to establish the rational basis for self-confidence in judging, on the basis of one’s perception, that a given object that looks F, really has the property F. Self-confidence in one’s perception, just as other sources of epistemic confidence, is based on two sources. One is objective uncertainty: the current evidence on which our judgments are built – i.e. on the way the world is. The less uncertain the world, the more confident the judger. A second source of confidence, as already noticed by David Hume

Bochum & Essen

33

(Treatise, I, 4, 1), consists in evaluating one’s past ability to reach true judgments: having often been mistaken in drawing conclusions reduces the force of my belief in this particular judgment, adding its own additional probability of error to objective world variability (Vickers, 2000).

Recognizing the role of perceptual confidence in forming perceptual beliefs presents an interesting new constraint to a theory of perceptual justification. The classical belief theory claims that perception can be defined as the acquisition of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the body or of the environment. Granting that persisting illusions of the Müller-Lyer variety are perceptions with no associated beliefs, the classical theory is inadequate. An alternative theory, the phenomenal belief theory, will be defended, claiming that perceptual experiences are beliefs with phenomenal contents. An object x looks F whether or not F is veridically attributed to x. This theory accounts for the prima-facie, reason-providing role of experience. The concept of “looking” so understood can be made to accommodate the fact that perceivers do not need to feel entitled to infer from the experience of x as of F, that x is an F. An analysis of defeaters of such inferences needs to recognize subjects’ sensitivity to the informational quality of their own experience.

References Barthelmé, S. and Mamassian, P. (2009). Evaluation of

objective uncertainty in the visual system. PLoS Computational Biology, 5(9):e1000504+.

Green, D. M. and Swets, J. A. 1966. Signal detection theory and psychophysics. New York: Wiley.

Hume, D. [1739-40].1978. L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) A Treatise on Human Understanding. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Levin, D.T. 2004. Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children, Bradford Book, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Koriat, A., Ma’ayan, H., Nussinson, R. 2006. The intricate relationships between monitoring and control in metacogni-tion, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 36-69.

ESPP2010

34

Smith J.D., Beran M.J., Couchman J.J., Coutinho M.V. 2008. The comparative study of metacognition: sharper paradigms, safer inferences. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15: 679–691.

Vickers, J.M. 2000. I believe it, but soon I’ll not believe it any more: scepticism, empiricism, and reflection. Synthese, 124, 155-174.

SIMON BARTHELMÉ AND PASCAL MAMASSIAN Explaining the correlation between performance and confidence

The function of the human visual system is to provide us with information about properties of the world that are relevant to action. We need to know about distances, shapes, speeds, trajectories, etc. None of these properties are perfectly recove-rable from the information present at the retina, so that we face systematic objective uncertainty.

In many cases objective visual uncertainty correlates with subjective visual uncertainty: we feel that our visual information is poor, degraded, and insufficient for our visual judgments. When walking through fog, we know that our perception of distances is poor and act accordingly: we slow down. This implies that in may cases we are able to detect states of high uncertainty – subjective uncertainty correlates with objective uncertainty.

In psychophysical experiments confidence judgments are often elicited from subjects. They are asked to perform a visual task, e.g., judging which of two lines is the longer, and then to state how confident they are in being correct, for example on a numerical scale. It has been known for quite some time that the confidence subjects report generally correlates with their performance (e.g., Angell, 1907): as difficulty is increased, performance drops, and so does confidence.

Although this fact may seem intuitively obvious, it requires an explanation. As any experience with machine vision shows, building a perceptual system that has a notion of the quality of the answers it provides is far from easy. The fact that we seem

Bochum & Essen

35

to do so effortlessly may mask sophisticated computational mechanisms at work.

We distinguish two broad classes of explanations for this ability. The first one is that, as suggested by the Bayesian framework in visual perception, uncertainty is represented explicitly in the brain under the form of probability distribu-tions (Kersten et al., 2004; Lee and Mumford, 2003; Ma et al., 2006). The origins of this view may be traced to Horace Barlow (1972), who was the first to suggest that neurons fire in accordance to the probability of their target being present. Under that framework the observed correlation between confidence and performance simply implies that confidence is a direct “read-out” of the probabilistic information present in the system.

Before we can accept that interpretation, another, simpler, possibility must be excluded: that the brain does nothing more than measure “cues to uncertainty”. In nearly all visual tasks, blur is such a cue. The more blur there is, the worse one does. Contrast is another strong cue, and so would be eccentricity, speed, etc. By keeping track of one salient cue, the visual system could monitor expected performance, explaining the observed correlation between performance and coherence. Indeed, such a mechanism seems to be at work in certain memory tasks (Koriat and Helstrup, 2007; Busey et al., 2000).

We will present two experiments designed to test the cue-based hypothesis, taking advantage of crowding (Pelli and Tillman, 2008) and backward masking (Breitmeyer and Ogmen, 2000) to manipulate difficulty. In our experiments confidence could be determined by the cues available, or by actual performance - the latter requiring a more sophisticated mechanism than cue monitoring. Results show that observers’ confidence followed performance rather than cues, supporting probabilistic models.

References Angell, F. (1907). On judgments of “like” in discrimination

experiments. American Journal of Psychology, (18):253+. Barlow, H. B. (1972). Single units and sensation: a neuron

doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception, 1(4):371–394.

ESPP2010

36

Barthelmé, S. and Mamassian, P. (2009). Evaluation of objective uncertainty in the visual system. PLoS Compu-tational Biology, 5(9):e1000504+.

Breitmeyer, B. G. and Ogmen, H. (2000). Recent models and findings in visual backward masking: A comparison, review, and update. Perception & Psychophysics, 62(8):1572–1595.

Busey, T. A., Tunnicliff, J., Loftus, G. R., and Loftus, E. F. (2000). Accounts of the confidence-accuracy relation in recognition memory. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 7(1):26-48.

Kersten, D., Mamassian, P., and Yuille, A. (2004). Object perception as bayesian inference. Annual Review of Psychology, 55:271–304.

Koriat, A. and Helstrup, T. (2007). Metacognitive aspects of memory. In Helstrup, T. and Magnussen, S., editors, Everyday Memory, pages 251–274. Psychology Press, London.

Lee, T. S. and Mumford, D. (2003). Hierarchical bayesian inference in the visual cortex. Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics, Image Science and Vision, 20(7):1434–1448.

Ma, W. J., Beck, J. M., Latham, P. E., and Pouget, A. (2006). Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes. Nature Neuroscience, 9(11): 1432–1438.

Pelli, D. G. and Tillman, K. A. (2008). The uncrowded window of object recognition. Nature neuroscience, 11(10):1129–1135.

ANNA LOUSSOUARN AND JOËLLE PROUST Two independent informational sources for metaperception

Research on metamemory suggests that even an agent equipped with mindreading abilities, and able to grasp the limitations of her aptitude to learn paired associates, would still depend, in fine, on her sentiments to reliably predict success in future performance. Judgments of learning correlate negatively, in self-paced conditions, with felt effort (less study time reliably predicts better learning), while, in a fixed study time condition,

Bochum & Essen

37

they seem to depend on the theory that more study time allows better learning (Koriat and Nussinsen, 2006). An important issue is whether such results also apply to perceptual metacognition, or “metaperception”. Is it the case that subjects engaged in evaluating their perceptual performances need to rely on two different informational sources, namely associative heuristics and folk-theories of perception?

To address these questions, following prior research on metaperception, we used a change detection paradigm called “flicker task” (Rensink et al., 1997, Simons, ( Scholl, 2004). Two alternating visual stimuli are presented, separated by brief blank screens masking the transients. Subjects generally present a poor ability to detect the changes, a condition referred to as “Change blindness”. They do no better, however, in evaluating their performance (Scholl, 2004). Surprisingly, subjects highly under-estimate the rate and degree of change blindness, whether in predicting or post-evaluating their ability to detect a change, a phenomenon called “change blindness blindness” (CBB) (Levin et al., 2000). A common explanation for CBB is that it derives from a failure to understand that attentional processes modulate perception (Simons & Ambinder, 2005). In support of this claim, it was observed a) that detecting one’s perceptual error is conceptually analogous to a False Belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983): in both cases, participants need to evaluate whether a change in the world will be detected, (whether by another subject or by themselves), based respectively on a theory of perceptual attention or of belief acquisition.

Furthermore, it was speculated that b) being subject to such metaperceptual errors might threaten the control of per-ceptual exploration (Scholl et al, 2004). Just as understanding the concept of belief is a precondition for adequately predicting how others will behave in a given situation, having a correct theory of attention might help subjects adjust their own perceptual attention to task demands.

These two claims, however, ignore the possibility that metaperceptual evaluations are sensitive to two types of fac-tors. In order to test a possible two-factor theory of CBB, we devised a series of CBB experiments in which the role of two types of feedback can be compared by biasing them.

ESPP2010

38

1. The first is implicit or “control-based” feedback: it is generated by the objective gradient of difficulty of the items – depending on their comparative duration, i.e. available searching time. different delays. If subjects rely on a perceptual-effort heuristic, they should correlate longer search time with poorer detection performance, and conversely for shorter time.

2. The second is non-verbal, but explicit: after having offered an estimation, after each trial, of the duration of the change undetected by them, subjects are presented with the supposedly “true” duration of their CB, actually systematically biased.

Having thus formed four groups of participants differing on the perceptual effort condition and the post-evaluative feedback, we are able to compare the respective influences of experience of effort and (theory-based) performance monitoring both on CB and CBB. Subjects’ evaluations in a CBB task indeed use both social feedback, and felt effort, to predict their performance. The quality of performance, furthermore, is clearly correlated with the initial amount of effort required to perform the task. References Koriat, A. Hilit Ma’ayan, and Ravit Nussinson. 2006. The

Intricate Relationships Between Monitoring and Control in Metacognition: Lessons for the Cause-and-Effect Relation Between Subjective Experience and Behavior, Journal of Experimental Psychology : General, Vol. 135, No. 1: 36–69.

Levin, D. T., Momen, N., Drivdahl, S. B., & Simons, D. J. (2000). Change blindness blindness: The metacognitive error of overestimating change-detection ability. Visual Cognition, 7(1/2/3): 397–412.

Levin, D. T. (2002). Change blindness blindness as visual metacognition. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9: 111–130.

Levin, D. T., Drivdahl, S. B., Momen, N., & Beck, M. R. (2002). False predictions about the detectability of unexpected visual changes: The role of metamemory and

Bochum & Essen

39

beliefs about attention in causing change blindness blindness. Consciousness and Cognition 11: 507–527. Levin, D. T., & Beck, M. R. (2004). Thinking about seeing:

Spanning the differences between metacognitive failure and success. In Dan Levin (Ed.), Thinking about seeing: Visual metacognition in adults and children: 121–144. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rensink, R. A., O’Regan, J. K., et Clark, J. J. 1997. To see or not to see: the need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5): 368-373.

Scholl, B. J., Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. 2004. ‘Change blindness’ blindness: An implicit measure of a metacogni-tive error. In D. T. Levin (Ed.), Thinking and seeing: Visual metacognition in adults and children: 145-164, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wimmer, H., and J. Perner, 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13: 103-128.

KATHRIN GLÜER

Perception and Justification

Belief theories, or ‘doxastic accounts’, of perceptual experience – as classically held by Armstrong (1968) and Pitcher (1971) – have not been considered a live option in the philosophy of perception for several decades now. I have argued that it is time to reconsider: There are versions of the belief theory that are very much alive and kicking (Glüer 2009). In this paper, I shall further develop both the phenomenal belief theory I suggest, and its defense.

Doxastic accounts are generally held to be untenable in view of the widely recognized modularity or ‘belief indepen-dence’ of perceptual experience (cf. Evans 1982, 123; Jackson 1977, 38ff; Crane 1992, 149). At the same time, many philoso-phers construe perceptual experience as a conscious mental state with representational content, and, thus, as a kind of propositional attitude. Such an ‘experiential attitude’ is of the committal, world-directed or truth-directed kind, and thus shares essential features with that of belief. Nevertheless, its

ESPP2010

40

modularity seems to force us to construe it as an attitude of it’s own, an attitude sui generis (cf., a. o., Crane 1992). I have argued that the anti-doxastic force of the argument from modularity rests on a controvertible premise about the content of experience. This is the premise that experiences have ‘naive’ contents, i.e. contents of the form x is F, where x ranges over material objects and F over sensible properties. These argu-ments therefore have no force against a belief theory that construes experiences as having ‘phenomenal’ contents, contents of the form x looks F, for instance.

In this paper, I shall argue that a phenomenal belief theory also accommodates all the important phenomenological features of perceptual experiences that have been stressed in the litera-ture. Since it does not conflict with the immediacy, the particu-larity, or the transparency of experience, a phenomenal belief theory cannot be faulted for falsifying the phenomenology of experience.

Most importantly, however, a phenomenal belief theory allows us to account for the rational or reason providing role of perceptual experience: It allows us to understand experience as providing defeasible inferential reasons for (further) belief. In this paper, I shall develop this account from an epistemological perspective: What is it for experience to provide – not only reasons, but – good reasons, or justification, for (further) belief? I shall argue that perceptual justification is best under-stood on the model of prima facie reasons, i.e. reasons that are good as long as there are no defeaters (cf. Pollock 1974, Pryor 2000). Since the inference from x looks F to x is F is ‘material’, such reasoning is warranted only if it is reliable. On a plausible probabilistic construal of reasons relations, however, no signifi-cant anti-skeptical conclusions can be drawn from this model.

References: Armstrong, D. 1968. A Materialist Theory of the Mind.

London: Routledge. Crane, T. 1992. “The nonconceptual content of experience”, in

The Contents of Experience, ed. by T. Crane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bochum & Essen

41

Glüer, K. 2009. “In Defense of a Doxastic Account of Experience”, Mind and Language 24: 297-373.

Jackson, F. 1977. Perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pitcher, G. 1971. A Theory of Perception. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pollock, 1974. Knowledge and Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pryor, J. 2000. “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist”, Nous 34: 517-549.

ESPP2010

42



What Is a Deduction? Integrating Logical, Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives

CHAIR: CATARINA DUTILH NOVAES

The concept of deduction occupies a central position in discussions within philosophy, in particular philosophy of logic and epistemology, and within the psychology of reasoning tradition. Yet, communication between these two traditions specifically on this topic is very scarce, and the lack of contact between them arguably represents an obstacle for a proper understanding of the phenomenon of deduction in all its implications.

This special symposium aims at contributing to bridging the gap between these two traditions which investigate the same phenomenon (deduction) from different but comple-mentary points of view. We shall have researchers with a background in psychology, logic and philosophy discussing the very notion of deduction from different perspectives. It will be argued, in particular, that a reconceptualization of this notion is badly needed, not only to provide a firmer conceptual foundation for experimental work within the psychology of reasoning tradition but also to establish sufficient common ground for a fruitful dialogue between philosophers and psychologists on the topic.

Bochum & Essen

43

CATARINA DUTILH NOVAES A dialogical, game-theoretic formulation of the notion of deduction

The paper will argue that a reconceptualization of the very notion of deduction is badly needed. The hypothesis is that what has gone wrong with most current conceptions of deduction is that its argumentative, dialogical component has been overlooked. Historical analysis shows that the very birth of the notion of deduction is related to the dialogical situation of debates in Greek antiquity (see (Marion & Castelnerac 2009), (Lloyd 1996)). A deduction is originally an argument (a discourse, according to Aristotle’s famous definition in Prior Analytics 24b19), not an inner mental process, and more specifically an argument put forward by a debater in order to compel the other debaters to accept the conclusion of the argument if they accept its premises. The main idea is a game-theoretic one: a deductive argument corresponds to a winning strategy; no matter what new information the other participants introduce (i.e. no matter what counter-moves they make in the game), if they have granted the premises, they will be compelled to grant the conclusion (hence monotonicity). Moreover, the claim is that the multi-agent, discursive situation is the conceptual locus primus of deduction; deduction in mono-agent situations – both in linguistic cases (e.g. an agent conducting a mathematical demonstration) and in non-linguistic cases (e.g. an agent performing the mental process of reasoning) – is in fact a derivative notion.

On the basis of these considerations, the paper will develop a dialogical, game-theoretical notion of deduction in terms of the concept of a winning strategy, taking a deduction to be primarily an argument in a dialogical situation. It will also be argued that such a reconceptualization may shed new light on investigations within the psychology of reasoning tradition, as reviewed in (Evans 2002). By showing that a deductive discourse is originally a specific, rather contrived form of dialogical interaction which emerged in a specific historical setting, it becomes clear why subjects in psychology experi-ments often seem to misrepresent the deductive tasks they are supposed to solve as different cognitive activities, closer to their own daily experiences.

ESPP2010

44

SEBASTIAN SEQUOIAH-GRAYSON Mono-Agent Dynamic Reasoning

The task of revealing the nature of the information yield involved in acts of deductive reasoning is not an easy one: in which sense, if any, does deductive reasoning yield new information? Established theories of information, such as those formulated by Shannon and Weaver (1948), Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1952), Stalnaker (1987), (1990) and Hintikka (1970), (1973) fail to offer a satisfactory answer to this question (Sequoiah-Grayson 2008). To make progress on this issue, we need to revisit the starting point: we need to recognize that acts of deductive reasoning involve just that, actions. That is, we must examine not only the consequences of acts of deductive reasoning, but also those actions or reasoning procedures that bring these consequences about. Deductive reasoning is an essentially dynamic beast. In information-processing terms, we may say that this corresponds to a widening of perspective from that of the outputted information alone, to include also the information processing that generates that output.

It is useful to think of the agent, or system, as a database. This immediately raises the question as to what constraints on the processing of the information (or data) in the database are required, in order that the processing successfully generates information. In the approach developed here, the well known K-axiom for epistemic closure for explicit knowledge is rejected for even the most trivial cases of deductive inferential reasoning on account of the fact that the closure axiom does not extend beyond a raw consequence relation. The recognition that deductive inference concerns interaction as much as it concerns consequence allows for perspectives from logics of multi-agent information flow (van Ditmarsh et. al. 2008) to be refocused on mono-agent deductive reasoning. Instead of modeling the information flow between different agents in a communicative or announcement setting, we model the information flow between different states of a single agent as that agent reasons deductively (Sequoiah-Grayson 2009, 2010). The resource management of the database of agent states for the deductive reasoning fragment in question is covered by the logic corres-

Bochum & Essen

45

ponding to the nonassociative Lambek Calculus with permu-tation, bottom, and identity NLP(01).

ANDREW J.B. FUGARD AND NIKI PFEIFER

The psychology of deduction in a probabilistic setting Deductive reasoning has been extensively studied by the psychology of reasoning. Since the late 90s, however, some psychologists have begun to reject the deduction paradigm in favor of a probabilistic one. Typically the definition of deduction used is narrow, and refers to classical first-order logic with one permissible context-independent interpre-tation of the task to be solved.

Probabilistic reasoning is seen as not deductive. In our talk we challenge this conceptualization and argue that there are many reasonable choices of deductive system. People must reason to, as well as from, interpretations (Stenning & van Lambalgen 2008), and there is often more than one permissible interpretation. Coherence-based probability logic (Coletti & Scozzafava 2002) is introduced as a deductive system for modeling how people engage in uncertain reasoning (Pfeifer & Kleiter 2009).

We developed a probabilistic truth table task to investigate reasoning to interpretations (Fugard, Pfeifer, Mayerhofer & Kleiter 2009). Replicating previous research, the conditional event of probability logic was the most common interpretation, followed by conjunction. The classical material conditional interpretation was practically absent. Intriguingly, we found within-participant shifts from conjunction to conditional event, which is evidence of different processes of reasoning to an interpretation within-participant. We also have prelimi-nary evidence that conditional event responses, and convergence on the conditional event, are due to the ability to inhibit bottom-up processes. For another set of experiments we investiga-ted the paradoxes of the material conditional, key for distin-guishing between different theories of conditionals but until now not investigated empirically. Again the conditional event interpretation was dominant and the material conditional practically absent.

ESPP2010

46

It is easy to find deductive problems that most participants cannot solve within an experiment (e.g., prove Fermat’s last theorem). This does not imply that participants cannot do deductive reasoning. In conclusion, we have found evidence that people draw deductive inferences in a probabilistic setting and that they converge on the competence answer provided by a justified deductive system.

References Bar-Hillel, Y., and Carnap, R. (1952): ‘An Outline of a Theory

of Semantic Information’, rep. in Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (ed.): Language and Information: Selected Essays on their Theory and Application, Addison Wesley, Jerusalem, (1964) pp. 221-74.

Coletti, G., & Scozzafava, R. (2002): Probabilistic logic in a coherent setting. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Van Ditmarsh, H., van der Hoek, W., and Kooi, B, (2008): Dynamic Epistemic Logic. Dordrecht: Springer.

Evans, J.St.B.T (2002): ‘Logic and human reasoning: an assessment of the deduction paradigm’. Psychological Bulletin, 128(6), pp. 978-996.

Evans, J.St.B.T., Newstead, S. & Byrne, R. (1993): Human reasoning: the Psychology of Deduction. East Sussex, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fugard, A. J. B., Pfeifer, N., Mayerhofer, B. & Kleiter, G. D. (2009): ‘How people interpret an uncertain If’. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Uncertainty Processing (WUPES) (pp. 80-91). Liblice, Czech Republic.

Hintikka, J. (1970): ‘Surface Information and Depth Information’, in J. Hintikka and O. Suppes (eds.) Information and Inference, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 263-97.

Hintikka, J. (1973): Logic, Language-Games and Information: Kantian Themes in the Philosophy of Logic, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Keren, G. & Schul, Y. (2009): ‘Two is not always better than one – A critical evaluation of two-system theories’. Perspectives on Psychological Science 4(6), pp. 533-550.

Bochum & Essen

47

Lloyd, G.E.R. (1996): ‘Science in Antiquity: the Greek and Chinese cases and their relevance to the problem of culture and cognition’. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (eds.), Modes of Though: Explorations in Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, CUP, pp. 15-33.

Marion, M. & Castelnerac, B. (2009), ‘Arguing for Inconsistency: Dialectical Games in the Academy’. In G. Primiero & S. Rahman (eds.), Acts of Knowledge: History, Philosophy and Logic. London, College Publications.

Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (Eds.). (1998): Rational models of cognition. Oxford: OUP

Pfeifer, N. & Kleiter, G. D. (2009): ‘Framing human inference by coherence based probability logic’. Journal of Applied Logic, 7(2), 206-217.

Prawitz, D. (2005): ‘Logical consequence from a constructivist point of view’. In S. Shapiro (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of mathematics and logic. Oxford: OUP.

Sequoiah-Grayson, S. (2010): ‘Epistemic Closure and Commutative, Nonassociative Residuated Structures, forthcoming in Synthese.

Sequoiah-Grayson, S. (2009): ‘A Positive Information Logic for Inferential Information’, Synthese, 167: 2, pp. 409-431.

Sequoiah-Grayson, S. (2008): ‘The Scandal of Deduction: Hintikka on the Information Yield of Deductive Inferences’, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 37: 1, 67-94.

Shannon, C. E. and Weaver, W. (1948): The Mathematical Theory of Communication, reprinted with a forward by R. E. Blahut and B. Hajek, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Stalnaker, R. (1987): Inquiry, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

Stalnaker, R. (1990): ‘Mental Content and Linguistic Form’, Philosophical Studies, 59, 129-146.

Stenning, K. & van Lambalgen, M. (2008): Human reasoning and cognitive science. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press.

Wason, P. (1966): ‘Reasoning’. In B. Foss (Ed.), New horizons in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 135-151.

ESPP2010

48

Friday, August 27th 17.00 – 19.15 Room 2b (Level 4)


Being Addressed as You Towards a Second-Person Approach to Social Cognition

CHAIR: TOBIAS SCHLICHT

Human beings are intensely social creatures and our capacity to understand others is central to our comprehension of human nature itself. But how do we get to know what others feel, intend and desire? What are the strategies we use and what are the psychological processes and underlying enabling processes on the neural level of these strategies? Philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists alike have tried to characterize these capacities for social cognition, and for decades, debates have been dominated by two major approaches: According to “theory theory” (TT), we take a detached, observational stance towards others and, indeed, posit mental states as theoretical entities in order to explain and predict behaviour. Analogous to a scientist who posits electrons or quarks in order to explain her observations, we are said to approach other minds from a third-person perspective (3PP) (e.g. Gopnik & Wellman 1992). According to the competing “simulation-theory” (ST), we use our own first-person perspective (1PP) and experience to put ourselves (imaginatively) into another person’s situation and create pretend mental states in order to explain and predict her actions (e.g. Goldman 2006). In order to achieve this, we make use of our own cognitive mechanisms, but we take them ‘offline’ such that we project the resulting cognition onto the other person rather than act on it.

Despite their popularity, both accounts however neglect the important distinction between a) merely observing someone and b) being directly engaged with another in social interaction. The intuition that social cognition is

Bochum & Essen

49

funda¬mentally different in these two conditions can be accounted for by a third original alternative, according to which our primary source of social understanding is based on direct interaction and engagement with others from a second-person-perspective (2PP) (Gallagher 2001; Ratcliffe 2007; Reddy 2008). Actively partici¬pating in reciprocal interaction employing ‘online’ intelligence culminates in a procedural, skilful knowledge of others that constitutes implicit rather than explicit understanding of others. Within engage¬ment, we perceive and ‘know’ each other in a way that we do not if we only observe each other, because we make use of “online intelligence” – grounded not in neural states alone, but also in complex causal interactions including the non-neural body and the environment (Wheeler 2005). Importantly, understanding others in social interaction is not a unidirectional process since my own efforts to engage with and understand the other prompt reactions feeding into a communication ‘loop’ characterized by reciprocity (Frith 2007, p.175). Here, the interacting agents reciprocally affect each other and take on different ‘roles’ when attempting to manage the (non-perfect) contingencies characteristic of social interaction (Gergely & Watson 1996; Schilbach et al. in press). In this new framework, explicit ‘offline’ mechanisms such as theoretical inference and simulation, on the other hand, only come into play in extra¬ordinary situations. Being addressed by others as ‘You’ is the principal source of social understanding (Reddy 2008). However, it should be stressed that not just every direct encounter between two people is an example of a second-person understanding of others. Sometimes, people confront or even ‘use’ others only as a means to some end and thus objectify them (Ratcliffe 2007, p. 72), with the extreme case of master-and-slave-relationships, already discussed by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus, there are important constraints on what counts as second-person understanding of others.

This symposium is intended as a substantial and original contribution to the development of such a Second-Person account of social cognition. To this end, speakers from philosophy, psychology, and social cognitive neuroscience will present conceptual considerations as well as converging empirical evidence that ultimately feed into such an account. The following central questions shall be addressed:

ESPP2010

50

1. In what way is social cognition different when we are directly engaged with someone in reciprocal interaction (‘online’ social cognition; 2PP) as compared to being a mere observer of interaction between other agents (‘offline’ social cognition; 3PP)?

2. What is the function of active participation and reciprocity in ‘online’ interaction?

3. What are the relative contributions of implicit and explicit ways of understanding others in ‘online’ as compared to ‘offline’ social cognition? How does active participation in the social world shape our implicit and explicit knowledge of others?

A promising way to develop a theoretical framework for such a Second-Person approach to social cognition is to extend the enactive view of cognition (in general) and apply it to the social domain. The focus of this paradigm in cognitive science is on the dynamics and interdependence of mind/brain, body and environment in explaining cognition (Noë 2004, 2009; Wheeler 2005; Thompson 2007). Cognitive processes and structures are held to be essentially embodied and dynamic, resulting from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action and the exercise of a skilful know-how. However, the resources of this paradigm have not been exploited systematically for the social domain such that currently there is no comprehensive account of social cognition that respects the difference between online and offline social cognition.

From the perspective of social neuroscience, the need for original, truly interactive experimental paradigms permitting the investigation of the psychological processes and neurobio-logical substrates of the constituents of the 2PP is addressed.

And from the perspective of developmental psychology, it has only recently been strongly emphasized that there is a need for truly engaging methodologies that address the intersubjec-tive capacities of young infants before they acquire a theory of mind at around 4-5 years (Reddy 2008).

These issues from the perspectives of the various disciplines involved frame the discussion of the present symposium proposal. It promises to shed new light on current debates on social cognition and stimulate future investigations.

Bochum & Essen

51

TOBIAS SCHLICHT Being involved. Towards an enactive account of social cognition

There has been a paradigm shift in the cognitive sciences towards an enactive and embodied/embedded understanding of cognition. Crucial to this view is the claim that cognition is not merely grounded in neural information processing. Rather, to explain consciousness and cognition, we need to appreciate neural activity as embedded in the larger context of an organism’s bodily actions and interactions with its environment. Cognition is facilitated by the sensorimotor coupling between agent and world – by a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world (Noë 2009).

Despite the popularity of this view, its resources have not yet been exploited for the social domain (but see Ratcliffe 2007 and de Jaegher 2007 for notable exceptions). In this talk, it will be shown how central ideas from the enactive approach support a second-person account of understanding other minds, in contrast to traditional third-person (theory-theory) and first-person approaches (simulation-theory).

The central claim of this new alternative is that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are directly engaged in social interaction with someone else from social cognition in situations where we are merely observing others. In direct interaction, we do not and need not rely on explicit mindreading strategies like theoretical inference or simulation, but on implicit processing of information: The most funda-mental kind of social understanding is constituted by a proce-dural knowledge, a skilful ‘know-how to deal with other people’. Such know-how manifests itself in appropriate actions and reactions that lead to a reciprocal relationship with an-other agent in social encounters, resulting inter alia from the perception of social affordances. Because autistic patients lack this implicit know-how, they are impaired in social cognition, although they are capable of explicit mindreading when prompted to do so (Senju et al. 2009). Contrary to traditional assumptions, there is no absolute epistemic gap between my mind and the mind of the other person, since in many cases we can directly perceive what others feel, intend, desire etc. (Gallagher 2001). The central features that make ‘online’ social

ESPP2010

52

cognition unique are elaborated in terms of the enactive approach.

LEONHARD SCHILBACH A Second-Person Approach to Other Minds: Preliminary Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging

The idea of a second-person approach to other minds can be taken to suggest the importance of one’s own self-involvement in social cognition (online social cognition) as compared to mentalizing about other persons from the standpoint of a mere observer (offline social cognition). Furthermore a second-person account suggests to take the reciprocity of social interaction seriously by focusing on the different roles interactors play when initiating or responding to each others’ actions.

Based upon these theoretical considerations two studies were conducted. The first set of studies was realized to assess the neurobiological correlates of the perception of socially relevant facial expressions depending upon whether or not they were directed towards the human observer (as opposed to someone else; Schilbach et al. 2006, Mojzisch et al. 2006, Schilbach et al. 2008). A second paradigm was devised to investigate the neural correlates of joint attention resulting from the interpersonal coordination of gaze behavior during online interaction by means of functional neuroimaging. Here a crucial experimental manipulation consisted in varying whether participants initiated joint attention themselves or responded to someone else’s gaze shifts (Schilbach et al. in press, Wilms et al. in press).

Results of these studies highlight differential effects on neural processing both related to self-involvement and to the reciprocal nature of social interaction consistent with the idea of these being important constituents of online social cognition. Con¬sequently, these results lend support to a second-person approach of other minds which promises to further our understanding of the neurobiology of social cognition by taking online interaction seriously and which might help to bridge findings in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience.

Bochum & Essen

53

ALAN COSTALL & VASUDEVI REDDY Getting personal: A neglected dimension of scientific methodologies

This paper takes a look at one (crucial) aspect of Psychology's theoretical and methodological heritage which has led it not only to separate the mental from the physical, but to separate mutual involvement from knowledge. Some consequences of this emphasis on detachment are apparent in the unspoken rules governing how one describes psychological data, others in the very way in which the data are ‘gathered’.

However, a simple dichotomy in methods – between detached experimental and engaged participatory methods – does not capture the complexities of what has come to be called a second person perspective. It certainly is not enough to say that any ‘interaction’ between two people involves a second person perspective. There are many ways of ‘objectifying’ the other within interaction which are well known within clinical and experimental contexts, and also within everyday interactions. Nor is it enough to say that any observation from outside of interaction cannot involve such a perspective. There are examples ranging from Darwin’s deep involvement with the earthworms and even plants he was observing to Barbara McClintock’s ‘feelings’ for the maize plants she was trying to understand, which suggest that a second person perspective is a state of openness towards the subjects of our perception which can be experienced even when ‘alone’. Given that Buber’s Thou was in fact powerfully expressed in relation to a tree, the assumptions within this perspective cannot be simple.

Within the temporal course of psychological ‘studies’ the perspective of the investigator towards the participant often shifts. One could argue that the shifting of perspectives is not only present in all engagement, but is necessarily so. Even in infancy, when reflective skills are hardly evident, engagement is not a simple steady state: teasing by infants in the first year of life, for instance, is a good example of a deliberate ‘outside’ stance taken briefly within engagement. The function that is served by such rapid shifting of perspectives is as yet little understood, but is probably crucial for progress in psychological understanding.

ESPP2010

54

References De Jaegher, H. & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-

making. An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6: 485-507.

Frith, C. D. (2007). Making up the mind. Blackwell Publishing. Frith, C. D., Frith, U. (2008). Implicit and explicit processes in social cognition. Neuron, 60(3), 503-510.

Gallagher, S. (2001). The Practice of Mind. Theory, Simulation or Primary Interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 83-108.

Gergely, G. & Watson, J. S. (1996). The social biofeedback theory of parental affect-mirroring: the development of emotional self-awareness and self-control in infancy. Int J Psychoanal, 77(Pt 6), 1181-1212.

Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating Minds. The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: OUP.

Gopnik, A. & Wellman, H. (1992). Why the child’s Theory of Mind really is a theory. Mind and Language 7: 145-171.

Mojzisch, A., Schilbach, L., Pannasch, S., Helmert, J.R., Velichkovsky, B.M., & Vogeley, K. (2006). Attention and Facial Mimicry during Social Interaction with Virtual Others. Social Neuroscience, 1, 184-195.

Newen, A. & Schlicht, T. (2009). Understanding Other Minds: A criticism of Goldman’s theory and an outline of the Person Model Theory. Grazer Philosophische Studien 79, 209-242.

Noë, A. (2009). Out of our heads. Why You are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Hill & Wang.

Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking commonsense psychology: A Critique of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulation. New York: Palgrave.

Reddy, V. (2008). How infants know minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Schilbach, L., Wohlschläger, A.M., Newen, A., Krämer, N., Shah, N.J., Fink, G.R., Vogeley, K. (2006). Being With Others: Neural Correlates of Social Interaction. Neuropsychologia, 44(5): 718-30

Bochum & Essen

55

Schilbach, L., Eickhoff, S.B., Mojzisch, A., Vogeley, K. (2008). What’s in a smile? Neural correlates of facial embodiment in social interaction. Social Neuroscience, 3 (1): 37-50.

Schilbach, L., Wilms, M., Eickhoff, S. B., Romanzetti, S., Tepest, R., Bente, G. et al. (in press). Minds made for sharing. Initiating joint attention recruits reward-related neurocircuitry. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21401.

Senju, A., Southgate, V., White, S., & Frith, U. (2009). Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome. Science, 325(5942), 883-885.

Sinigaglia, C. (2008). Enactive understanding and motor intentionality. In: Enacting intersubjectivity: a cognitive and social perspective on the study of interactions. Ed. by. F. Morganti, A. Carassa, G. Riva. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life. Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step.

Wilms, M.*, Schilbach, L.*, Pfeiffer, U., Bente, G., Fink, G.R., Vogeley, K. (in press). It’s in your eyes. Using gaze feedback to create truly interactive paradigms for social cognitive and affective neuroscience. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. (*Equal contributions).

ESPP2010

56

Friday, August 27th 17.00 – 19.15 Room 1 (Level 4)


The Psychology and Philosophy of Property Ownership

CHAIR: PATRICIA KANNGIESSER

Property ownership plays a critical role in many social interactions such as buying groceries at the supermarket, borrowing a book from the library, or lending a pen to someone. Often, ownership also influences people’s behaviour towards things: for example, the owner of a car has the right to drive it, whereas a non-owner is not allowed to do so without the owner’s permission. In addition, social conflicts frequently centre on ownership rights or their violation and can sometimes only be resolved by resorting to juridical authorities.

Occasionally, it is not even clear whether a certain resource or good can be legitimately owned at all. Even though property ownership seems to be ubiquitous in every-day life, its philosophical and psychological underpinnings are far from evident. The goal of this symposium is twofold: it aims at presenting recent empirical research on children’s and adults’ intuitive reasoning about ownership and property rights, while at the same time trying to discuss some of the conceptual underpinnings of property ownership. It is intended to highlight the relevance of this domain of inquiry for psychologists as well as philosophers.

CHRIS BERTRAM Possession, property, territory

The stories Locke and Kant tell about the relationship between property and territory are both similar and opposed. Both explore a sequence in which individual acquisition of bits of the external world is the trigger for the establishment of state and juridical systems which then have the function (inter alia) of

Bochum & Essen

57

regulating holdings and resolving disputes. This paper argues that the sharp distinction that Kantians wish to draw between property and territory (jurisdiction) is not well founded and that valid Kantian claims to jurisdiction are vulnerable to similar objections concerning indeterminacy similar to the ones Kantians themselves make against Lockean natural property rights. The paper draws on social scientific literature to argue against the Kantian claim that property depends, conceptually, on the prior existence of legal authority.

ORI FRIEDMAN, KAREN R. NEARY, MARGARET A. DEFEYTER AND SARAH L. MALCOLM

Ownership and object history

Ownership constrains behavior towards objects. Suppose you see an interesting agazine on an empty seat in a bus. You want to read the magazine, but whether you do likely depends on ownership. If the magazine is not owned (perhaps it was purposely left on the bus), then you may read it, underline some words, or tear out a page. However, if the magazine is owned then you will be excluded from all of these actions (at least unless you first get permission from the owner).

This example reveals the importance of being able to judge whether an object is owned or not. We propose a two part theory about how people make such judgments. According to the theory, in judging whether objects are owned, people begin by assuming that artefacts (e.g., chairs) are owned and that natural kind (e.g., pinecones) are not; findings from three experiments on children aged 3- to 6-year-olds are consistent with the view. However, people must sometimes override these default assumptions, because not all artefacts are owned and not all natural kinds are un-owned. We suggest that people may override the default assumptions by inferring the history of intentional acts made in relations to objects. For instance, though it is typically assumed that chairs are owned, a chair found outside near the edge of the street will likely assumed to be non-owned. We argue that this intuition arises because it seems plausible that the chair arrived in its current position because it was intentionally discarded by its owner. Making

ESPP2010

58

judgments about ownership often involves drawing inferences about object history.

PATRICIA KANNGIESSER, NATHALIA GJERSOE AND BRUCE M. HOOD Ownership and Creative Labour in Young Children and Adults

How do people intuitively reason about property ownership and about how they come to own things in the first place? Do these intuitions change in the course of development? So far most psychological research has investigated property ownership by focusing on the historical chain of possession of objects. However, in many situations, questions of ownership might arise with regards to objects that have been modified or changed from their original state. For example, who owns the wooden statue – the sculptor who created it or his friend from whom he borrowed the wood initially? Locke (Locke, 1698/1960) suggested that people often come to own things by mixing their labour with them, but only little research has investigated this claim. Here we present a series of studies that investigate the influence of creative labour on ownership judgments in young children and adults. In contrast to most other research on ownership that usually presented participants with stories about ownership conflicts, our studies evaluated how people made ownership judgments when they were engaged in a real-life scenario where materials were borrowed and new objects were created. We controlled for alternative explanations such as short term possession or the amount of effort invested. Our findings indicate that participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the creator of an object when s/he had invested creative labour than when she had not. In addition, this effect was signifycantly stronger in preschool children than adults. Two additional studies revealed that ownership transfer was not attributable to duration of manipulation and only secondarily to changes in the object’s identity. Creative labour thus overruled a previously found bias towards first possession. Moreover, determining property ownership may be an early emerging intuitive process.

Bochum & Essen

59

FEDERICO ROSSANO, HANNES RAKOCZY, MICHAEL TOMASELLO The development of a normative understanding of property rights

Property is the social institution that rules relationships among people with regards to things by assigning individuals differential rights over things. We can distinguish an input side, which represents the conditions under which property rights may arise (e.g. buying, inventing) and an output side, which consists in the rights and obligations that follow the way an individual accessed an object.

From several studies we know that young children can infer ownership through situational cues (such as who had it first; e.g., Friedman and Neary, 2008) and track ownership across transfers such as giving and stealing (e.g., Kim and Kalish, 2009; Blake and Harris 2009). What we do not know, however, is what young children understand about the normative structure of property. Building on recent research on the developing understanding of normativity (e.g., Rakoczy et al., 2008), the present study explores young children’s under-standing of the normative implications of property by ana-lyzing children’s protests during violations of property rights.

2- and 3-year-olds were involved in joint activities over different objects with an experimenter and a hand puppet. During these interactions, the puppet performed actions with the objects that sometimes constituted violations of property rights: she took away an object and put it into her bag (violation 1) and then went on to throw it away into a trash can (violation 2). The crucial variation across the conditions was with regard to who owned the object before the beginning of the experiment.

Children as young as 3 not only infer and track who owns what, but understand the normative nature of property. While at 2 they only care about losing control of their own objects, at 3, they intervene specifically when an actor violates property rights of others, but refrain from intervening in response to analogous actions (taking; throwing away) performed on the actor’s own objects.

ESPP2010

60



Causality within the Brain and between the Brain and the Limbs. A Fresh Look at the Initiation of Movement and the Feeling of “Intending”

CHAIR: AARON SCHURGER

Since Libet’s seminal experiments of the early 1980’s, many subsequent studies have fallen in line with the view that consciousness comes quite late in the neural preparation for action. However, this rests on the assumption that a certain movement-preceding event present in the time-locked average (the Readiness Potential or RP) reflects the neural cause of action. We propose to scrutinize this fundamental premise, which is typically taken as a given, and discuss the basic assumptions about causality that are implicit in Libet's view. What is the link between movement-preceding signals, like the RP, and movement itself? Is it deterministic or probabilistic? What is the link between movement-preceding signals and the cause of movement? Are they one and the same? When does activity in motor cortex become ballistic (even if interruptable) vis-a-vis the feeling of an “urge” to move? We will begin at the beginning, but try to proceed down a new road, taking account of new evidence and new ideas. If the experience of intention really does include a feeling of “causality” then it is even more illusory than anyone might have suspected... or is it? Perhaps the phenomenology of movement initiation will seem much more veridical when seen from a vantage point other than the one offered 30 years ago by Benjamin Libet.

Bochum & Essen

61

AARON SCHURGER Riding the cortical wave: Volition as evidence accumulation

The pioneering and controversial work of Benjamin Libet on the timing of the cortical readiness potential (RP) and the conscious intention to move suggested that the objective neural events in the brain that cause movement preceed the subjective feeling of “intending” to move by 300 ms or more. Although widely criticized, his paradigm has had an unrivaled influence on what has become the prevailing view: that movement is initiated pre-consciously, and the feeling of intending to move is grafted on long after the fact. While this resonates well with the materialist notion that consciousness is an effect and not a cause, it rests on a very important assumption: that the readiness potential reflects the cause of movements. The earliest part of the RP is commonly assumed to be like the first in a row of dominos cascading deterministically toward spinal motor neurons. This assumption is pervasive throughout the literature and is a necessary premise if the RP is to have any relevance to the subject of “free will”. Surprisingly, this assump-tion has gone unchallenged for more than two decades even though there has never been any solid evidence that the RP causes anything. Recently, a few studies have emerged that challenge and/or cast doubt on this assumption, which I will briefly review. I will then describe a plausible alternative model of the relationship between the RP and movement initiation: (1) the readiness potential reflects ongoing cortical drift that biases the precise moment at which the immediate cause exceeds threshold, (2) as in sensory perception, the feeling of intending is a threshold-crossing event in a process of evidence accumulation - evidence that “I am about to move”, and (3) if the word “decision” is properly defined, then conscious intention is roughly coincident in time with the neural decision to move.

ESPP2010

62

MARC PAVLOPOULOS Readiness potential, sense of volition, and neural causes of action

Recent experimental results suggest that certain conclusions drawn from Libet’s famous experiment on the readiness potential might be unfounded: the readiness potential might well reflect a cumulative, probabilistic process. This raises questions for most theories of action, which are causal theories. I propose a strong distinction between voluntary and intentional action. Intentional action implies distal intention, whereas voluntary action does not. I examine the notion of a sense of agency, by contrast with a sense of authorship in Jeannerod’s sense, to argue that the sense of agency need not have a causal content and therefore can accommodate a cumulative process. I conclude on the question of free will and with a suggestion for further experimental enquiry.

JOHN-DYLAN HAYNES Unconscious determinants of free decisions

Human decisions are often believed to involve a conscious and rational analysis of the available evidence. Here we will show a number of examples that demonstrate the importance of unconscious information processing to decision making. In one series of experiments we asked subjects to freely decide to press one or another key. Simultaneously they were asked to report the time point when they made up their mind.Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)and multivariate decoding we were able to predict their choices several seconds before they reached awareness. This long-term predictive activity was confirmed by further studies using other choices (adding / subtracting) and using other imaging modalities (ultra-high-field fMRI, EEG). In an extension of this research we also investigated cases where subjects have a clear preference for one or the other option. For this we studied the evaluation of consumer products (cars). We were able to predict with high accuracy which car someone would buy, even when the car was presented outside the focus of attention. Taken together these results reveal the importance of implicit processes for human decision making.

Bochum & Essen

63

TILLMANN VIERKANT How do I know I am about to initiate a movement? Introspection and

proximal intention in experiments of spontaneous movement In his seminal experiments Libet asked his subjects to time the onset of a conscious urge, intention, etc. Libet notes that subjects did not find that instruction too difficult to understand. Starting from the work done by Eric Schwitzgebel on introspection, I want to worry in this talk about whether Libet’s trust in his subjects is satisfied. I want to argue that it is very unlikely that time W can be pinned to any basic folk psychological state (like an urge, a desire, intention, etc..). In a second step, I then want to generalise the point and wonder what we might mean when we talk about a “sense of action initiation”. It is not clear at all what exactly this is supposed to be conceptually. Achieving conceptual clarity on this issue seems like a necessary condition for making these kinds of experiments interpretable. I will discuss why it might be difficult to achieve that aim.

ESPP2010

64



Universal and Cultural Determinants of Social Interaction and Perception

CHAIR: ANIKA FIEBICH & LEON DE BRUIN

Nature has endowed human beings with a number of crucial capacities to successfully navigate their social environment. The aim of this symposium is to create an interdisciplinary platform in order to address questions about the extent to which these capacities are unique to humans as a species, and to discuss the universal and cultural determinants that shape and structure them. The symposium focuses on three main topics:

(i) In the first place, the symposium addresses the question to which extent we should conceive of human being as a distinctive kind of ‘social animal’. It is generally assumed that various basic perceptual skills such as detecting biological motion, low-level gaze following abilities, perceiving bodily motions as goal-directed behavior, registering what others can and cannot see (Tomasello & Call 1997; Tomasello et al. 2003; Whiten et al. 2009) can be found in both human and nonhuman primates. By contrast, comparative studies of preverbal children and great apes suggest that the early affective and imitative exchanges characteristic for humans differ markedly from that of nonhuman primates (Buttelmann et al. 2007; Carpenter & Call 2009; Moll & Tomasello 2006; Tomasello et al. 2005). Hermann et al. (2007) found that 2.5 year-old-children have equally well developed physical-cognitive abilities (i.e. abilities that emerge by dealing with the inanimate environment such as the understanding of causal relations) compared to orangutans and chimpanzees but much

Bochum & Essen

65

better developed social-cognitive abilities (i.e. abilities that are acquired during social interaction such as (nonverbal) communication skills and social learning). This supports the so called “cultural intelligence hypothesis”, which claims that the complex social cognition as well as cultural development of human beings is due to these social competencies; a huge phylogenetic advantage over our non-human primate relatives with whom we still share 99 percentage of our gene material.

(ii) What about the cultural differences within the human species? Various studies show that there is a considerable variability with respect to social interaction and perception across cultures (Markus & Kitayama 1991; Nisbett et. al. 2001; Masuda & Nisbett 2001, etc). One important topic to be discussed in the symposium concerns cultural differences in the perception of dominance and likeability. In order to successfully deal with social hierarchies, humans have to be sensitive towards subtle signals of power and dominance transmitted via nonverbal communication channels. However, human cultures differ substantially in their valuation of social hierarchy; i.e. whether they regard inequalities in power and status as natural or man-made and largely artificial (Naylor 2009), and whether they appreciate instructions how to behave in a hierarchical system (Hofstede 2003). As a result, the cultural dimension is regarded as a major source of diversity in the manifestation of power and consequently as a potential cause of misunder-standing in perception and interpretation of dominance cues during intercultural communication.

(iii) Another important topic that the symposium aims to address is the human capacity to understand others in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires – generally referred to as ‘mindreading’ (Nichols and Stich 2003). It is often assumed that the capacity for mindreading is universally acquired and exercised (Flavell et. al. 1983). The universal status of mindreading is explained by assuming that “humans everywhere interpret the behavior of others in (…) mentalistic terms because we all come equipped with a “theory of mind” module that is compelled to interpret others this way, with mentalistic terms as its natural language.” (Tooby and Cosmides 1995: xvii). It has been suggested that ToM develops universally between the third and fourth year of life (Wellman et al., 2001). However, the universal ToM hypothesis has not

ESPP2010

66

remained uncontested. Using verbal false-belief style paradigms, several ToM studies conducted beyond the Anglo-American cultural/linguistic boundaries have obtained mixed results. Some of these cross-cultural studies have supported the universal developmental trajectory of ToM (Avis and Harris 1991; Lee et al. 1999; Naito et al. 2004; Tardiff and Wellman 2000; Yazdi et al. 2006), whereas others have found some developmental delays in ToM in the non-English-speaking children (Chen and Lin 1994; Louis 1998; Naito 2003; Vinden 1996).

ANIKA FIEBICH AND LEON DE BRUIN Universal and Cultural Determinants of Mindreading

According to the universal Theory of Mind (ToM) hypothesis, the capacity for ‘mindreading’ (i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others in order to predict and explain their behavior) has a universal developmental trajectory, and children typically cross a ‘ToM threshold’ between the age of 4 and 5 when they are able to pass the false belief test. We review a number of findings that cast doubt on the universal ToM hypothesis, since they indicate large differences in ToM development and acquisition in children of collectivistic cultures compared to individualistic cultures.

To explain these findings, we propose a model of intersubjectivity that consists of three levels, which emerge subsequently in ontogeny and build on each other (Fiebich, de Bruin & Newen, in prep.). On the first two levels, we postulate universal ‘core’ abilities that allow for a basic form of intersubjectivity, such as intentionality detection and shared attention. These precursors to ToM have deep phylogenetic roots and are thus likely to be universally shared amongst humans (and perhaps other primates as well). On the third level, we can find abilities for intersubjectivity that incorporate culture-specific features, including those characteristic for a mature ToM. We close by addressing the question whether cross-cultural differences in ToM also reflect variability at the neurobiological level, and suggest that there may be both universal and culture specific neural correlates of ToM (deBruin, Fiebich & Newen, in prep.).

Bochum & Essen

67

GARY BENTE

Basic Instincts? Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Dominance and Likeability

Social hierarchies are ubiquitous in most animal and human societies and successful navigation of the social world implies sensitivity towards subtle signals of power and dominance often transmitted via nonverbal communication channels. Cultures have been shown to differ with regard to the value they assign to the vertical dimension of social relations, either accepting that inequalities in power and status are nature given or seeing them as man-made and largely artificial. However it is still an open question to which degree these basic cultural values influence the actual expressions of power and the perceptions of social dominance cues within and across cultures. Using a novel methodology the current study aimed at exploring potential universalities and cultural specificities in the perception of dominance and to identify the nonverbal cues responsible for cultural diversity in dominance perception and evaluation. Our comparison included social stimuli as well as observers from three countries: Germany, USA and United Arab Emirates. To mask clues to the cultural background of the agents video recordings were transcribed into movement protocols and reproduced via computer animations using neutral characters. Clips were shown to observers from the three countries asking for their impressions of dominance and likeability by means of adjective scales. Measurement invariance across cultures for the impression dimensions was established by means of confirmatory factor analysis. On the factor level we found significant correlations in dominance perception across all countries. Significant correlations were also found for likability between German observers and observers from the other two groups but not for US and Arab observers. Perceived dominance also uniformly predicted the assignment of status-roles in all cultures. Microanalysis of movement behavior further revealed predictive value of specific nonverbal cues for dominance ratings. Results point to universalities in the processing of dominance cues and to cultural specificities in the evaluation dimension (likeability).

ESPP2010

68

LOUISE RÖSKA-HARDY Does culture determine Theory of Mind?

Human culture provides the framework in which members of social groups acquire and share knowledge, values and beliefs, which may, in turn, causally affect phylogeny and ontogenetic processes. Several studies have examined whether aspects of culture exert specific causal influences on the mentalistic understanding of behavior, ‘Theory of Mind’ (Astington, 1996; Avis & Harris, 1991; Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Callaghan et al., 2005; Cole 1996, 2006; Lillard 1998, 1999; Lillard & Skibbe, 2005; Vinden, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002; Vinden & Astington, 2000; Wellman & Miller, 2005; Wellman et al., 2001). This talk discusses whether culture-specific differences determine the character of ToM, construed as the ability to understand self and others as minded agents with cognitive and conative states leading to thought and action.

In the light of empirical findings on developmental trajectories in autistic children, deaf children and children in diverse cultures, I argue that ToM is a universal capacity of typical humans, subserved by specialized low-level perceptual mechanisms that process socially relevant stimuli and enable social cognition. However, this claim does not commit one to innatist modularity theory.

Importantly, individuals’ psychological development does not stop once a mentalistic understanding of thought and behavior, ToM-ability, is achieved. The psychological construal of self and other continues to evolve and ramify during late childhood and the teenage years, becoming more elaborated, e.g. an understanding of traits as psychological constructs that influence action, emotion and thought emerges as does an appreciation of different interpretive frameworks and narrative templates. I argue that these developments are mediated by linguistic interactions among social partners in context, which, in turn, lead to the culturally specific concepts, habits of mind, notions of self and cognitive styles of social explanation, documented in cross-cultural research. However, these aspects of culture do not determine, i.e. causally shape, ToM-ability; they presuppose it.

Bochum & Essen

69

MARC SLORS In defence of the culture-specificity of folk-psychology

Our European-American everyday practical conceptual framework for understanding each other – the attribution of beliefs, desires and other mental states – is widely held to be a universal phenomenon. Thus Fodor (1987: 123) writes that “there is, so far as I know, no human group that doesn’t explain behavior by imputing beliefs and desires to behavior. (And if an anthropologist claimed to have found such a group, I wouldn’t believe him.)” This alleged universality is explained by assuming that “we all come equipped with a “theory of mind” module that is compelled to interpret others this way (…).” (Tooby and Cosmides 1995: xvii)

The problem with such universalistic views is that, the facts count against them. The few survey studies that have been conducted on so-called ‘ethno-psychologies’ (e.g. Lillard 1997, 1998; Vinden 1996; 1999) show wide variation and incommensurability. Many mental state concepts that are crucially important to understanding the behaviour of others are highly culture-specific. Also, in many cultures behaviour of others is understood in situational terms or in terms of group agency, rather than in personal, mentalistic terms.

This apparent culture-dependency of folk-psychology appears to contradict universalistically-inclined theories that depict it as the product of hard-wired internal theories of mind. But if folk-psychology is not hard-wired and internal, then what is it? I argue that folk-psychology is an idealized conceptual framework that models the actual mechanisms involved in understanding each other. This idea can explain the cultural specificity of folk-psychologies. But it can also explain why belief-desire psychology is deemed universal: folk-psycho-logies-as-models are applicable (though not always usefully so) even to people who model themselves differently.

ESPP2010

70

Saturday, August 28th 14.00 – 16.15 Room 2b (Level 4)

Contributed Symposium 7 Thinking and Motor Control

CHAIR: GOTTFRIED VOSGERAU

Thinking and motor control are traditionally viewed as strictly separated faculties of the mind. Recent heterogeneous theses have questioned this strict separation from various sides, often subsumed under the term “grounded cognition”. This symposium aims at scrutinizing the idea of grounded cognition, thereby focusing on the relation between motor control, action perception, and action cognition (thinking about actions). The leading questions are how and to what extent action perception and action cognition are grounded in basic sensorimotor abilities, and what the implications are for (i) a description and explanation of the respective phenomena and for (ii) conceptualizing the architecture of the mind. The symposium will bring together the viewpoints of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to discuss theoretical considerations and experimental results.

In recent years, the thesis stating that “higher-order” abilities such as thinking are grounded in “low-level” sensori-motor abilities has become widespread and very popular. However, the precise meaning and implication of this thesis which go beyond a mere metaphorical use are still unclear. Does it mean that we cannot think without the ability to move? Or does it merely mean that we need the ability to move in order to learn how to think. Three different versions of the thesis of grounded cognition will be distinguished in respect to motor cognition: 1) The strong version of grounded action cognition states that basic motor abilities are constitutive for all processes within the domains of action cognition and action perception. This thesis implies that every breakdown of motor abilities automatically means a breakdown of action cognition and action perception. Moreover, it implies that the classical

Bochum & Essen

71

boundaries between the different domains become meaningless such that the whole idea of a modular processing (for these abilities) has to be given up. If this thesis is taken seriously, it would drastically reshape our conception of the architecture of the mind. 2) The moderate version of grounded action cognition states that some motor abilities are constitutive for some processes within the domains of action cognition and action perception; however, in particular more abstract action cognition processes have become independent from motor abilities in the course of phylo- and ontogenetic development. This means that a breakdown in motor control mechanisms will impair both action cognition and action perception but will not lead them to fully break down. This thesis implies that separation between motor control, action cognition, and action perception can still fruitfully be drawn but that the boundaries between these different domains become blurry: there are cases for which it is not decidable whether they are part of the motor control or the action cognition domain. If this thesis turns out to be true, our classical modular picture of the mind has to be adapted but not dramatically changed. 3) The weak version of grounded action cognition states that motor abilities are not constitutive for action cognition and action perception but still among the acquisition conditions for the latter abilities. This means that motor control capacities are necessary to acquire the abilities to perceive and to think about actions. However, once we have acquired these abilities, the basic motor control abilities can be lost without any damage to action cognition or action perception. If this thesis is true, our classical modular picture of the mind is not affected, although important information about the interrelation between different modules is added.

The philosophical talk by Gottfried Vosgerau will develop the three versions of the thesis of grounded action cognition in detail and discuss the underlying concepts of domain, module, constitution and acquisition conditions. It will then be argued that the strong version ultimately leads to the thesis that thoughts plainly are motor processes. This thesis will be rejec-ted both on theoretical and empirical grounds. The moderate and weak versions of grounded action cognition will turn out to be attractive theses that make different predictions and thus can be experimentally tested. Different existing studies will be

ESPP2010

72

shortly reviewed and evaluated regarding their contribution to the experimental distinction between the two theses. Also, the implications of each version for our understanding of the architecture of the mind will be discussed. It will be argued that the classical picture of a modular mind (in the strict and interesting sense) is not compatible with either version of grounded action cognition.

The distinction between thinking and motor control is deeply reflected in our conception of disorders and the distinction between the respective disciplines: While neurology is almost exclusively dealing with so-called motor disorders, cognitive psychology has mostly focused on thinking and perception. Questioning this distinction, Matthis Synofzik (Cognitive Neuroscience) will present experimental evidence from different behavioral experiments with patients suffering from a “motor disorder” show that motor deficits go hand in hand with selective deficits in action perception and action thinking. Thus, it might turn out that “motor disorders” are not just motor disorders, but in fact “disorders of amodal representations”. This suggestion would clearly reverse our common thinking in neurology and should be considered to provide further evidence for the thesis of grounded action cognition.

Finally, the last presentation by Simone Schütz-Bosbach (Cognitive Psychology) will be focusing on the influence of motor factors and thoughts on perceiving one’s own and other’s agency. The question here is firstly, to what extent the perception and attribution of action are grounded in primary motor control processes such as the efference copy of a motor command and secondly, to what extent it results from primary or accompanying thought processing and thus needs to be regarded as a rather high level process.

GOTTFRIED VOSGERAU Grounded Action Cognition

The traditional strict separation of motor control and thinking about actions has recently been challenged by different theses subsumed under the term “grounded cognition”. Three versions

Bochum & Essen

73

of the thesis of grounded action cognition will be distinguished: the strong version of grounded action cognition ultimately leads to the thesis that there is no distinction between motor control and thinking. If this distinction is denied altogether, there is no sense in talking about “grounded” cognition, since then there is nothing anymore to be grounded or to be a ground. Therefore, the strong reading of the thesis is equivalent to recent “motor theories” of thoughts (Campbell 1999, Schmahmann 2004, Ito 2008) which conjecture that thoughts are motor processes.

However, there are various reasons to reject this view: First of all, the view seems to lead to an infinite regress, since motor processes are often triggered by an intention. This intention is best classified as a thought. If thoughts are motor processes, (at least some) thoughts would be triggered by thoughts. This problem becomes most difficult for goal-directed thinking processes. Moreover, central features of prototypical thoughts are not shared by prototypical motor control processes and vice versa: For example, thoughts are compositional and (fairly) systematic, movements are not; movements are controlled and corrected online (i.e. during the execution of the movement), while this idea seems to be absurd for thoughts. Thus, the strong version of grounded action cognition should be abandoned. The remaining two versions of grounded action cognition present attractive new ways of thinking about the architecture of the mind. It will be discussed what empirical data could decide between the two versions and what impli-cation such a decision would have for our conception of the human mind. It will be argued that the classical modular picture of the mind has to be abandoned in either case.

MATTHIS SYNOFZIK Grounding perceptual dysfunctions in motor disorders – or vice versa? Diseases of the brain’s “motor” systems, e.g. of the cerebellum (cerebellar ataxia) or the basal ganglia (Parkinson’s Disease), have traditionally been considered to be motor disorders. This view has recently been challenged by experiments demonstrating that patients with cerebellar ataxia or Parkinson’s Disease are also impaired in several perceptual faculties. Here, I provide preliminary evidence that action

ESPP2010

74

perception dysfunctions in cerebellar patients do not just accompany motor dysfunctions, but that both dysfunctions might indeed share a commonly disturbed “amodal” mechanism. In fact, at least some action deficits in these patients might even be secondary to action perception deficits (Synofzik et al., 2008). In a similar way, motor deficits in Parkinson’s Disease might be accompanied by – and maybe even secondary to – action perception and action cognition deficits. This suggestion will be supported by clinical evidence and several experiments will be suggested to further probe and clarify these interrelations. The empirical findings will be discussed in the light of the three different versions of grounded cognition: whereas some of them seem to support at least moderate grounded action cognition, others limit the scope of grounded action cognition by demonstrating that not motor, but perceptual abilities are the basis of action cognition.

SIMONE SCHÜTZ-BOSBACH Grounding agency in sensorimotor processes

Classical phenomenology suggests that we have an unmistakable experience that “I am my body” and “you are your body”. However, this view has been challenged by the discovery of shared representations of actions such as those provided by mirror neurons that become active not only when executing an action but also when just observing this particular action. The notion of shared representations argues against a self-specific representation of one’s body at this level and as a consequence, we should frequently make errors in assigning actions to the respective agent. Indeed, problems of agency attribution do occur in situations where the visual cues are ambiguous as for instance, when one’s own and other’s actions are carried out at the same time or lead to similar perceptual effects (Jeannerod, 2003). Therefore, the question arise how we distinguish self and other. In contrast to the shared representation hypothesis, we recently showed that the human motor system responded differentially to visually perceived actions of one’s own and another’s body [Schütz-Bosbach et al.

Bochum & Essen

75

2006, 2009]. This implies that the motor system may include a representation of other agents as qualitatively different from the self, and as such, it may underpin a distinction between self and other that normally trumps the “self-other equality” of the mirror system. I will present various neuro-cognitive studies that sought to identify further sensorimotor based markers of agency and moreover, aimed at clarifying the representation of the self on both a primary sensorimotor and a reflective, conceptual representation.

ESPP2010

76

Saturday, August 28th 14.00 – 16.15 Room 1 (Level 4)


Constructive Memory

CHAIR: JOHN SUTTON

This symposium explores the constructive nature of remembering - remembering in general and autobiographical remembering in particular. In particular, it addresses the implications of remembering’s constructive nature for the legitimacy of our reliance on memory as a source of knowledge in various contexts. It responds to recent trends in both philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, philosophers of mind and epistemologists have tended not to take the constructive character of memory seriously. On the other hand, psychologists have tended to take construction so seriously that it becomes difficult to see it as anything more than a source of error and distortion. By striving for both conceptual and empirical rigour in its exploration of the constructive nature of remembering and the normative implications of construction, the symposium aims to challenge both of these tendencies.

With certain exceptions, philosophers have not taken the constructive character of memory into account. In particular, they have neither worked out the implications of construction for the causal theory of memory (the default view of the metaphysics of memory), nor explored the epistemological questions raised by construction; despite the recent upsurge of interest in social epistemology, including the epistemology of testimony and social influences on individual belief, they have tended not to take social influences on memory into account. From the perspective of a naturalistic, empirically-informed philosophy of mind and epistemology, given the broad consensus among psychologists on the highly constructive nature of remembering, both the metaphysics of memory (the

Bochum & Essen

77

causal theory) and the epistemology of memory need to take construction into account: this will not only be more adequate as philosophy, but also be of more use to the empirical psychology of memory (e.g., by clarifying what is or should be at stake in debates around the normative implications of social influences on individual memory).

Again with certain exceptions, psychologists have taken the constructive character of remembering so seriously that it sometimes seems to rule out the very possibility of truth in memory – there is, in other words, a tendency to identify construction with distortion and error. A particularly contested source of construction and misinformation is social influence, with Loftus for example warning that ‘misinformation has the potential for invading our memories when we talk to other people’. Similar negative views about the dangers of social influence pervade some recent experimental paradigms addressing memory contagion and memory conformity, as well as some forensic literature on memory in psychology and law, treating as epistemic failings our tendencies sometimes to trust certain other people’s versions of a shared experience. This is despite the fact that most psychologists officially maintain that understanding construction will help us to identify not only the sources of error and distortion in memory but also the processes involved in veridical remembering – the core idea here is that construction is not a ‘sin’ but an aspect of the same mechanisms that drive effective generalization and schematization. Indeed, an alternative tradition based on Wegner’s concept of a Transactive Memory System (an enduring dyad or small group with shared awareness of how information is distributed across members) predicts benefits for remembering together. The challenges in resolving tensions between these approaches are both empirical (testing and comparing lines of research in different traditions, avoiding methodological commitments to treating remembering by the individual as the gold standard) and conceptual (how to assess the rationality of relying on information about the past derived from other people).

This symposium combines philosophical and psychological research in seeking better to understand the constructive nature of remembering and its implications, integrating analysis and evidence from a number of robust but rarely

ESPP2010

78

connected literatures. It includes empirical work based in studies of collaborative recall and memory conformity, with a particular focus on social influences on remembering. Experiments reported address when we rely on others for information about the past, which others we are differentially disposed to believe, and under which conditions collaboration in recall might be beneficial. This research brings established results in social cognition to bear on the cognitive psychology of constructive memory, and also exemplifies the convergence of distinctive methods in basic and applied memory research. In turn, the philosophical work in the symposium addresses implications of the constructive nature of remembering for central questions in epistemology about our reliance on information from other people, and examines both internal and external sources of influence on autobiographical memory. The symposium as a whole thus opens a range of issues about construction and social influence in memory which require concerted attention from philosophers and psychologists together.

FIONA GABBERT, LORRAINE HOPE AND KAT JAMIESON When do we rely on information from others?

This research explores when we rely on information from others rather than our own memory, and the extent to which this truly distorts memory, or is merely the manifestation of informational influence.

Study 1 investigated the effects of actual versus perceived memory quality upon an individual’s susceptibility to memory conformity. Dyad members studied a series of images depicting objects, whilst simultaneously engaging in a digit-summation task to divide attention (DA). To manipulate actual memory quality, the DA task was either difficult, or relatively easy. To manipulate perceived memory quality, dyad members were told that their own DA task was easier, or more difficult that their partners’, whereas in fact both were the same. Post-event information (PEI) was introduced via a virtual confederate. Participants who had performed the easy DA task were significantly less susceptible to memory conformity than the other two conditions (which did not reliably differ to each

Bochum & Essen

79

other), thus suggesting that actual memory quality underlies susceptibility to memory conformity more so than perceptions of another’s memory.

Using a similar procedure, Study 2 sought to determine the impact of warnings on the conformity effect. Dyads took part in one of four experimental conditions where they received either (a) a general warning to rely on their own memory; (b) a specific warning revealing that the experimental manipulation; (c) a monetary incentive to be as accurate as possible; or (d) no instructions (control group). Participants in the two warning conditions were significantly less susceptible to memory conformity than Controls. In contrast, participants who were given the incentive to be accurate, were significantly more susceptible to memory conformity than all other condi-tions. These results suggest that when being warned against another person’s memory, we are able to reject PEI and rely on our own memory. However, when the instruction requires us to be as accurate as possible, we look to others as valuable sources of information.

LORRAINE HOPE AND FIONA GABBERT Who do we rely on? Exploring the role of co-witness relationship

in recall and susceptibility to misinformation

A witness is quite likely to be in the company of someone they know when they witness a criminal or otherwise noteworthy incident in public (e.g. a robbery, mugging, assault). They may even be a witness in a professional capacity, such as a member of an emergency response team (e.g. police firearms unit). While witnesses to an event might share the same experience, their individual recall of the event may differ in terms of both quality and quantity. Research on witness accuracy suggests that the most likely outcome when two witnesses discuss their memories is that their accounts of the witnessed event become more similar and, hence, seemingly corroborative. However, this apparent consistency may be misleading as inaccuracies in eyewitness accounts can occur when witnesses exchange (mis)information. This is problematic as the criminal justice system relies on individual level accuracy

ESPP2010

80

but prizes consistency between witness statements. Here we present two studies exploring the role of relationship in recall consistency and accuracy.

Study 1 examined the role of co-witness relationship by comparing the memory performance of pairs of romantic couples, friends and previously unacquainted strangers with that of individuals. Results suggested that all co-witness dyads produced less accurate recall accounts than participants who did not interact with another witness. However, witnesses who were previously acquainted with their co-witness were significantly more likely to report information obtained from their co-witness that they had not seen themselves. In Study 2, we explore the impact of conferring on the production of state-ments by firearms police officers who took part in a live crime scenario and were permitted to confer (or not) while writing their statements. Results suggested that conferring had no overall impact on the accuracy of final individual statements.

Analyses also explored the transmission of errors during conferring and whether formalized statement-writing practices leads to the production of similar accounts, irrespective of conferring practices.

KOURKEN MICHAELIAN Constructive memory, testimony, and epistemic luck

This talk explores an epistemological problem arising from the constructive character of episodic memory. Without the agent’s awareness, content beyond that deriving from her experience can be incorporated into her memory at either encoding or retrieval; this new content can stem from either internal sources (schemas, etc.) or external sources, including the testimony of others. While the incorporation of testimony is routine, it is nevertheless natural to view it as a source of contamination; in epistemologi-cal terms, it is natural to say that such “contamination” prevents the agent from having knowledge. In cases where contamination causes the agent to form an inaccurate memory belief, this intuitive view is clearly correct. But what of cases in which contamination results in an accurate memory belief?

Bochum & Essen

81

The cases of “helpful” contamination on which I focus appear to be Gettier cases: the agent has a justified true memory belief but, because her true belief is due to luck – the testimony that she unknowingly incorporates happens to be true – she lacks knowledge. But we should be reluctant to say that the beliefs in question are not knowledgeable, for, given that the incorporation of testimony is a routine matter, doing so risks committing us to an unacceptable scepticism about episodic memorial knowledge. A first alternative is to argue (adapting a suggestion of Hetherington’s) that the relevant beliefs are knowledgeable despite being lucky; this allows us to avoid scepticism but requires us to deny the orthodox line that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck. The second alternative, which I favour, is consistent with the orthodox line: drawing on research on lying in everyday life and on the adaptive nature of constructive memory, I argue that the relevant beliefs are not lucky after all, and thus that agents can have memorial knowledge despite incorporating testimony into episodic memory.

JOHN SUTTON

Observer memories and collaborative recall. Two cases of construction without distortion

in autobiographical remembering Many or all of the constructive processes which are involved in the production of false autobiographical memories also operate in veridical recall. Yet this fact is often neglected in both philosophy and psychology. In this paper I discuss two distinct areas of memory research, each with its own interest for both disciplines, in which this point matters.

Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene, rather than from a ‘field’ perspective in which my current remembering adopts the visuospatial vantage-point of the original experience. Memories involving an observer perspective have rightly been cited since Freud as evidence of constructive processes. But some have been tempted to go further and deny that these are genuine memories. I argue against this move,

ESPP2010

82

suggesting that ‘observer memories’ are compatible with our best causal theory of memory, and that ‘field memories’ are in the same boat: they do not replay or archive the past either. So it may turn out that there are more false memories from observer than from field perspectives (though I offer some caution in interpreting existing studies in this way): but this would be an empirical discovery, and will not simply be due to the fact that observer memories are constructed.

The second example in my case against what philosopher Sue Campbell calls the ‘alliance of construction and error’ relates to social influences on remembering. I argue against the widespread view that joint recall inevitably or generally leads to distortion. Adapting existing methods from experimental work on collaborative recall in cognitive psychology, we have identified conditions in which couples or small groups jointly remembering shared experiences demonstrate improved performance (in terms of both amount recalled and error-correction) compared to equivalent nominal groups. Both cases undermine the pervasive assumption that constructive processes (whether internal or social in origin) are intrinsically malign.

ESPP2010

84

Wednesday, August 25th 14.30 – 16.00 Room 82 (Level 4)

Paper Session 1: Infant and Non-Human Animal Reasoning

ALEXIS MOURENZA Logical Inference in Humans and in Sea Lions: Domain-specific or domain-general cognitive mechanisms?

Evolutionary psychologists investigating the cognitive mecha-nisms underlying human rationality have proposed that most, if not all, reasoning and decision making in their human subjects is carried out by domain-specific mental modules that have been refined by natural selection to assist our evolution-nary forbearers in dealing with the types of adaptive problems they would have encountered in their physical and social environments. Samuels and Stich have objected to this hypothesis of ‘massive modularity’ and have proposed instead that human reasoning and decision making is underwritten by two distinct neuronal systems, one of which is constituted by a number of domain-specific mental modules and another that is constituted by a set of domain-general problem-solving skills. Samuels and Stich’s ‘middle-way’ is able to better account not only for the body of experimental data coming from studies of rationality in human subjects, but also for the results from studies of marine mammal cognition, specifically for Ronald Schusterman and colleagues demonstration of the eventual acquisition of an equivalence concept by their sea lion subject (Rio).

The middle-way’s reference to dual-process theories sheds light on the mechanisms of mind involved in the sea lion subject’s eventual acquisition of an equivalence concept. Dual-process theo-ries of reasoning, decision-making, and social cog-nition, propose that problem-solving is carried out by two different sorts of systems. The evolutionarily older system, operating relatively unconsciously and requiring little training in application, is responsible for our ability to solve problems using content-independent rules of thumb, or rough heuristics

Bochum & Essen

85

(i.e. the exclusion effect). The newer system, which is frequently presumed to be uniquely human, is largely under conscious control and is heavily influenced by training in its application. This latter system is proposed to be responsible for our ability to reason in accordance with the rules of the formal theories of deductive logic, probability calculus, and decision theory.

The idea that the faster, unconscious system evolved earlier than the slower, controlled system predominates through-out the dual-processing literature, as does the claim that although the older system is shared with other animals, the newer system is responsible for the ‘uniquely human’ characteristics of higher-order thought (i.e. reflective consciousness, abstraction, linguistic competence). But evidence indicates that there is a distinction between stimulus-bound and higher-order processing in many species, including primates and rodents (Toates, 2006) in addition to marine mammals (Schusterman and Kastak, 1993). Rio’s ability to acquire an equivalence concept in a biologically insignificant context indicates that, in sea lions, such inferential reasonning is not restricted to a specific domain. Perhaps it is a by-product of a domain-specialized mechanism, but it is not domain-restricted in that it can be co-opted and utilized in an alternative context when sufficient and appropriate training is provided. The middle-way’s portrayal of human rationality as arising from both domain-general cognitive capacities and domain-specific mental modules best accounts for the data on logical inference in sea lions as well, so some level of modularity of mind is apparently not uniquely human either.

TOBIAS STARZAK Rationality in Humans and Other Animals

It is widely believed that theoretical rationality consists in reasonning in accordance with the laws of logic and probability theory. This formal aspect of reasoning is considered a uniquely human feature that distinguishes them from all other species. The fact that the kinds of reasoning non-human animals use lack that formal character makes them domain specific kinds of reasoning. There are two ways to argue against this thesis: one

ESPP2010

86

can either deny that human thinking is well described as reasoning in accordance with the laws of logic and probability theory, i.e. is domain specific itself, or one can claim that animal reasoning, too, falls under that description. A good candidate for the first line of reasoning is the model of ecological rationality suggested by Gerd Gigerenzer. But the model of ecological rationality still leaves us with an explanatory problem: it can´t account for human scientific productivity and achievements. David Papineau suggests a model of theoretical rationality to close that explanatory gap. Following him, theoretical rationality is a spandrel, which is being constituted by two more basic and uniquely human abilities: an understanding of cause and effect and some kind of understanding of the difference between truth and falsity. But if this conception of theoretical rationality is correct, theoretical rationality cannot mark the difference between us and all other species, because great apes as well as corvids fulfill these criteria for crediting them with theoretical rationality as well.

ALEXANDRA-LUCIA VARGA AND MICHIEL VAN LAMBALGEN Infants’ Closed-World Reasoning about What to Do, When, What for

14-month-old’s tendency to reenact observed novel instrumental actions directed toward an objects is selective, depending on the physical details of the situation, and on the social context in which the action is presented. Such selectivity requires complex cognitive skills (e.g. flexibility, teleological understanding of actions) of the kind involved in action interpretation (goal attribution and plan recognition), and action planning. Non-monotonicity is a crucial formal feature of these reasoning processes. By spelling out the computations in which young reasoners presumably engage during task perfor-mance, the paper sets forth an argument for the possibility to provide a process model in the framework of the event calculus. This is a logical language for representing and reasoning about actions and their effects; it embodies default reasoning with closed world assumptions, and it has a non-monotonic conse-quence relation. The methodological implication stresses the insightful role of applying logical formalisms to empirical research in cognitive science.

Bochum & Essen

87


Paper Session 2: Categories & Semantics 1

JOSEP MACIA Color adjectives and systematic semantics

Some theorists, most notably Charles Travis, have claimed that sentences such as (1): (1) The leaves are green which contain color adjectives can (beyond effects of ambiguity, indexicality or vagueness) change truth value from context to context, and they conclude that this shows that there cannot be a systematic, deterministic and compositional semantics for these structures and, generalizing the point, no systematic semantics for natural language. In this paper I will defend a particular, simple, indexical view of the semantics of color adjectives that tries to meet Travis’ challenge. In a nutshell, the view is the following: A sentence such as (1) has the following semantic value when interpreted with respect to a context C:

[[the leaves are green]]C = true iff R ([[leaves]] , [[green]] )

Where R is the most salient relation in C.

And we can take [[green]] = the color green. I will show how this is a systematic proposal which can account for the data presented by Travis. I will also argue that this view can appropriately respond to two kinds of objections that might be raised against it.

ESPP2010

88

ALESSIO PLEBE AND MARCO MAZZONE Towards a key mechanism for category formation

A possible mechanism that can explain the ability of developing categories is investigated. Even if categorization might very well rely on a multiplicity of mechanisms, the one proposed here, is one that appears to play a key role, especially in categories built in the first period of life. This mechanism, here named “coincidence detection and coding”, is motivated by the state-of-the-art in the neurobiology of learning, is coherent with the evidence furnished by develop-mental psychology, and supported by results of neurocompu-tational models.

BAINGIO PINNA, MARIA TANCA AND JURGIS SKILTERS From perceptual grouping to semantics. A three-level approach

Based on empirical evidence, we formulate a model according to which semantics of visual processing is perceptually generated through the interaction of three dynamic levels of perceptual organization. We consider perceptual grouping as the first-order processing. Shape formation is considered as the second order processing. Both grouping and shape formation can be considered as two complementary and interrelated processes of perceptual organization. The third – partially over-lapping – level is meaning assignment, the most resistant in respect to changes of stimuli. A general consequence from the model proposed is that the strength of functional dependencies increases from the lower to higher levels and becomes a meaningful structure at the third level. Most of the results are supported by empirical evidence based on new visual illusions of shape and meaning and are consistent with several other proposals (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, Zwaan, 2004, Glenberg, 1999). We also assume that there is a level lower than perceptual grouping – concrete stimulus, concrete visual representtations. And there is also a level higher than generation of meaning – the experiential and situational factors and determinants. We

Bochum & Essen

89

shall, however, focus on the levels 1-3 as the crucial and minimal in perceptual processing and meaning generation.

In our work we: (i) suggest a link between perceptual grouping, shape perception and visual meaning, (ii) trace the visual shapes and meanings back to organizational processes similar to grouping, (iii) define the underlying structure and principles ruling the formation of shapes and meanings, and, finally (iv) delineate a new model of perceptual processing of semantics based on this interrelated tripartition of forms.

A further significant conclusion of our research: Both modal and amodal modes of processing are crucial and complement each other: e.g. perceptual invariants are amodal, but the processing of concrete perceptual heterogeneous material is modal. (During the processing of concrete perceptual material we discriminate and extract certain invariants which we use in processing later.) The object is perceived as holistic and contains the ‘semanticity’ due to amodal processing. However, certain modal (partial, heterogeneous) objects necessary build the basis of stimuli in perception. It means, one and the same material is processed both modally and amodally but in different levels of processing. It is also important that there is no discrete but rather a continuous difference between both modes of processing and all kinds of perception start amodally. However, all kinds of perception is phenomenally mediated and amodally modified; i.e., the access to the modal processing is via phenomenal, amodal processing. Here our research is to a large extent consistent with Spivey (2007), De Vega, Glenberg, & Graesser (2008).

In the ordering of perceptual levels and types of invariants belonging to each level, every level follows from a lower level and determines it. Every type belongs to a different level of perceptual processing and every level contains invariants of a corresponding type. According to certain invariants from type ‘grouping’ the perceptual material (from zero-level objects) is transformed to higher level and processed according to the type ‘shape’ and, finally, to meaning.

The empirical evidence is provided, fist, in using a pheno-menological free-report method, in which untutored, “naive” subjects (a new group of 10 for each stimulus) are given a series of visual stimuli and asked to report what they see.

ESPP2010

90

Secondly, the free-report method is supplemented by a quantitative one (magnitude estimation), where subjects are instructed to rate (in percent) the descriptions obtained in the phenomenological experiments (see also Pinna, 2010, Skilters, Tanca, & Pinna, 2010). References Barsalou, L.W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral

and Brain Sciences, 22, 577-609. De Vega, M., Glenberg, A.M., & Graesser, A.C. (Eds.) (2008).

Symbols, embodiment, and meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glenberg, A. (1999). Why mental models need to be embodied. In G. Rickert & C. Habel (Eds.), Mental models in discourse processing (pp. 77–90). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Pinna, B. (2010). New Gestalt principles of perceptual organi-zation: An extension from grouping to shape and meaning. Gestalt Theory, 32, 1-67.

Skilters, J., Tanca, M., & Pinna, B. (2010). The role of grouping in shape formation: New effects due to the directional symmetry. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Visual Sciences Society, May 7-12, 2010, Naples, FL.

Spivey, M. (2007). The Continuity of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zwaan, R.A. (2004). The immersed experiencer: toward an embodied theory of language comprehension. In B.H. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp 35-62). Academic Press, New York.

Bochum & Essen

91

Wednesday, August 25th 14.30 – 16.00 Room 2b (Level 4)

Paper Session 3: Extended Mind 1

LARS MARSTALLER Gestures: Evidence for the Extended Mind?

The extended mind thesis states that the supervenience base of the mind can under certain circumstances include non-neural physical structures (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2009). Clark & Chalmers (1998: 8) argue for the extended mind thesis with the parity principle: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.” An especially interesting example of such a structure is gesture. Gestures are meaningful movements of the hands and arms that almost exclusively co-occur with speech. According to the extended mind thesis, gestures can be seen as mental representations because they are presumed to be part of a process that “were it done in the head we would have no difficulty in recognizing as cognitive”. Clark (2009: 131) suggests that gestures enable the cognitive system to stimulate itself: “Gesture is both a systemic output and a self-generated input that plays an important role in an extended neural-bodily cognitive economy”.

To confront this claim with empirical evidence, I review research on the effects of gestures on language processing, working memory, problem-solving, and learning. For example, participants that do gesture on average perform better in a memory task in a dual task paradigm than participants that do not gesture (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2001). If these effects are due to self-stimulation, further research is needed to strengthen the plausibility of the extended mind thesis. I discuss possible ways by which gestures can be seen as self-generated input. First, this requires the identification of possible feedback loops

ESPP2010

92

(proprioception, visual feedback, indirect feedback through listener). Second, possible mechanisms for the processing of such input are discussed (attention, multimodal binding, priming). Third, I’m asking what the knowledge from observation of gestures can tell us. Finally, I discuss an approach to gestures that could benefit from an extended interpretation (Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, to appear).

References Clark, A. (2009). Supersizing the mind. Embodiment, action,

and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis

58: 7-19. Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H., Kelly, S. D. & Wagner, S.

(2001). Explaining math: Gesturing lightens the load. Psychological Science 12: 516-22.

Goldin-Meadow, S. & Beilock, S. (to appear). Action’s influence on thought: The case of gesture. Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Hostetter, A. B. & Alibali, M. (in press/2010). Language, gesture, action! A test of the gesture as simulated action framework. Journal of Memory and Language.

SILJA FREUDENBERGER What could ‘collective memory’ be?

In this paper, I investigate the concept of ‘collective memory’ which plays a key role in much contemporary research in history and cultural studies.

While in these disciplines the concept is obviously useful, it seems debatable whether there could be a philosophically sound explication of the concept of ‘collective memory’.

I explore some viable roads to this end. After discussing the ways in which the concept is used in historical and cultural research, I show that traditional philosophical individualistic accounts of memory are of limited help in understanding ‘collective memory’. I then investigate the resources which a)

Bochum & Essen

93

the theory of distributed cognition and b) social epistemology can bring to bear on the question of collective memory. I will defend the claim that if the concept of ‘collective memory’ has a genuine cognitive and epistemological meaning, it must be in virtue of collective epistemic agents.

If one looks at the works of historians like Aleida Assmann, one notes a central difference between the use of the term ‘memory’ in history and in philosophy. What interests historians is not so much ‘memory’ as a cognitive system, or as retrievable content, but the fact that it is specific content that is retrieved or retained. What historians call ‘collective memory’, is content that a collective deems worthy of retrieval or retention. At the very least, it is content the worthiness of the retention of which is a matter of public debate and dispute.

In this conception, for a collective to have a memory of a certain event does not entail that all or most of the members of the collective must have individual episodic memories of that event – maybe those members of a collective who had a personal episodic memory of the event in question are all already dead. Conversely, widespread individual episodic memories of an event are not sufficient for the formation of collective memory. Consider, for example, that most of us have some memories of December 31st of 2009. New Year’s Eve 2009 is, nevertheless, not an item in the system called ‘collective memory’, and our individual memories of that day do not constitute anything like a ‘collective memory’.

Arguably, something similar holds for propositional memory: It is neither necessary for each member of a collective (esp.if it is a large collective) to have propositional memory of a certain event (“remember that event XY took place”), nor is it, in itself, sufficient. What can be said, though, is that due to the public nature of collective memory, most members of the collective in question are likely to have at least some propositional memory of the event in question.

The question I want to discuss now is this: From the point of view of cognitive science as well as from the point of view of epistemology, ‘memory’ is usually understood as a feature pertaining to individuals. But, if we grant the existence of a phenomenon ‘collective memory’ we want explained, it can be argued that the analysis of individual memory is of limited

ESPP2010

94

help. What conceptual resources could philosophy bring to bear on an analysis of ‘memory’ as a feature pertaining to collectives?

Two candidates suggest themselves: We could understand the phenomenon of ‘collective memory’ as a case of distributed cognition: as a complex cognitive system in which memories might simply be stored elsewhere. But this approach is still concerned mainly with individual memory.

More promising seems another approach: Reviewing recent work in social epistemology, most notably that of Margaret Gilbert and Deborah Tollefsen on collective belief and collective mind, I suggest that in the understanding of ‘collective memory’, collectives must be recognized as cognitive and epistemic agents in their own rights; agents which cannot be reduced to aggregations of individual agents.

CHIARA BROZZO AND CORRADO SINIGAGLIA Affording real enactivism

In this paper we’re going to explore the extent to which action has a constitutive role in perception. We will show that the main theories concerning the relation between perception and action, which can be listed under the headings “ecological” (5, 3, 10), “sensorimotor” (8, 9) and “enactive” (8, 7), are not really enactive. While ecologists focus on the visual salience of motor aspects (affordance) and sensorimotor theorists concentrate on the motor role of visual qualities coding, we take a further step (11). That is, we emphasize how action constitutively shapes perception, not at the level of perceptual process per se, but primarily as regards the content of perception.

Our paper will be divided into two parts. In the first one, we will present two experiments on enactive perception elaborated by our research group in collaboration with the Department of Clinical Sciences and Bio-imaging at the University of Chieti. In both of them, the notion of affordance properly connected to that of motor action will play a crucial role. In the first experiment we will show that the affordances of objects are pragmatic properties that may really emerge only

Bochum & Essen

95

when objects fall within the action space of an individual, confirming that action and space representations in the brain are strictly linked to one another (1). In the second experiment we extend our previous study by introducing an actor in the visual scene, and investigating whether objects located outside the action space of the participant but within the action space of the actor may afford action. The results not only corroborate our previous finding, but also extend it, demonstrating that object affordances may re-emerge when the object falls outside the observer’s action space, provided it is located within that of another observer (2).

In the second part of our paper we’ll try to draw the philosophical implications of these experiments by showing that most sensorimotor and ecological theories of perception are not truly enactive. This is because they lack an appropriate understanding of how motor experience constitutes and modifies the content of perception. Paradoxically, by empha-sizing the all-encompassing character of the motor dimension of perception, most sensorimotor and ecological theories fail to acknowledge the genuinely constitutive role of action in shaping the content of perception. The difference between the content level and the process level is key in this context. For instance, within ecological theories movement is considered to be part of the perceptual process – still, it doesn’t determine the content of perception (6, 13). The same holds for most sensorimotor theories that fail to grasp how motor actions play a critical role not only in managing sensorimotor contingencies but also in constituting the content of the percept. To this regard we will show that neither the identification of optic invariants (ecological theories of perception) nor the definition of sensorimotor invariants allows us to characterize the specific motor content of object perception (4, 12). This, as a matter of fact, emerges only to the extent that constitutive action is taken into account between the object power of affording and the power for action characterizing every acting body as such and unfolding in its own action space.

ESPP2010

96

Bibliography

1. Costantini, M., Ambrosini, E., Tieri, G., & Committeri, G. (submitted). When does an object trigger an action? An investigation on affordances in space.

2. Costantini, M., Sinigaglia, C., & Committeri, G. (submitted). Automatic enhancement and remapping of action space in social context.

3. Cutting, J.E. (1986). Perception With an Eye for Motion. MIT Press.

4. Gallese, V., & Sinigaglia, C. (2010). The Bodily Self as Power for Action. Neuropsychologia, 48, 746-755.

5. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

6. Mossio, M., & Taraborelli, D. (2008). Action-dependent perceptual invariants: From ecological to sensorimotor approaches. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 4.

7. Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

8. O’Regan, J.K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 939–1011.

9. Philipona, D., O’Regan, J. K., Nadal, J.-P., & Coenen, O. J.-M. D. (2004). Perception of the structure of the physical world using unknown multimodal sensors and effectors. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 15.

10. Reed, E.S. (1996). Encountering the world: Toward an ecological psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

11. Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2007). Mirror neurons and motor intentionality. Functional Neurology, 22, 205–210.

12. Sinigaglia, C., & Brozzo, C. (in press). The enactive constitution of space.

13. Taraborelli, D., & Mossio, M. (2008). On the relation between the enactive and the sensorimotor approach to perception. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 4.

Bochum & Essen

97


Paper Session 4: Perspectives on Reality

MARTIN DOHERTY AND JOSEF PERNER Putting children’s alternative naming problems into perspective

(or vice versa) Children have difficulty acknowledging that something can be one thing (e.g., a rabbit) and at the same time something else (e.g., an animal). This has been claimed to indicate a lexical principle: children assume word extensions are mutually exclusive (Markman, 1989; Merriman & Bowman, 1989). Others argue that children do not use lexical principles, but infer word meaning from judgements of others’ communicative intentions (Bloom, 2000; Diesendruck & Markson, 2001). Neither position can properly explain existing data: even 3-year-olds know and use multiple overlapping terms, suggesting any mutual exclusivity bias must be very weak (Waxman & Hatch, 1992). On the other hand, 3-year-olds do not possess the insight into other’s minds that socio-pragmatic theories require (Breheny, 2006). The debate is dea-locked. The aim of this paper is to propose a way to breas the deadlock.

Both camps tacitly assume the problem is limited to novel words. In fact, children have similar problems with words already learned. For example, until the age of about 4 years, children cannot produce synonyms (e.g., bunny and rabbit) and other overlapping terms (e.g., rabbit and animal), The ability to do this is specifically associated with the ability to ascribe (false) beliefs to others (Doherty & Perner, 1998). We argue that at this age children develop an understanding of perspective: beliefs and names specify particular perspectives on a situation.

ESPP2010

98

This analysis suggests that children’s difficulties with learning overlapping terms also result from failure to understand perspective. We assume that different names specify different perspectives on a referent, and that to switch between alternative names requires an understanding of this; otherwise the only conceivable difference in meaning involves a different referent. Before the age of about 4 years, children struggle to understand perspective differences, and therefore tend to assume that different names refer to different objects.

Since ‘perspective’ is rather abstract, we present our claims in terms of ‘file cards’, a particuarly conception of discourse referents (extending an original suggestion by Heim, 2002). File cards are mental entities used to keep track of a situation, each object discussed having one (and ideally only one) file card. Cards bear an individuating sortal to specify what kind of thing an external referent is, which sets the perspective on the referent. Cards also store conversation-specific information about referents.

Attachment of cards to referents proceeds by procedural rules. Our claim is that along with a few plausible assumptions the phenomena in question can be accounted for by the operation of one of these rules: Do not anchor new file cards to objects with open file cards.

Known objects will evoke file cards, so novel words cannot be anchored to familiar objects. Similarly, the rule will prevent production of alternative names, at least until children develop the metacognitive understanding that there are such things as file cards. In the remainder of the paper we expand on how our claim accounts for key findings from the literature.

MATTHEW NUDDS Children’s Understanding of the Distinction between Appearance and Reality

The development of children’s understanding of perception has been tested using a number of experimental paradigms which involve asking children about the way things look. The results of these experiments have been interpreted as evidence for children's acquisition, at around the age of four, of a represen-

Bochum & Essen

99

tational theory of perception. According to this standard inter-pretation, children’s understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality and their ability to understand others' perceptual perspectives on the world, can be explained in terms of their coming to understand the nature of perceptual experi-ence; in particular, their coming to understand that perceptual experience represents objects or situations as being a certain way. In what follows I argue that this standard interpretation is not supported by the evidence provided by the experiments; that children’s understanding is better explained by their deve-loping understanding of objects and the way they look (and their ability to understand and make claims about them); and therefore that the appearance-reality and perspective-taking tasks don’t tell us about how children think about perceptual experience.

HENRIKE MOLL How Children Come to Distinguish Appearance from Reality

For agents to act appropriately, they have to be able to perceive the world as it is. Perception is in the service of action, and so it must inform about reality. However, perception is fallible and sometimes presents things differently from the way they really are. A full understanding of the relationship between appearance and reality thus involves not only the appreciation that our assumptions about the world are based on how things appear, but also that appearances can be deceptive and may lead to false assumptions. Not surprisingly therefore, the appearance-reality distinction is considered one of the major intellectual achievements in children’s cognitive development.

In a seminal study, Flavell, Flavell, and Green (1983) showed preschoolers an object that looked like a rock. However, closer manual inspection revealed that the object was really a sponge. Children were then asked two questions: what the object looked like (a rock) and what it really and truly was (a sponge). The result, replicated in numerous studies (see Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986), was that children of 4 years and older answered both questions correctly, whereas the vast majority of

ESPP2010

100

3-year-olds made the ‘realism error’, judging that the object not only was a sponge but also looked like one.

Perner and colleagues describe the intellectual achievement reflected in the success of this test—and a number of other social-cognitive tasks solved at this age—as the newly acquired ability to confront perspectives: children can now understand that the selfsame object can be viewed or construed in alternative ways (see Perner, Stummer, Sprung, & Doherty, 2002). In the context of appearance-reality, this means that the same object can look to be one thing (appearance perspective) but really be something else (reality perspective).

Inspired by this conception, we conducted a study with 3-year-olds using a new appearance-reality test that does not require a confrontation of two perspectives on the same object. In this version, children just had to – what we call – take an adult’s conceptual perspective by determining the referent of her request for what ‘looks like x’ or ‘really and truly is x.’ Objects to choose from were always ‘a real x’ (e.g., a chocolate bar) and a deceptive object that looked like x but was something else (e.g., an eraser that looked like chocolate), with children having earlier experienced the deceptive object’s true identity. When the adult requested what ‘looks like x’, the 3-year-olds chose the deceptive object significantly above chance, p < .05, and more often than the ‘real x’, p < .05. When the ‘real x’ was requested, they chose the ‘real x’ significantly above chance, p < .01, and more often than the deceptive object, p < .01. Thus, in this non-confrontational version of the test, 3-year-olds readily distinguished between appearance and reality. The results are discussed within the broader context of children’s developing abilities to take and confront perspectives in various domains.

.

Bochum & Essen

101


Paper Session 5: Propositions and Attitudes

ALISON HALL ‘What is said’, singular reference, and modes of presentation

Contextualists (Carston 2002, Recanati 2004, Sperber & Wilson 1995) maintain that the only psychologically real levels of representation are (i) linguistic logical form, (ii) explicit speaker’s meaning (a usually very pragmatically elaborated ‘what is said’, or ‘proposition expressed’) built by developing logical form, and (iii) implicatures, inferred from what is said plus contextual assumptions.

Korta & Perry (2007, 2009) criticise this three-level picture because, as they illustrate, often the proposition expressed does not serve as input to hearers’ inferences to implicatures. What is required instead may be any of a number of other, partly token-reflexive or descriptive, contents of the utterance (for instance, with ‘THE UTTERER OF u’, or ‘THE GUY STANDING IN

FRONT OF ME’ rather than the referent, assigned as the value of “I”). So what is said involves a mode of presentation of the individual, rather than the individual itself – a conclusion that appears to undermine the referentialist view of expressions such as names, indexicals, demonstratives, referential uses of definite descriptions.

In this talk, I discuss the contextualist notions of proposition expressed and what is said, with particular reference to the relevance-theoretic view, and whether they need revising in light of such examples. I consider two possible solutions on behalf of the referentialist approach (one of which might apply better to certain types of singular terms; the other to different ones): (a) modes of presentation as unarticulated constituents of the singular proposition; (b) the descriptive/to-ken-reflexive information forms part of the information under

ESPP2010

102

the ‘file’ or ‘dossier’ labelled by the singular concept that forms part of what is said, and plays the role of contextual assumptions rather than modes of presentation.

ELISABETTA SACCHI Attitudes and their objects

One of the main problems that propositional attitudes raise is how to account for what has been called their opacity: the fact that belief reports which differ at most for having one term replaced by another co-referring one can differ in their truth value. Many different attempts have been suggested to deal with this problem. What most of them share is the idea that the object of the attitude (what the subject believes) is the explicit argument of the attitude verb (what is expressed by the that-clause) and on the ground of this assumption the problem has been that of accounting for opacity in terms of the distinction between what is believed and how it is believed. The way in which the how-part of the story has been accounted for is different: in terms of modes of presentation which are constituents of the proposition expressed (the Fregean strategy), in terms of unarticulated constituents of the proposition expressed (the hidden-indexical strategy), in terms of modes of presentations which are constituents of quasi singular propositions (the overt-indexical strategy) and in terms of the distinction between the semantic content of a belief report (what it says) and what is pragmatically conveyed by an utterance of it (the pragmatic strategy of neo-Russellians). In my view, none of these accounts pass muster in so far as they are unequipped to deal with the most troublesome puzzle about belief reports, namely: Kripke’s Paderewski case.

That none of the main theories of propositional attitudes solves the problem of opacity and that this failure has to do with the shared but wrong assumption according to which that-clauses specify belief contents is a point which has already been argued for (see e.g. Bach 1997). But even though it has been claimed that mental contents have to be more specific (more fine-grained) than the that-clauses used to report them, no clear suggestion has been put forward as to how mental

Bochum & Essen

103

contents should be conceived. In my paper I shall address this issue. I shall claim that the sort of contents which are relevant to psychological explanation are structured, personal level, subject-oriented mental representations. Such entities differ from propositions because they are not mind-independent and differ from sub-personal level representations (of the kind made popular by Dretske, Fodor, Millikan) under at least two aspects: (i) they are not two-place relations (a represents b), but three-place relations (a represents b to S, where S ranges over subjects) and (ii) they are posited not on third-person but on first-person ground. I shall try to show that it is precisely the representation-to component which accounts for the opacity of the attitudes and that this is so because it captures the subject’s point of view. The main theses I shall try to defend are: (1) that propositions, however they are construed, are

unable to adequately account for the opacity of the attitudes;

(2) that propositions are not the real objects of the attitudes;

(3) that the real object of the attitude is not specified by the that-clause (what the that-clause expresses puts at most a truth-conditional constraint on the real object of the attitude)

(4) that the real objects of the attitudes have to be entities suited to account for the subject’s point of view;

(5) that such entities are precisely personal-level represent-tations (two-faced or Janus-headed entities having both an outword and an inward-looking face).

Essential bibliography Bach, K., 1997, Do Belief Reports Report Beliefs?, “Pacific

Philosophical Quarterly”, 78, pp. 215-241. Georgalis, N., 2006, The Primacy of the Subjective, Cambridge

MA, MIT Press. Jubien, M., 2001, Propositions and the Objects of Thought,

“Philosophical Studies”, 104, pp. 47-62. Kripke, S., 1979, A Puzzle About Belief, in A. Margalit (ed.),

Meaning and Use, Dordrecht, Reidel.

ESPP2010

104

Loar, B., 1988, Social Content and Psychological Content, in Grimm and Merill (eds.), Contents of Thought, Tucson, University of Arizona Press.

McGinn, C., 1988, Consciousness and Content, in N. Block et all (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1997.

Moltmann, F., 2003, Propositional Attitudes Without Propositions, “Synthese”, 135, pp. 77-118.

Richard, M., 1990, Propositional Attitudes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Salmon, N., 1986, Frege’s Puzzle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

TOMOO UEDA Communicating beliefs: A communicational theory of propositional attitude reports

In this talk, I shall discuss reports of propositional attitudes from some philosophical points of view. Examining many of the present theories, it will first be pointed out that they share a common task and show that their problems stem from it (sec. 1). Then, I shall reexamine our discursive praxis about the attitude reports and propose an alternative framework called a “standard case” (sec. 2). As a preliminary work, a pragmatic communicational theory for the standard case will be proposed (sec. 3). It will be suggested that our communicational theory can be extended for the theory of truth-value evaluations.

Bochum & Essen

105


Paper Session 6: Social Judgments

BELONIA GABALDA, PIERRE JACOB AND EMMANUEL DUPOUX The Role of Emotion in Children’s Evaluation of Ownership Transfers

Many social interactions rely on the understanding of owner-ship, which is not fully available to children under 5 years of age (Blake & Harris, 2009). Previous studies using non-verbal stimuli (Gabalda, Jacob & Dupoux, in prep) showed that 3-year-olds do not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate behaviors in interactions involving ownership, while 5-year-olds do. In these experiments, the owner did not react to the agent’s illegitimate action. Arguably, without any reaction of the owner, 3-year-olds may simply not engage in social evaluation. Here, we explore whether children’s moral evaluation of an agent involved in a property transfer is modulated by the affect displayed by the owner during the interaction.

We performed two experiments with 3- and 5-year-olds, and adults. Subjects were first presented with two non-verbal animated cartoons of social interactions and subsequently asked questions regarding their social and moral evaluation of the agents and attribution of rights to them.

Study 1 compared agents’ mode of acquisition of an object (within subjects): gift-reception (legitimate condition) vs. theft (illegitimate). In each condition, the transfer was immediately followed by either (between subjects) the same negative emotion (sadness) of the 1st possessor of the object (emotional condition) or no reaction (non-emotional). The results showed that 3-year-olds preferred the legitimate recipient as opposed to the thief only in the emotional condition, whereas 5-year-olds and adults did so in both the emotional and the non-emotional conditions. As far as property rights are concerned, in the emotional condition, at all ages, subjects considered that the

ESPP2010

106

2nd possessor (agent) had no right to keep the object whether the acquisition was legitimate or not.

Study 2 compared a situation where a legitimate recipient of an object finally returns it to the 1st possessor (legitimate) to a situation where he keeps it (illegitimate). In each condition, the agent’s final behavior was followed by either the same negative emotion of the 1st possessor (emotional) or no reaction (non-emotional). The results indicated that 3-year-olds had no preference towards the agent that returned the object independently of the presence of emotion, contrary to adults who did prefer this character in both the emotional and the non-emotional conditions. In the emotional condition, 5-year-olds behaved like adults, and, when considering only their moral evaluation, 3-year-olds also tended to display the same preference.

In conclusion, 3-year-olds did show understanding of ownership transfers in the presence of a negative emotion. Importantly, the emotion displayed was the same whether the behavior was legitimate or not. Therefore emotion alone cannot have acted as a cue to differentiate between the legitimate and illegitimate agents. Rather, we hypothesized that negative affect acts as a trigger to moral evaluation. In one condition, a negative emotion is expected (after being stolen / not getting the object back), while in the other condition (after giving / recovering the object) it is not. 3-year-olds seemed to take this into account in our first study by blaming the agent more if he triggered an expected negative emotion.

FRANCESCA ERVAS AND TIZIANA ZALLA The role of social stereotypes and irony comprehension in autism spectrum disorders

Both social and communication impairments are part of the essential diagnostic criteria used to define autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Asperger Syndrome (AS) and High-functioning autism are widely acknowledged to be variants of this spectrum, which share such impairments but are characterized by the absence of mental retardation. In this study, we address the problem of irony comprehension in

Bochum & Essen

107

individuals with ASD, which has been regarded as a consequence of the inability to recognize speaker’s intention (Happè 1994; Joliffe-Baron-Cohen 1999) and go beyond the decoded sentence meaning of an utterance (Happè, 1993). This difficulty has also been linked to their inability in using contextual information in on-line comprehension of others’ behavior (Frith 1991).

Despite the severe social impairments, recent findings have shown that individuals with ASD are sensitive to stereotypes on genre, race and age (Hamilton-Krendl 2007), they have preserved abilities in attributing social stereotypes to people’s faces (White et al. 2006) and that perform well in using stereotypes to predict the outcomes of new contexts (Hirschfeld et al. 2007). The present study investigates how irony is socially perceived and whether stereotypes facilitate under-standing of irony in a group of adults with ASD (N=16) by using a series of verbally presented stories containing either an ironic or a literal utterance.

The results show that, in spite of their longer response time, individuals with ASD performed as well as the com-parison group in recognizing ironical utterances. Interestingly, the results also shows that when a character in the story has a job stereotypically considered as sarcastic, comprehension of ironical utterances improved in terms of both accuracy and latency, while the performance is diminished for the compre-hension of literal utterances, in both groups. Moreover, both groups exhibit an overall similar image of irony: irony is generally perceived as more mocking, but also more polite and positive.

Bibliography Frith U. (1991), Autism and Asperger's Syndrome,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hamilton A., Krendl A.C., Social Cognition: Overturning Stereotypes of and with Autism, in «Current Biology» 17:16, pp. R641-R642.

Happé F. (1993), Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A test of Relevance Theory, in «Cognition» 48, pp. 101-119.

ESPP2010

108

Happé F. (1994), An advanced test of theory of mind, in «Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders» 24, pp. 129-154.

Hirschfeld L. et al. (2007), Can autistic children predict behavior by social stereotypes?, in «Current Biology» 17:12, pp. R451-R452.

Joliffe T., Baron-Cohen S. (1999), A test of central coherence theory, in «Cognition» 71:2, pp. 149-185.

White S., Hill E., Winston J. and Frith U. (2006), An islet of social ability in Asperger Syndrome: Judging social attributes from faces, in «Brain and Cognition» 61: 1, pp. 69-77.

SERGI ROSELL The Place of Affect in Judging People. Misunderstanding the Link between Appraisal and Emotion

This talk is devoted to the issue of our pre-theoretical intuitions concerning attributions of moral responsibility—particularly, our intuitions about the Compatibility Question (whether determinism and moral responsibility are compatible or not). The first experiments on these intuitions yielded the result that we are not pre-theoretical incompatibilists as generally assumed. For example, an experiment found that college students who were identified as determinists were no less punitive than indeterminists and no less likely to offer retributivist justifications for punishment. Another study showed a clear effect of identification in assignation of moral responsibility regardless of being in a determinist universe.

However, Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe (2007) [“Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions”, Nous 41(4): 663-685] suspected that those results could be the effect of affective reactions, and conducted a series of experiments to explore whether participants would be more likely to report incompatibilist intuitions if the emotional and motivational factors were minimized. These studies yielded a surprising result: most people gave compatibilist responses to concrete cases, but incompatibilist responses to abstract cases.

Bochum & Essen

109

It seems that we have different intuitions depending on how the issue is approached.

But Nichols and Knobe hypothesized (second phase of their experiment) that the compatibilist responses to concrete cases could be due to a prejudice or bias—an affective bias. Their explanation of this effect is that when people are faced with egregious violations of moral norms (concrete cases), they experience a strong affective reaction which makes them unable to apply their tacit theory for responsibility judgments correctly. But these latest experimental results are objectionable.

True, in one case the affective reaction is higher than in the other, but what lastly makes the difference (and this is my alternative explanatory hypothesis) seems to be not the variance in affect but the moral seriousness of each behavior. The fact that the agent commits a rape, in contrast with a fraud, is what actually causes higher condemnation (and a compatibilist judgment) – although, doubtless, through triggering a higher affective reaction. But, ultimately, the crucial factor is not the affective reaction itself, but the moral seriousness of the behavior judged. Concrete descriptions bring moral seriousness to the fore, whereas abstract descriptions hide it. Indeed, the experiment’s design—a crucial point—prevents from discriminating between seriousness and affect in bringing about the effect, and so undermines Nichols and Knobe’s conclusion.

Hence, the conflict between concrete and abstract intuitions cannot be decided in favor of the latter, in virtue of the fact that responses in the concrete condition are due to a biased psychological mechanism. Indeed, the experiment’s design prevents from discriminating between seriousness and affect in bringing about the effect, which undermines Nichols and Knobe’s conclusion. With no further experimental data available, we are justified to think this is a genuine conflict of intuitions: a conflict between intuitions prompted by the particular (concrete or abstract) presentation of cases.

ESPP2010

110


Paper Session 7: Experience and the Senses

LOUISE RICHARDSON Taste, touch and smell in flavour perception

We talk and think as if we perceive the flavours of things by taste. In this paper I consider whether we’re right to do so. When I drink my coffee I say that I can taste its coffee-ish flavour, and the mouthful of cake, I think, tastes of vanilla. Yet it’s a familiar enough fact that our experiences of flavours such as coffee and vanilla involve the olfactory receptors as well as the receptors on the tongue that we call taste buds, and usually, we also feel the things in our mouths the flavours of which we perceive. I consider whether there is any reason to suppose that we’ve got something wrong the sense or senses with which we perceive flavour, in our everyday thought and talk.

FABIAN DORSCH Transparency and Imagining Seeing

One of the most powerful arguments against intentionalism and in favour of disjunctivism about perceptual experiences has been formulated by M.G.F. Martin in his paper The Transparency of Experience. The overall structure of this argument may be stated in the form of a triad of claims which are jointly inconsistent: i. As reflection on the subjective character of visualising an

external thing reveals, it is not neutral about the pre-sence of the visualised thing in the imagined situation.

ii. At least in some cases, visualising an external thing consists in imagining a visual perception of it.

Bochum & Essen

111

iii. But imagining a visual perception of an external thing is neutral about the latter’s presence in the imagined situation.

Given that visualising cannot be non-neutral and identical with a neutral form of imagining at the same time, one of the three claims has to go. Martin presents detailed arguments in favour of (i) and (ii) and concludes that we should give up (iii). Intentionalists, on the other hand, typically attack (i) or (ii), while holding on to (iii). In this paper, I would like to suggest that the intentionalist response gets its target wrong: instead of trying to undermine one of the first two claims, it should instead raise doubts about the last.

More specifically, having a detailed look at the problems which visualising poses for theories of perceptual experience makes it possible to find a satisfactory response on the behalf of intentionalism, which ensures and explains the non-neutrality involved in imagining perceiving something. Indeed, it will turn out that some aspects of visualising thereby discovered actually favour intentionalism over disjunctivism. The version of intentionalism to be defended here differs significantly from those currently en vogue – most notably in linking intentionality essentially to consciousness, and in assuming a self-presentational (i.e., experiential and self-reflexive) element as part of perceptual (and other kinds of) intentionality.

PHILLIP MEADOWS Space and the Sense Datum Inference

In this paper I consider the relationship between the spatial properties of experience and the sense-datum inference. I argue that the sense datum inference must be accepted if spatial properties are not merely intentionally present in experience. This result serves to underline the seriousness of the difficulties that are presented to Direct Realism by illusory spatial experiences.

ESPP2010

112

HONG YU WONG Is there a sense of owning one’s body?

It is sometimes said that we have a sense of ownership of our bodies and bodily experiences (de Vignemont 2007 and Tsarkiris 2009). In this talk I explore whether there are grounds for claiming that there is a positive phenomenology of a sense of ownership of one’s body and bodily experiences. It is often unclear what is meant by talk of ‘a sense of ownership’ in the first place, and I begin by exploring some things people have meant in using the phrase, and other possible interpretations of the phrase. It turns out that there are many different things that might be meant by talk of a sense of ownership even if we distinguish, as is customary, between experiential and doxastic senses of bodily ownership and focus on one or the other. Here my focus will be on the putative experiential sense of bodily ownership.

I present six sources of evidence for the claim that is a positive phenomenology of a sense of ownership of one’s body and bodily experiences: (1) there are cases of a sense of disownership of one’s body and bodily experiences, as in cases of Alien Hand (somatoparaphrenia or asomatognosia) (Brion and Jedynak 1972, Marchetti and Della Sala 1998, de Vignemont 2007); (2) we need to account for phenomenological differences between one’s experience of someone else’s hand and one’s experience of one’s own hand (de Vignemont 2007); (3) in somatosensory processing there are shared representations between self and other (Keysers et al. 2004, Singer et al. 2004), but we are able to distinguish between our bodies and our bodily experiences and those of others, so there must be some reason why this differentiation is possible (de Vignemont 2007); (4) we need to explain aspects of amputee’s experiences of prosthetic limbs where this has consequences for successful adaptation; (5) this positive sense of ownership of a body part is manifest to subjects experiencing the Rubber Hand Illusion (Botvinick and Cohen 1998), where this is what underlies the paradigm of experimental manipulations exploiting the Rubber Hand Illusion to study embodiment experimentally (Tsakiris 2009); (6) there are putative causal effects, such as homeostatic regulation, that are correlated with experiences of body part ownership (Moseley et al. 2008). I examine and reject each

Bochum & Essen

113

argument in turn. I consider whether an opposing claim, that there is only a positive phenomenology of disownership, and no positive phenomenology of ownership is plausible. In closing, if time permits, I will briefly explore some consequences for connections between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of bodily agency.

ESPP2010

114

Wednesday, August 25th 17.15 – 19.15 Room 2b (Level 4)


CARLOS ZEDNIK Mental Mechanisms & The Extended Mind

Robert Rupert (2004) challenges the Extended Mind Hypothesis on the grounds that it appears to undermine the viability and productivity of cognitive science. In this paper, I respond to Rupert’s challenge by questioning his construal of cognitive scientific practice. Although the Extended Mind Hypothesis may in fact threaten the viability of a cognitive science that seeks the discovery of law-like generalizations, cognitive scientists typically seek to describe the mechanisms that underlie such generalizations. By acknowledging the role of mechanistic explanation in contemporary cognitive scientific practice, I argue that the Extended Mind Hypothesis presents no threat to our current and future understanding of mind and cognition.

GEORG THEINER Cognitive Processes, Cognitive Systems, and the Extended Mind

The “extended mind” thesis asserts that a significant portion of human cognition is not confined to the boundaries of our brains, but literally extends into our bodies and parts of our environment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2003, 2008). In a series of papers that has culminated in a recent monograph, Robert Rupert (2004, 2009; forthcoming) has vigorously argued against this view. Rupert’s case rests on two master arguments. The first argument is based on a systemic principle for demarcating the cognitive from the non-cognitive. The second argument rests on a cost-benefit analysis meant to show that the “extended” view is inferior to a simpler and more conser-

Bochum & Essen

115

vative competitor perspective he calls the “embedded view.” The goal of this paper is to scrutinize both arguments, in a way that illuminates the stakes of the current debate between psychological internalism and externalism.

LENA KÄSTNER Cognitive Extension and the Question of What “Cognition” Is

Against the background of recent theories of cognitive extension, the question of what cognition is becomes ever more pressing. While some dismiss its discussion as pointless and reject extended cognition as just a fancy idea, I shall argue that there are at least two plausible routes towards cognitive exten-sion. Problematically, settling the issue of whether or not cognition extends presupposes an answer to the what-question – precisely which we do not have to date; and which will be difficult to find as long as is left unclear where in the world to look for cognition. In light of the emerging circle, I suggest giving priority to a different kind of what-question, viz. the question of what kind of concept “cognition” designates. Five candidate answers drawn from contemporary literature will be discussed: “cognition” may be seen as a natural kind term, an umbrella term, a complex psychological kind term, a family/cluster term, or a morphological term.

ESPP2010

116


Paper Session 9: Consciousness

ELIZABETH IRVINE Conflicting contents of consciousness and what to do about them

In order to pursue any content-matching strategy in a science of consciousness, exemplified in the search for neural correlates of consciousness, the contents of consciousness need to be identified. However, experimental evidence (change blindness, inattentional blindness, Sperling paradigm) shows that the contents of subjects’ reports do not always match the contents of their behaviours, leading to the question of how best to resolve this apparent conflict. After a brief discussion of the way that ‘rich’ (Block, 2007, Lamme, 2006), ‘sparse’ (Mack & Rock, 1998, Dehaene et al., 2006), and sensori-motor (O’Regan & Noë, 2001) accounts of perceptual experience attempt to solve this problem, an alternative account will be sugges-ted. According to models of perception and cognition that consist of parallel hierarchies of hypothesis generation and testing it will be argued that there are no right or wrong ways of identifying the contents of consciousness. There are simply a variety of ways of operationalising the different informational contents of processing streams that fulfil particular functions. From this, it will be argued further that the concept of ‘the contents of consciousness’ and the strategy of content-matching are deeply problematic.

MARKUS WERNING Descartes Discarded? Introspective Self-awareness and the Problems of Transparency and Compositionality

What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner

Bochum & Essen

117

self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Various proposed analyses of direct and indirect quotation are discussed and tested regarding their applicability to thought. It is concluded that, on the assumption of compositionality, the inner self is only insofar accessible to awareness as it has an accessible phonological (or otherwise subsymbolic) structure, as apparently only inner speech does.

SAMULI PÖYHÖNEN Intentional concepts in cognitive neuroscience

This paper develops a plausible interpretation of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. According to Bennett & Hacker (2003, 2007, 2008), the sub-personal use of intentional predicates necessarily results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclu-sion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the theory of constitutive explanation, I show that while the use of intentional predicates in mechanistic explanations some-times leads to explanatorily inert claims, intentional predicates can also successfully feature in mechanistic explanations as tools for the functional decomposition of the explanandum phenomenon.

THOR GRÜNBAUM Commonsense psychology and eliminativism

In this paper I propose to use eliminativism about common-sense psychology as a strategy for exploring what commonsense psychology might be. I depart from the assumption that elimi-nativism is a consistent and interesting theory in order to explore the question of what commonsense psychology is. The

ESPP2010

118

main question is this: if eliminativism is a consistent and interesting possibility, then what is commonsense psychology? Or in other words, if eliminativism were to be true, what would get eliminated? I argue on this basis that the usual distinction between explicit and implicit (sometimes called external and internal) commonsense psychology should be supplemented with a notion of constitutive commonsense psychology. This is the only form of commonsense psychology that could function as a substantive constraint on scientific theories and could function as an interesting target of eliminativism.

Bochum & Essen

119


Paper Session 10: Theory of Mind & Mental States

JESSICA WANG AND IAN APPERLY Adults’ efficient theory of mind includes information selection capacity Classical theory of mind studies suggested that children are not able to make explicit inference about other’s mental states until four years of age (e.g., Wimmer & Perner, 1983). However, recent studies on infants (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005) and non-human animals (e.g., Tomasello, Call & Hare, 2003) demonstrated successful performance in false-belief-like tasks. These findings pointed towards a theory of mind capacity that draws limited executive resources when inferring other’s mental states.

Samson and colleagues (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, Bodley Scott, in press) recently demonstrated similar theory of mind capacity in adults. When adults judged an avatar’s perspective, self-perspective interfered with simple judgments about other’s perspective (known as egocentric intrusion). Interestingly, similar congruency effect was also found when adults judged self-perspective (altercentric intrusion). Samson and colleagues interpreted the combination of both intrusions as an automatic process of self and other perspectives.

Apperly and Butterfill (2009) proposed a 2-system approach, which provided account for the discrepancy found in developmental and animal literature. Apperly and Butterfill suggested that a flexible system and a fast system each provides basis for distinct types of “theory of mind processes”. The flexible system allows complex mentalising and sophisti-cated social reasoning to be accomplished, often drawing heavy demands on executive function and memory. The fast system trades its efficiency for cognitive flexibility, allowing rapid

ESPP2010

120

judgments and inference to be made when only limited amount of information needs to be taken into account.

The current study examined the fast system of theory of mind; with the aim to investigate the limit for information selection whilst making efficient judgments about self- and other-perspective. The capacity to guide one’s attention and to extract relevant information from a scene is essential for navigating the social world. Studies have demonstrated clear cognitive cost for information selection process (Hyun, Woodman, Vogel, Hollingworth & Luck, 2009; Simons, 2000; Xu & Chun, 2009); therefore in the current study it was targeted as a potential signature limit for fast theory of mind.

Two experiments were conducted to test our hypothesis. Additional irrelevant objects were included in half of the trials, 32 adult participants made perspective judgments solely based on relevant objects. Results from Experiment 1 demonstrated both egocentric and altercentric intrusions when irrelevant information was presented and when it was absent. This suggested adults’ fast theory of mind system included infor-mation selection process. Experiment 2 further ruled out the potential confounds from eye gaze attentional cueing (Becchio, Berstone & Castiello, 2008) and the possible difficulty of representing ”zero” perspective content (Bialystok & Codd, 2000; Wellman & Miller, 1986).

The current study confirmed previously found egocentric and altercentric intrusion in adults (Samson et al., in press) were indeed driven by relevant perspective content, instead of visually distracting stimuli. We also provided evidence for adults’ level-1 visual perspective processing to include cognitive capacity for information selection. Finally, according to the 2-system approach (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009), one would expect to find similar amount of cognitive flexibility in infants’ and non-human animals’ mentalising mechanism.

Bochum & Essen

121

MARKUS PAULUS, SABINE HUNNIUS, MARLIES VISSERS, CAROLIEN VAN

WIJNGAARDEN, SVEN VRINS, IRIS VAN ROOIJ AND HAROLD BEKKERING How Rational is Imitation and Action Prediction in Infancy?

A critical Examination The human ability to act rationally and reflect over the rationality of other people’s behavior has fascinated human thinking from early on, so that the unique human ability for rational thinking has even become the definiens for human beings in general (cf. Aristotle; zoon logon echon). Exploring the historic dimensions of human action, sociological analyses have suggested that our western societies are best described as rationalized, i.e. societies in which human action has become more and more oriented towards purposive rationality (e.g., Weber, 1920; Habermas, 1981). As the ability for rational analysis is an important human capacity, the question arises as to how this capacity develops. Empirical findings and theoretical analysis of the development of human rationality will be of great relevance for psychological theories on human cognition and development, as well as for current anthropo-logical models and epistemological theories.

The present paper critically explores the claim that already very young infants’ action perception and imitation is rational (e.g., Csibra et al., 1999; Gergely et al., 2002), i.e. based on an evaluation of the efficiency of others’ actions, suggesting an early specialized and robust information processing system for teleological analysis (cf. Fodor, 1983). It presents a series of empirical investigations that employ behavioral observation and eye-tracking techniques.

The first studies examined the mechanisms subserving imitation in infancy. The principle of rational action suggests that infants normatively evaluate the efficiency of observed actions. In contrast, it has been proposed that motor resonance (i.e. the mapping of others’ actions onto one’s own motor repertoire) plays a central role in imitation. We tested 14-month-old infants in nine conditions (n=186) and manipulated the extent to which the observed actions could be matched onto the infants’ own motor repertoire as well as whether the observed behavior appeared to be efficient. The results suggest strongly that motor resonance plays a central role in imitation

ESPP2010

122

in infancy instead of a rational evaluation of the observed action.

The second study investigated the contribution of frequency learning and teleological reasoning to action prediction in infancy and adulthood. Nine-month-old (n=20) and 14-month-old infants (n=20) and adults (n=14) observed how an agent repeatedly walked to a goal while taking the longer of two possible paths, as the shorter and more efficient path was impassable. In a subsequent test phase, participants were presented with trials in which both paths were passable. Unlike adults, infants kept anticipating to the longer path even after observing that the agent now took the more efficient path, indicating that the frequency of previous observations domi-nates action prediction. These results provide evidence that in infancy frequency learning rather than teleological reasoning underlies action prediction, whereas the latter gains importance in adulthood.

Altogether, our results cast doubt on the claim that infants are able to rationally imitate or assess the actions of others and suggest that rather automatic processes like frequency learning and motor matching are dominant in infants’ action perception. These results suggest that the ability to think rationally about others’ behavior is a later developmental achievement, which may depend critically on the development of other capabilities like the ability to use language (cf. Davidson, 1982; Habermas, 1981).

MARGHERITA ARCANGELI Is There a Place for Supposition in Imagination?

Nowadays imagination is defined by the cognitive literature as a recreative faculty. In imagination one is able to simulate “self-standing” mental states such as percepts (e.g. I imagine a tree) and beliefs (e.g. I imagine that there is a cat wholly behind this tree). The strongest thesis claims that imagination is able to recreate all the set of “self-standing” mental states.

Despite this strong thesis, the debate on imagination has taken into account a narrow range of possible counterparts of the imaginative states. To be more precise there is unanimity

Bochum & Essen

123

only in thinking that there are percept-like and belief-like imaginings. Hence, two kinds of imagination are at the heart of heated debates among cognitive scientists and philosophers: sensory and cognitive imagination. In literature a variety of labels had been used to indicate this distinction. What is striking is that the term “supposition” emerges on the one hand as a label for a “self-standing” mental state not to be confused with imagination, and on the other hand as a synonym of cognitive imagination.

I disagree with both these views and claim that supposition is a specific imaginative state, which recreates acceptance. My goal is to show that the distinction introduced by Jonathan Cohen between belief and acceptance allows us to separate supposition from cognitive imagination, without thereby banning it from the imaginative realm.

I will begin by analysing the relationship between sensory and cognitive imagination and their counterparts (i.e. perception and belief), and I will look more closely at what it is that makes a mental state an imaginative one. I will show that what characterizes imagination is the relationship with the will (imaginings are will-dependent). Consequently, the imaginative state enjoys a higher degree of freedom than its counterpart (imaginings are truth-independent). However, each type of imagining has its proper limits, which are somehow inherited from the counterpart. Moreover, imaginings preserve the type of content of their counterparts.

In the second part I will move to supposition. I will briefly introduce the arguments contra supposition as an imaginative state and I will discuss some examples, which are intended to show the difference between imagination and supposition. I will point out that there are not sufficient arguments for discarding supposition from the imaginative realm, rather supposition shows the features proper of an imagining.

Then, I will consider the main authors who advocate that supposition is a kind of imagination. I will agree with them in considering supposition as an imaginative state, but not in conflating supposition with cognitive imagination. By critically analysing their positions and some examples, I will show that another solution is available: to consider acceptance (and not belief) as the counterpart of supposition. Indeed, I will argue

ESPP2010

124

that Cohen’s distinction is useful for grasping the differences between supposition and cognitive imagination, and advocating supposition as the kind of imagination which recreates acceptance. Moreover this framework paves the way to a better understanding of the relationships between the different kinds of imagination.

RICHARD STÖCKLE-SCHOBEL Dynamic Representation – An Interactionist Argument

In this paper, I want to investigate how developmental psychology has informed the philosophy of mind in recent years. The research in social cognition in infants led by Trevar-then (1979) has become the basis for a recent contender to the classic Theory of Mind approaches. Interaction Theory holds that our understanding of other’s intentions and thoughts is based on our embodied capacities to engage in interactive prac-tices. Infants have a much earlier understanding of themselves as subjects and of other people as being like them – an under-standing that leads to intersubjectivity – than classic deve-lopmental theories would have posited. In the first part of the paper, I will lay out Interaction Theory’s basic assumptions.

One important point of divergence between Interaction Theory and Theory of Mind is the role of mental represen-tations. I will elaborate on the Dynamic Systems Theory perspective of Thelen & Smith (1994, 2006) to find support for a different kind of notion of representation.

The dynamic interpretation of mental representations that I want to present starts off with a change in perspective: whereas Computational Theories of Mind regards representations as static symbols that are like snapshots of mental states, I claim that a diachronic study of mental episodes is a better explanation of the way in which perception and conceptualisa-tion inform each other and of how perception leads to action. Several streams of activity, both sensorimotor and conceptual, are interwoven and create the feeling of a unified conscious state that we normally attribute. This dynamic notion of representation is better suited to explain the actual goings-on in social interaction and cognition.

Bochum & Essen

125


Paper Session 11: Emotions

LUCA BARLASSINA A hybrid model of disgust attribution

Mindreading is the capacity to attribute mental states to others. In my paper, I will consider a narrow subset of mind-reading abilities, namely the capacity to attribute disgust from visual stimuli, such as facial expressions, bodily postures, etc. I will address the following question: what cognitive mechanisms underlie this capacity? The two most influential theories of mindreading, the simulation theory (ST) and the theory-theory (TT), give two conflicting answers to this question. According to ST, a mindreader arrives at attributing disgust from visual stimuli by simulating the experience of disgust in her own cognitive system. On the contrary, TT maintains that disgust attribution is entirely based on tacit knowledge about disgust.

I will defend a ST-TT hybrid model of disgust attribution from visual stimuli. I will claim that some cases of disgust attribution from visual stimuli are entirely underpinned by simulation of disgust, while others stem entirely from know-ledge about disgust. My model is based on evidence from people suffering from Huntington’s Disease (HD), a genetic, degenerative brain disorder that affects motor, cognitive, and affective functions.

The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I will consider the capacity to attribute disgust from observing facial expressions of disgust, or face-based disgust recognition (FDR). Alvin Goldman has hypothesized that FDR is based on the simulation of the experience of disgust. I will argue that Goldman’s simulationist hypothesis is strongly supported by the fact that HD patients demonstrate a deficit both in FDR and in disgust experience.

ESPP2010

126

In order to experimentally assess a subject’s capacity for FDR, the subject is presented with pictures of isolated facial expressions. Then, the subject doesn’t have access to a number of visual cues that are available in ordinary contexts, such as the body posture of the subject, the object that caused the emotion, and the situation in which the emotional event takes place – call these cues “contextual visual information” (CVI). In the second section of my paper, I will examine the cognitive mechanisms underlying attributions of disgust from CVI. A recent study shows that HD patients are able to attribute disgust from CVI. Since HD patients cannot simulate disgust, I will conclude that attribution of disgust from CVI is not simulation-based, and I will propose an alternative TT account.

In the last section, I will outline a general hypothesis. Disgust has both a qualitative character and an intentional structure, that is to say, when a person is in the mental state of disgust there is something she is feeling and there is an intentional object she is disgusted by. From the observation of an isolated facial expression of disgust one cannot determine the intentional structure of the emotion, but only its quali-tative character. On the other hand, the intentional structure of the emotion can be inferred from CVI. I will claim that the fact that FDR is underpinned by simulation of disgust while the attribution of disgust from CVI is underpinned by knowledge about disgust strongly suggests that the attribution of the feeling of disgust is underpinned by simulation of disgust, while the attribution of its intentional structure is underpinned by knowledge about disgust.

References Aviezer, H., Bentin, S., Hassin, R.R., Meschino, W.S.,

Kennedy, J., Grewal, S., Esmail, S., Cohen, S., Moscovitch, M. (2009). Not the face alone: perception of contextualized face expressions in Huntington’s disease. Brain, 132, 1633-1644.

Goldman, A.I. (2006). Simulating Minds. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goldman, A.I. and Sripada, C.S. (2005). Simulationist models of face-based emotion recognition. Cognition, 94, 193-213.

Hayes, C.J, Stevenson, R.J, Coltheart, M. (2007). Disgust and Huntington’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1135-1151.

Bochum & Essen

127

PATRICK BURNS, SARAH BECK AND KEVIN RIGGS Executive control and complex emotions in children.

Switching predicts the experience of regret Feelings of regret rely on a comparison of current reality to what might have been, i.e., a comparison with a counterfactual world. Previous work has shown that inhibitory control predicts the ability of children to answer counterfactual conditional questions (Beck, Riggs & Gorniak, in press). In this study we present evidence that the developmental emergence of the feeling of regret is related to further domain general improvements in executive control. Four‐to‐seven‐year‐olds completed a battery of executive measures along with a game which assessed whether or not they experience regret at lost opportunities. A logistic regression revealed that the experience of regret in this age group was predicted by switching (a measure of attentional flexibility), but not by working memory or inhibitory control. We interpret these findings in the context of our broader thesis that the emergence of adult like counterfactual thinking in children is underpinned by domain general improvements in executive function. Furthermore, the findings that abstract cognitive processes such as executive control are developmentally related to the experience of complex emotions argues against an ‘affective primacy thesis’ of emotion and is consistent with the broader cognitive approach in the philosophy of emotion (Griffiths, 2003).

ULRIKE POMPE Affects as mediators between perception and cognition

The impact of affects on perception has so far not been in the center of attention - at least, there is very little data to be found in the empirical sciences. However, most of us would intuitively subscribe that certain percepts elicit an emotional or at least affectional response. We might feel disgust or sudden joy while discovering and recognizing an object in our vicinity, depending upon whether it is a cockroach or a piece of choco-late on the plate before us. The question I wish discuss is in which respect affects are involved in perceptual processing and in particular, which role they play for the recognition of objects

ESPP2010

128

(faces). In comparing the symptoms and underlying deficits of the Capgras Delusion and prosopagnosia, I will claim that recognition and belief formation are intrinsically dependent on affects. These considerations will be embedded in a larger architecture of object-recognition, making space for affects as mediators between perception and cognition.

MATTHIAS KETTNER Affects and Reasons

A person’s doing x for reasons r that this person takes to be a good enough reasons for doing x occupies centerstage in our dominant conception of rational self-governance. The dominant conception focuses on reasons good or bad, not on “the passions” (emotions and affects) positive or negative. Both the naturalistic-psychological tradition and the normative-rationalist traditions of thinking about how reasons and the passions are related advocate a master-slave model for integrating reasons and the passions within the self-governance of the rational person, either making reason the slave of the passions (e.g., Hume) or admitting only passions rationalized by reason (e.g., Habermas). Rationalistically construed, good reasons are justifiers. Roughly, the goodness of a reason r is the power of r to defeat competing reasons in a context of justification, i.e. a context where validity claims are at stake. Discourse theoretical pragmatists (myself included) will contend that argumentation is for us the only medium in which we can articulate, sort out, and hope to settle our different and often conflicting appreciations of reasons, and that argumentative discourse therefore is the universal and final arbiter of validity claims. This attractive account of the rational or normative power of reasons runs into problems with properly fitting in reasons into a psychologically realistic account of human motivation. Good reasons, it seems, do not only play a discursive role as justifiers, they also play a motivational role as person-motivating-reasons (“Beweg-gründe”). In my presentation, I explore how the passions can be integrated into an account of personal self-governance that saves the insights of the discourse paradigm into the inter-subjective constitution of reasons as justifiers while giving the

Bochum & Essen

129

passions a more intimate connection with the reasons that motivate persons across the whole range of first-personal activities. Working towards an interdisciplinary and realistic account of personal self-governance, we have to take into account how the passions (emotions and affects) a. can them-selves have, for a person, justifying and motivating reasons, b. can provide a person with justifying and with motivating reasons, c. can empower justifying reasons to translate into motivating reasons or practical guidance.

ESPP2010

130

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room I

Paper Session 12: Experience and Emotion

SANTIAGO ANRANGO MUÑOZ The mystery of epistemic feelings

Among the different phenomena that compose the mind, cognitive psychologists have postulated a mysterious one that they have called “epistemic feelings”. Some instances of epistemic feelings are the feelings of knowing, of uncertainty, of forgetting, the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, among others. This paper aims to unveil the mystery and to determine: (1) the object of these feelings, (2) the way they refer to it, (3) their origin and (4) their epistemic status.

SAM WILKINSON Egocentric judgements, encyclopaedic beliefs, and delusional assertions

I focus on Capgras delusion, which is (ambiguously) described as the delusion that “a loved one has been replaced by an impostor”. Patients suffering from this (in cases caused by brain-damage, which do not occur in the context of schizophrenia) don’t necessarily exhibit any overall reasoning deficit or irrationality and, when kept away from the “impos-tor”, have been known to lead ordinary lives. Any theory of belief has to explain how this (highly tenacious) delusion can be maintained among a set of conflicting beliefs within the mind of a seemingly rational subject. Some have held that this forces us to claim that delusions are not beliefs. I think this is too quick. In this paper, I present an overlooked distinction between encyclopaedic beliefs and egocentric judgements and

Bochum & Essen

131

show how this contributes to a better understanding of Capgras delusion, and one that classifies it as genuinely doxastic. While encyclopaedic beliefs are factual, reportable (i.e. roughly “conceptual”) and context independent, egocentric judgements have context-dependent singular content involving perceived elements of one’s surroundings.

ANNA WELPINGHUS

On the Constituents of Jealousy

I discuss a version of Social Constructivism concerning the emotions, namely the claim that social norms are necessary constituents of at least some emotions. This claim is more plausible when integrated within a developmental framework which allows us to distinguish between basic and complex emotions. Social norms might be necessary for complex emotions but not for basic emotions. For the emotion of jealousy, these norms are probably those which govern close relationships, prominently romantic relationships. A closer look at jealousy reveals that this version of SC is not plausible for it. First, philosophical explorations on the necessary conditions of jealousy show that the endorsement of such a social norm is not a necessary part of jealousy. This conclusion does not rest on the claim that social norms have some causal influence on the occurrence of jealousy in a society. In a second step, empiri-cal findings on jealousy in infants are interpreted. If the fin-dings are correct, jealousy can occur independent from elabo-rate cognitions. These findings further weaken Social Construc-tivism. Their integration also poses a challenge to most developmental theories of emotions: Complex emotions can be quite simple. Obviously social norms do play a role in many episodes of jealousy between adults. To account for this, it is helpful to distinguish individual emotional episodes from types of emotions. Social norms have a part when it comes to understanding emotional episodes.

ESPP2010

132

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room II

Paper Session 13: Theory of Mind & Language

DINÇER ÖZORAN AND ANNETTE HOHENBERGER The relation between evidentiality and theory of mind in 4-7 year old Turkish children

The relation between evidentiality and Theory of Mind (ToM) is a recently intensely discussed topic within the language-and-thought debate (Gleitman & Papafragou 2005). In the present study on 4-7 year old Turkish children, a representative ToM scale (Wellman & Liu 2004) was cast into three different lingu-istic forms in order to investigate the impact of Turkish evi-dential markers on ToM understanding: (i) a neutral control form without explicit evidential markers, (ii) a form with –DI (marking factuality in the past) and (iii) a form with –MIS (marking hearsay in the past). To predict children’s ToM performance, we also administered a working memory task and two language tasks assessing the understanding of complex syntax.

A main effect of age was found. Crucially, our analysis showed that younger as well as older children performed significantly better with the –DI form, however, not with the –MIS form, than with the control form. Only one of the language tasks which measures relative clause understanding was found to be a significant predictor of ToM performance.

Unlike other studies comparing learners of evidential and non-evidential languages that could not show a consistent advantage of the former over the latter in a variety of tasks tapping into the relation between language and thought, our study comparing the impact of three linguistic forms in Turkish (neutral, –DI, –MIS) on ToM reasoning did show a benefit of evidentiality. We conclude that the evidential markers used in the ToM stories, in particular those expressing factualiy in the past, may help children in their on-line reasoning of ToM.

Bochum & Essen

133

References Gleitman, L., & Papafragou, A. (2005): Language and thought.

In Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning, 633-661. Cambridge: CUP.

Wellmann, H.M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of Theory-of-Mind Tasks. Child Development, 75 (2), 523-541.

UTA KRAUS, HALE OGEL-BALABAN, BEATE WAGENER, AYHAN AKSU-KOÇ AND GÜNTER KOEHNKEN

Does evidentiality count for 3- to 5-year olds source monitoring performances? A Turkish-German cross-linguistic study

Recent research has indicated that conceptual development in a specific domain may not be independent of the way it is mapped linguistically. In the present study, this claim was examined in the domain of evidentiality specifying the source of knowledge acquisition through comparing source monitoring abilities of 3- to 5-year-old children speaking the evidential language Turkish (48 children) with those of children speaking the non-evidential language German (48 children). We hypothesized that 1) children’s source monitoring performance would increase with age and 2) Turkish-speaking children would outperform their German-speaking peers. We examined three different types of source monitoring performances to get a fine grained insight into the effect of evidentiality on source monitoring. We used a sticker book-source task (internal and external person sources in reality, internal and external source monitoring conditions); a fact-source task (source of knowledge acquired from a real and a fictious external source) and a tunnel-source task (source modality: direct perception, hearsay, inference). Results supported the first hypothesis, but not the second one. These findings suggested that the development of source monitoring abilities is not related to how source information is coded in the language. The evidentiality markers were not explicitly used in the application of the tasks and their effects were expected at implicit level. Further studies examining the effect of explicit use of these markers on source monitoring performance will shed more light on the relationship between evidentiality and source monitoring.

ESPP2010

134

VALENTINA CUCCIO On Negation. What do we need to “say no”?

Negation is a universal feature of human language. Every human language includes negation, but to date we do not know of any animal communication system having negation. What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying negation? And also, what does negation allow us to do?

In many ways, negation makes us species-specific. We could not persuade each other without negation, we could not have public nor private debates without negation, we could not reflect on our past or our future without negation because we could not have counterfactual reasoning. This list could continue on and on.

By looking at first-language learning in infancy, we can see, following L. Bloom (1970), three steps in the acquisition of negation: non-existence, rejection and denial.

According to Pea (1980), rejection is the first to be acquired. We can find examples of rejection in animal behaviour and in human pre-linguistic gestures. This kind of negation does not require abstract mental representations.

Non-existence is acquired after rejection and requires abstract mental representations. Even though animals can acknowledge absence, animal communication systems are not capable of displacement. Animals cannot communicate non-existence.

Denial is the most complex form of negation and the last to be acquired. To deny the truth of another person’s statement entails the understanding that the other person may hold different beliefs, or that language is itself a representation of reality, not reality itself (Tager-Flusberg, 1999). Thus, denial requires Theory of mind. In fact, according to Tager-Flusberg’s (1999) data, young children with autism rarely used denial.

Many studies in the last years have shown that language is tightly linked to Theory of mind. By analysing the many findings in this field (Baron-Cohen et al 2000), we can say that language and theory of mind are in a co-evolutionary relationship. We need language in order to acquire a complete Theory of mind. On the other hand, we must be able to look at

Bochum & Essen

135

our conspecific like intentional agents in order to acquire language (Tomasello 1999).

In this paper I will present the hypothesis that linguistic negation, in its complex form, relies on Theory of mind.

Moreover, I will argue that denial is a proof of the presence of Theory of Mind. Competence in linguistic denial is usually acquired by the age of three years. Thus, according to this hypothesis, the attribution of Theory of mind is lowered to the age of about 3 years while, according to false belief tests, children do not have Theory of mind until they are 4 year olds. However, following P. Bloom and German (2000), we can say that this task does not only require Theory of mind but many other abilities as well. Thus, failure in this test is due to the major complexity of the task given. Indeed, as they note, the linguistic and communicative skills of normal three-year-olds are different and far superior to those of older autistic children, even if normal three-year-olds are not passing false belief tests. References Baron-Cohen S., Tager-Flusberg H., Cohen D.J. (2000).

Understanding other minds. Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Bloom, L. (1970). Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Bloom, P. & German, T. (2000). “Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind”. In Cognition, vol. 77, N. 1, 25-31.

Pea, R. (1980b). “The Development Of Negation In Early Child Language”. In D.R. Olson (Ed.), The Social Foundations Of Language & Thought: Essays in Honor Of Jerome S. Bruner, 156-186. New York: W.W. Norton.

Tager-Flusberg, H. (1999). “A Psychological Approach to Understanding the Social and Language Impairments in Autism”. In International Review of Psychiatry, vol. 11, N.4, 325-334.

Tomasello M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Harward University Press.

http://informahealthcare.com/loi/irp

ESPP2010

136

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room III

Paper Session 14: Cognitive Penetration

ATHANASIOS RAFTOPOULOS Why Color Perception is not Cognitively Penetrated

Macpherson (forthcoming) argues that the phenomenal character of the experience of colors can be affected by cognitive states and, thus, is cognitively penetrable. Since it is held that early vision delivers colors, if color is cognitively penetrated the cognitive impenetrability of early vision is undermined. Macpherson discusses Delk and Fillenbaum’s (1965) experiments and argues that the standard strategies proponents of the cognitive impenetrability of perception use to rebut such alleged counterexamples do not work in this case. These strategies consist either in arguing that there is no difference in phenomenal character but only a difference in the judgments made on the basis of experience, or that while the experiences differ in phenomenal character this change is not caused by the penetration of experience by cognitive states but by a change in perceptual processing owing to pre-perceptual attention.

I claim in this paper that the experience of color is cognitively impenetrable, where color experience is understood as the personal-level content of states of early vision. In section one, I argue that Macpherson misinterprets Pylyshyn’s views about the nature of the content of early vision by missing the distinction between two stages of visual perception: a cognitive impenetrable early vision, and a cognitively penetrated late vision that roughly corresponds to the distinction between phenomenal seeing and doxastic seeing. I also discuss the notion of cognitive impenetrability and point to an important difference between Pylyshyn and Macpherson’s views.

In section two, I examine the Delk and Fillenbaum’s experiments and argue that they involve memory and object-

Bochum & Essen

137

centered attention. These factors occur after the operation of early vision and, thus, given Pylyshyn’s definition of cognitive impenetrability, their role does not entail that color experience is cognitively penetrated. In virtue of the fact that memory and object-centered attention occur post-perceptually and characte-rize late vision in which color categorization occurs, it is pos-sible to explain the results by referring to response or report bi-ases that affect the categorization of colors, that is, by referring to differences in judgments and not in phenomenal content.

In section three, I discuss the reasons why Macpherson thinks that the strategies for defending the cognitive impene-trability of early vision fail. Though Macpherson is right that the second strategy cannot account for the results because evo-king pre-perceptual spatial attention will not explain them, the first strategy can. The results are explained by appealing to the role of post-perceptual object-centered attention and, thus, to perceptual judgments. In other words, the results reflect what the subjects see in the doxastic sense and not in the pheno-menal sense of seeing. I explain why Macpherson is wrong to dismiss this possibility despite the fact that she emphasizes the role of object-centered attention in the experiment. The reason is that by ignoring the distinction between a non-conceptual early vision and a conceptual late vision, she fails to see that the reports of the subjects in the experiment reflect their doxa-stic seeing and not phenomenal seeing.

ALBERTO VOLTOLINI

How picture perception defies cognitive impenetrability According to the thesis of cognitive impenetrability of perception to thought – from now onwards, (TCI) – both the phenomenal character and the intentional content of perceptual states are impermeable to states of their subjects’ cognitive systems. This means that no change in the content of the latter states alters either feature of the former states. Now, percep-tion of ambiguous figures is held to be a prima facie counter-example to (TCI), for what one takes to be the picture a picture of influences what experience she has when facing the picture, hence it induces two different (picture) perceptions. A

ESPP2010

138

defender of (TCI) may well reply that in the Gestalt switch involving ambiguous figures there is indeed a phenomenological change, yet this change is only indirectly driven by the states of the cognitive system involved. For, first, those states rather induce a shift in attention, and second, this shift of attention is responsible for the phenomenological switch. Yet let us consider first the fact that in perception of ambiguous figures attention works differently than in the ordinary perceptual cases in which there is no real cognitive penetration; namely, as a mere focusing on the very same elements of the figure to be alternatively grasped rather than as a focusing on a different part of the scene one was previously facing. Moreover, let us take into account the fact that picture perception of ambiguous figures is just a borderline case of ordinary picture perception, for picture perceptions both of ambiguous figures and of ‘normal’ figures are characterized by the lighting up of aspects (different aspects in the former case, just one aspect in the latter case). Then, the above reply may be appropriately circumvented: insofar as in picture perception attention performs a grouping job of the very same elements of the figure one is facing, concepts mobilized by the states of the cognitive system involved may well help attention to perform such a job by conceptually informing the picture perception one has. As Wittgenstein once said, “that’s why the lighting up of an aspect seems half visual experience, half thought” (20094: II, xi § 140).

OPHELIA DEROY Is perception cognitively penetrable? Colours, shapes and other cases

Most of the time, you believe what you see. But can you also see what you believe? This is, in brief, the question raised by the hypothesis of cognitive penetrability of perception (CPP): what we perceive at a certain time t could be determined, at least in part, by the contents of higher level mental states, such as beliefs or desires. What we know or have learnt about the typical colors of objects, could for instance influence the color these objects appear to us to have. This claim has been widely discussed by psychologists and philosophers, surrounding debates about modularity and, more recently, about the

Bochum & Essen

139

perception / cognition distinction. In this paper, I distinguish two different ways of defining the high level and low level perceptual states at stake in an potential cognitive penetrability case. I discuss the recent claim by McPherson that experiments about color perception (where a banana would look more intensely or more robustly yellow to us than a random disc painted with exactly the same hue) exhibits cognitive penetrability at least in one of these senses. I show that these results don’t meet more robust criteria for CPP and suggest that certain cross-modal effects (e.g. so called “semantic” cross-modal effects), rather than single modality cases, are better cases for finding robust CPP.

ESPP2010

140

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room IV

Paper Session 15: Morality & Empathy

TIZIANA ZALLA The concept of intentional action and moral judgment in people with High-Functioning Autism

While evidence shows that people with Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism (AS/HFA), a mild form of autism, have mindreading difficulties, little is known as to whether their understanding of the intentional status of actions is impaired and how this impairment interferes with moral judgment.

In this work, I report the results from three experiments that address this question. The first experiment, by using Machery’s Free Cup and Extra-Dollar cases, show that individuals with AS/HFA have difficulty understanding the intentional status of means that are negatively valued or that are desired as means for something else, in contrast to what is the case in the general population. In the second study, by using Knobe’s Harm and Help cases and the Murder and Bull’s-Eye cases (Knobe, 2003), I show that individuals with AS/HFA are sensitive to moral considerations and that these inform their judgment about the intentional status of actions. Nonetheless, different from the general population, they judged non-intentional positive side-effects as praiseworthy.

In the third study, by using the moral/conventional/disgust task (Nichols, 2002), I show that while people with AS/HFA judged moral and disgust transgressions as being less permissible and less authority contingent than conventional transgressions, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions as being more serious than the control group. In addition, they justified moral transgressions more in terms of

Bochum & Essen

141

rule violations and less on the basis of others’ distress, but when affective responses are paired with disgust prohibitions, these are taken into account in the process of justifications of their normative theory.

In conclusion, the present findings show that impairments in mindreading in individuals with AS/HFA might affect their moral judgment and that to supply for such impairment, they use a moral heuristic to decide whether an action is intentional: If an action violates a moral norm, then it is likely seen as intentional. Moreover, I argue that although they might be affectively responsive to other’s distress, these affective experi-ences are not cognitively processed while still acting at a sub-personal level.

While the latter study confirms Nichols’s theory on the role of affective mechanisms in generating non-conventional judg-ments, it provides further evidence that these two types of affective-backed normative theories partially rely on distinct cognitive and affective processes.

RAINER REISENZEIN Moral Emotions from the Perspective

of the Computational Belief-Desire Theory of Emotion CBDTE is a proposal for a computational explication of the belief-desire theory of emotion. Its central assumption is that a core subset of emotions are products of hardwired mechanisms whose primary function is to subserve the monitoring and updating of the central representational system of humans, the belief-desire system. The posited emotion-producing mecha-nisms are analogous to sense organs; however, instead of sen-sing the world, they sense the state of the belief-desire system and signal important changes in this system, in particular the fulfillment and frustration of desires and the confirmation and disconfirmation of beliefs. In my contribution, I examine how CBDTE explains the so-called moral emotions, using the examples of pity and guilt. The basic idea is that moral emo-tions are feelings of pleasure and displeasure that differ from other pleasure and displeasure feelings in having a special cognitive-motivational background.

ESPP2010

142

References Reisenzein, R. (2009). Emotions as metarepresentational states

of mind: Naturalizing the belief-desire theory of emotion. Cognitive Systems Research, 10, 6-20.

Reisenzein, R. (2009). Emotional experience in the computational belief-desire theory of emotion. Emotion Review, 1, 214-222.

Reisenzein, R. (2010). Moralische Gefühle aus der Sicht der kognitiv-motivationalen Theorie der Emotion [Moral emotions from the perspective of the cognitive-motivational theory of emotion]. In M. Iorio & R. Reisenzein (Hg.), Regel, Norm, Gesetz. Eine interdiziplinäre Bestandsauf-nahme. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag.

VLADIMIRA CAVOJOVA, ZUZANA TORVENYI BELOVICOVA AND MIRSOLAV SIROTA Winning friends and popularity. Connections between empathy and ToM in preadolescent girls and boys

Social understanding is core ability for successful living in any group – whether it is group of hunters and gatherers, working team or group of teenagers. Many researchers showed that the concept of social understanding consists of various aspects, or at least it should be distinguished between understanding of beliefs (“theory of mind”) and understanding of desires and emotions (empathy) and that these components have different developmental trajectories (Dunn, 1995). Although theory of mind has been widely explored recently, most empirical studies focused on infants and young children to determine the threshold of acquiring the “theory of mind” (ToM) ability, or groups of individuals with hypothesized ToM disorders (such as autism and schizophrenia). However, it is crucial also for teenagers to develop social skills based on understanding of mental and emotional states of others to “survive” in their social groups. We are interested in question whether better social under-standing will lead to pronounced prosocial orientation and whether it will result into higher popularity and acceptance in peer group reflected in the number of friends a person has. There are mixed evidence for relationship between ToM and

Bochum & Essen

143

prosocial orientation, as it is assumed that people better in inferring mental and emotional states of others can use this also for selfish purposes (Shlien, 1997). Empathy has many common features with ToM and it is generally associated with prosocial attitudes and behaviour, but again, not all helping behaviour is motivated by empathy (Ginsburg et al., 2003). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the web of relationships between ToM (understanding of mental and intentional states of others) and empathy (understanding of emotions of others) and their effect on winning friends and popularity among their peers and how these abilities relate differently for boys and girls. Our study was realized in the sample of pre-adolescent girls and boys aged 11 to 15. ToM skills were measured by Imposing Memory Task (Kinderman, Dunbar, & Bentall, 1998) and Awkward Moments Test (Heavey et al., 2000) as more naturalistic method. Empathy was measured by three questionnaires that focused on different aspects of empathy: Empathy Scale Items (Caruso, & Mayer, 1998), Basic Empathy Scale (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006) and Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980). Prosocial orientation and ability to win friends within and outside the school setting was determined by peer-nominated question-naire. Our prediction was that adolescents with better ability to infer mental and emotional states of others (as measured by ToM and empathy measures) had more friends than their counterparts scoring lower in these measures and that girls were better at inferring mental and emotional states than boys.

ESPP2010

144

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room V

Paper Session 16: Uncertainty

CHARLOTTE WOLLERMANN, BERNHARD SCHRÖDER AND ULRICH SCHADE Signalling and Interpreting Uncertainty Interplay between Context, Prosody and Pragmatic Focus

Speakers and hearers use various cues in communication in order to signal and detect uncertainty. Uncertainty can be cha-racterized as non-prototypical emotive state (Rozin, Cohen, 2003) and/or cognitive state (Kuhltau, 1993). Uncertainty as a signal of the speaker's cognitive state is often found in information seeking processes, e.g. in question-answering situations. It was shown that prosodic markers like rising intonation, pauses and fillers are relevant cues for both production and perception of uncertainty (Smith, Clark, 1993; Brennan, Williams, 1995).

Often when hearers have to implicate what is meant in the Gricean sense from what was said, the respective implicatures rest on assumptions on the speaker's certainty on the issue under discussion. Is there an measurable interplay between prosodic markers of (un)certainty and implicatures? We will investigate this for a type of implicature which is also tied to prosody: exhaustivation.

In semantic-pragmatic theories (Groenendijk, Stockhof, 1984; Rooth, 1992) it is assumed that free or pragmatic focus, i.e. focus not bound by an overt focus operator, is associated with a background question. If the latter is interpreted as a mention-all question and the hearer supposes that the speaker knows the exhaustive answer, the preconditions for an exhaustive interpretation are given.

1a: Who kissed Mary? 1b: [John]F kissed Mary.

If the hearer of (1b) concludes that John is the only person who kissed Mary, she interprets the answer exhaustively.

Bochum & Essen

145

Whether the hearer interprets the speaker’s answer exhaustively depends on the knowledge about the answer which is ascribed to the speaker by the hearer.

We assume that when the speaker conveys uncertainty in the speech signal, the hearer will use this information for the interpretation by assuming that the speaker is uncertain about the answer, then a non-exhaustive interpretation should be favoured. In our empirical approach we use question answer pairs where the focus constituent in the answer is a noun phrase and embed the pairs into short dialogues.

Experiment 1 investigates whether intonation – as prosodic indicator of uncertainty – and type of question effect the exhaustive interpretation of answers. Results suggest that the exhaustive reading is strongly preferred, only weak effects of micro context and prosody are found. Experiment 2 tests if several prosodic cues indicating uncertainty and variation of macro context influence exhaustivity. Results show a strong influence of macro context, whereas prosodic impact is rela-tively weak. Since prosodic influence is weaker than theoreti-cally expected we regard it is necessary to investigate the production side. In Experiment 3 we give our material from Experiment 1 and 2 to speakers in order to elicitate focus production. This time we investigate both audio and visual modality. Our findings suggest that in the case of an uncertain and non-exhaustive context rising intonation combined with raising of eyebrows or head occurs more often than for the context intended to favour certainty and exhaustivity. We regard this as audiovisual manifestation of Bolinger’s (1986) metaphor of up and down in the context of signalling information status.

AMELIE GOURDON AND SARAH R. BECK Overcoming the framing effect when making decisions based on

verbal probabilities: having more time is necessary but not enough Uncertain outcomes can be described by raw probabilities (e.g., There is 40% chance), but also by verbal probabilities (e.g., There is a chance, It is not absolutely certain). Beyond their probabilistic meaning verbal probabilities also have a direction-

ESPP2010

146

nality (Teigen & Brun, 1995), i.e. can be positive or negative. This directionality gives verbal probabilities a framing effect on decisions: when presented with two drugs for a headache, people typically prefer the one that is described by a positive verbal probability (e.g., some possibility) rather than the one introduced by a negative verbal probability (e.g., quite uncertain), even if both verbal probabilities are judged by other participants as having the same probabilistic meaning (Teigen & Brun, 1999). In this study we made the first investigation into the potential differences in processing directionality and probabilistic meaning that could explain the framing effect of the directionality.

In experiment 1, twenty participants chose between two outcomes described by verbal probabilities. In one third of the trials the probabilistic meaning was controlled and the directionality varied. In another third the directionality was controlled and the probabilistic meaning varied. In the last third, both dimensions were different, reinforcing each other (congruent trials; e.g., a positive verbal probability carrying a high probabilistic meaning) or contradicting each other (incongruent trials; e.g. a negative verbal probability carrying a high probabilistic meaning).

When both dimensions differed, participants chose more quickly between congruent verbal probabilities than between incongruent verbal probabilities. When only one dimension (directionality or probabilistic meaning) varied, participants chose more quickly between positive verbal probabilities and between ones of high probabilistic meaning than between nega-tive verbal probabilities and between ones of low probabilistic meaning. Participants were also more accurate (i.e. chose the verbal probability carrying the highest probabilistic meaning most often) when choosing between congruent verbal probabili-ties and between positive verbal probabilities than when choosing between incongruent verbal probabilities and between negative verbal probabilities. Finally when the probabilistic meaning was held constant, participants tended to choose the outcome with the positive verbal probability more often than chance. In experiment 2, twenty participants did the same task under two time conditions: in the limited time condition, they had to

Bochum & Essen

147

answer within five seconds; in the unlimited time condition, they could take all the time they needed. The order of the time conditions was counterbalanced. Besides replicating the results of experiment 1, our aim was to investigate if the framing effect can be overcome under some conditions, here when relieving the time pressure.

The same pattern as in experiment 1 was observed regarding accuracy and response time. However when the probabilistic meaning was held constant, actual answers indicated that the preference for the positive verbal probability was cancelled out when participants had all the time they needed.

Even if relieving the time pressure, the framing effect occurred when the verbal probabilities to compare were incongruent. However if they had the same probabilistic meaning the framing effect was cancelled out. We discuss how these results can be integrated.

MARIE JUANCHICH, AMÉLIE GOURDON AND KARL-HALVOR TEIGEN

Uncertainties. Effect of the communication of personal and impersonal uncertain quantifiers

The present research focuses on how uncertainties are communicated, understood and used. From a mathematical point of view, uncertainty can be described by numerical probabilities: numbers ranging from 0 (impossible) to 1.0 (full certainty). Yet uncertainty cannot be reduced to a point on an axis and can be characterized as well by its source. Indeed uncertainty could be deemed from lack of knowledge (i.e., ignorance) or from the character of events themselves (i.e., disposition of the world). As numerical probabilities, quantifiers of the natural language (e.g., there is a chance, it is almost certain) can convey different ranges of uncertainty. Furthermore these terms could reflect the source of uncertainty by the mean of the pronoun used to describe the uncertain state; for example one can say “I am uncertain” reflecting an internal uncertainty, whereas someone else can prefer “it is uncertain”, reflecting an uncertainty attributed to the world.

ESPP2010

148

We conducted one study intending to explore how the personal and the impersonal modes of predictions (I am uncertain vs., It is uncertain) are perceived by the recipient and influence its subsequent decision making in football game prediction contexts. 246 participants, non expert of soccer cup, read a prediction about a match outcome and then judged its informativeness, the degree and kind of knowledge of the speaker, the attitude of the speaker towards the team and finally, their own willingness to bet. In a mixed design, the degree of certainty of the prediction was a within-subject factor (low, mild vs. high probability of occurrence) and the mode of prediction (personal vs. impersonal) was a between subject factor.

Results indicated that predictions communicating a mild degree of certainty (i.e., not certain) were perceived as less informative and less based on statistics than low and high ones (i.e., very uncertain and almost certain). In the same vein, mild probability terms were less encouraging to bet than low and high ones. The mode of prediction did not influence the uncertainty degree communicated by the linguistic quantifiers of uncertainty. However impersonal predictions (e.g., “It is almost certain that Hoffenheim will win”) were perceived as more based on statistical information than personal ones (e.g., “I am almost certain that Hoffenheim will win”). We found an interaction between mode and certainty degree showing that impersonal predictions were judged more informative when they conveyed a low degree of certainty. Finally, participants were more willing to bet on the impersonal predictions rather than on personal ones.

The source of certainty manipulated by the mean of the personal pronoun influences the inference drawn by the hearer on the speaker’s knowledge and consequently was found to influence subsequent decision making. These results show the need to take into account different dimensions of uncertainty, such as the attribution of its source, and to not consider uncertainty along the single probability frequentistically base dimension. Some bounds of these results will be drawn as a function of social factors, such as the expertise of the speaker. Results will be discussed at the light of the phenomenological analysis of the variants of uncertainty.

Bochum & Essen

149

Thursday, August 26th 11.45 – 13.15 Room VI

Paper Session 17: Biological Categories

HATICE BAYINDIR AND ANNETTE HOHENBERGER Exploring Turkish preschoolers understanding of ontological categories An important issue in cognitive development has been how children develop an understanding of the entities around them and how they categorize these entities ontologically through a process of tracking and property specification. The current study was conducted to have a better understanding of Turkish children’s ontological categories and their corresponding properties. Ontological categories included living things and nonliving things. The sample consisted of 25 preschoolers: 6 four-year-olds, 9 five-year-olds, and 10 six-yearolds, all of which were selected randomly from a kindergarten, Arı Preschool, belonging to a university, Çankaya University. There was also an adult control group of 8 people whose data provided the criteria based on which children’s responses were scored. The real photos were directly presented to the children and their answers to the questions were recorded by circling yes or no in the answer section of the form and notes regarding children’s extra explanations were written down in the extra spaces provided. The whole procedure took ± 10 minutes for each child. The current study indicated that Turkish preschoolers’ cognition of ontological categories develop across the specified age range, 4-6 year-olds. There was a significant difference between 4- year-olds and 6-year-olds in their performance of category specification, whereas 5-year-olds’ performance significantly differed from neither 4-year-olds nor 6-year-olds. These findings demonstrated children’s capability of distinguishing entities around them with reference to some biological properties. For all age groups, subjects’ performance differed across category types, with humans as the best specified category while animals and plants were the worst in

ESPP2010

150

the broader category of living things, and with man-made things as the better specified category over natural things in the broader category of nonliving things. They all did better in the nonliving things category in comparison with the living things, excluding the human category. These findings could be linked to habitual surroundings, cultural conditioning, informal learning opportunities, formal schooling, and limited experience and observation opportunities.

JULIA BADGER, LAURA SHAPIRO, JOANNA HARDY, ALAN BATES AND SOPHIE STEVENS Investigating the development of inductive reasoning Can interactive training with animals boost category-based induction?

It is well established that adults can use both perceptual cues and category knowledge when making inductive decisions. However, the extent to which young children use both types of information remains under debate (Gelman & Markman, 1986; Sloutsky, Kloos & Fisher, 2007; Opfer & Bulloch, 2007). There is evidence to suggest that children’s natural bias is to focus on perceptual cues (e.g., Sloutksy et al., 2007) and only later shift to a focus on category knowledge. However, other research suggests that children are inherently essentialist and by default, actively seek cues as to category membership (e.g., Gelman, 2003). Firstly, we aim to resolve conflicting accounts of children’s default induction strategies and secondly to exa-mine the mechanisms behind developmental changes in induc-tive reasoning. Firstly, we developed induction tasks using biologically plausible novel kinds in which category membership could be pitted against overall appearance. This enabled us to separate 3 to 9 year old children’s (N = 264) default induction strategies. Children were asked to generalise hidden properties from a target to one of two test items (same-category, but different overall appearance vs. different category but similar overall appearance). We found that young children were biased towards perceptual induction, shifting to a category bias from around age 6-7 years (Badger & Shapiro, under review). Secondly, we investigated the mechanisms behind this shift.

Bochum & Essen

151

Specifically, whether the development of category induction is dependent on the acquisition of domain-specific causal knowledge (Gentner, 1988). We therefore investigated whether interactive educational sessions with animals can boost the development of more sophisticated reasoning. Children aged 5 - 7 years (N = 130) took an educational session at Twycross Zoo: they were allowed to touch or hold animals whilst being taught about habitat adaptations and how non-obvious features may be more predictive of behaviour than overall appearance (e.g., tree frogs, unlike common frogs, have sticky pads on their toes to climb trees). One week before and after this educational session, children participated in inductive reasoning tasks with novel and familiar (i.e., used in the educational session) examples. Tasks involved training on categorising the animals into kinds, followed by induction trials in which hidden properties were generalised from a target (e.g., adult squirrel) to one of two test items in which category membership conflicted with appearance, e.g., adult chinchilla (perceptual distractor) vs. baby squirrel (category choice). A shift from perceptual to category induction with age was observed, supporting previous research (Badger & Shapiro, under review; Sloutsky et al., 2007). All ages showed a stronger category preference for familiar compared to novel examples. However, the educational sessions boosted category preferences for both novel and familiar examples. Our findings suggest that category induction is not an early bias, and instead develops gradually as a consequence of knowledge and experience within a domain. References Badger, J.R., & Shapiro, L.R. The shift from perceptual to

category induction is independent of featural distraction. Manuscript under review.

Gelman, S.A. (2003). The essential child: origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gelman, S.A., & Markman, E.M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23, 183-209. Gentner, D. (1988). Metaphor as structure mapping: the relational shift. Child Development, 59, 47-59.

ESPP2010

152

Opfer, J.E., & Bulloch, M.J. (2007). Causal relations drive young children’s induction, naming, and categorization. Cognition, 105, 206-217.

Sloutsky, V.M., Kloos, H., & Fisher, A.V. (2007). When looks are everything: Appearance similarity versus kind information in early induction. Psychological Science, 18 (2), 179-185.

TOMI KOKKONEN AND SAMULI PÖYHÖNEN Psychological Essentialism and Hidden Premises in Philosophical Argumentation

Our talk investigates the link between the psychological disposition to attribute explanatory essences to things in the world and hidden premises in philosophical argumentation. We summarise some of the empirical work done on psychological essentialism and argue that from the perspective of argumentation theory, the attribution of essences in everyday thinking can be seen as postulation of hidden premises. Finally, we show that our analysis of essentialist thinking can be used as a critical perspective on intuition-based argumentation in contemporary analytic philosophy.

According to psychological research, people assume that biological beings – including humans – have underlying essen-ces. These essences are taken to be explanatory for superficial properties and they are assumed to be shared by a class of beings (e.g. a species or a sex), thus supporting law-like genera-lisations. One way to look at essentialist thinking in argumen-tation is to analyse it as an enthymeme-argument, in which the hidden premise states that an essence is involved. This would make, for example, the fundamental attribution error and strong stereotypical generalizations seem like rational and valid inferences, though ones with a false premise. Essentialist thinking can be seen to have a function in the human cognitive economy: it makes generalisations in everyday thinking possible without vast and complex statistical knowledge about the subject. Prejudices, for example, work on the level of essen-tialist “theories” about groups of people and these “theories” may be backed up by anecdotal evidence and the confirmation bias characteristic of everyday thinking. The crucial step in

Bochum & Essen

153

criticising a prejudiced argument is, sometimes trivially, to confront the premise that a binding essence exists, not what is included in the essential traits. The explicit structure of the argument might, however, hide this premise. We illustrate our approach with an example, the claim that girls are favoured over boys in the Scandinavian school system. The inference is seemingly valid and the explicit premises are true, but this validity comes only from the presupposition that the gender itself is a direct explanatory factor. The reality is, however, more complex and there is no favoritism toward the gender in itself or any trait that could be thought of as typical for girls, as opposed to boys.

Our main argument is about the manifestation of essentia-lism in philosophical argumentation. Arguments are based on conceptual intuitions, the conclusions are drawn presupposing that the subject matter stays unchanged on each step of an argument, and the validity of an argument is evaluated based on conceptual intuitions. These intuitions are often based on essentialist thinking about the subject. Essentialist thinking is not necessarily wrong, but it needs to be justified case-by-case. A standard philosophical “trick” in criticising an argument is to make a new conceptual distinction separating two senses of the word and presumably two different targets in the subject matter. This is not, however, to renounce essences, but to propose that there are two instead of one. The subject matter might be richer in its nature than any essentialist intuition is able to capture in the first place. Essences cannot be simply presupposed, but they need to be argued for, and some of the essentialist presuppositions made by philosophers may be non-reflected “self-evident truths” produced by our everyday thinking.

ESPP2010

154

Thursday, August 26th 14.00 – 15.30 Room I


NIKOLA KOMPA Meaning and Categorization

My aim in the paper is to investigate into the relation between linguistic meaning and categorization. According to a traditionally influential idea the linguistic meaning of a (general) term in a language is the concept associated with the word. The concept, in turn, provides speakers with something like a definition that she employs in categorization, i.e. in order to sort things into classes or sets. For example, the meaning of the word “table” is the concept TABLE, and a speaker classifies a thing as a table if and only if it complies with the definition that makes up the concept. She thereby sort things into those which belong to the set of tables and those which don’t belong to that set. Intuitively appealing as this idea may seem, it raises a host of difficult questions and is nowadays almost unanimously regarded as too simplified a picture of the relation between meaning and categorization. Current research in philosophy, linguistics and psychology shows the need for a refined picture of what the meaning of a word may be, what knowledge of meaning consists in and how that knowledge figures in categorization.

More specifically, new work on word meaning, concept & word learning and the mental lexicon, e.g., seems to show that linguistic meaning is much less well-behaved than the traditional picture suggests. In the paper, I will focus on a couple of phenomena that have recently become the subject of extensive debates in (cognitive) linguistics and philosophy. In particular, I will focus on the context-sensitivity, vagueness and polysemy of linguistic expressions – these features being pervasive features of natural languages. Yet they seem to call into question the traditional idea of linguistic meanings as

Bochum & Essen

155

stable entities that guide categorization. Are we forced to sever the distinction between meaning and categorization, then? I don’t think that this conclusion is forced on us. Instead I will try to defend the claim that, quite to the contrary, the context-sensitivity, vagueness and polysemy of natural language ex-pressions are best explained on the assumption that these expressions serve the purpose of categorization. Given that the expressions’ main function is to guide categorization we should expect them to be context-sensitive, vague and polysemous; otherwise they wouldn’t be apt to serve that purpose – or so I will argue.

JAMES TRAFFORD Competence Conditions and Shared Meaning

How is the use of natural language coordinated? How do speakers have epistemic access to the referent of their terms? According to neo-descriptivists such as Frank Jackson (1998), there is a common answer to both questions: competent spea-kers must assent to an implicit shared set of roles according to which the property picked out by a term can be identified. And, thus, shared understanding of the meaning of public terms depends upon a shared set of invariant roles. Why think this? Jackson argues that something must provide the story about how public terms pick out what they pick out, and so we should be confident that his reference-fixing story is at least broadly correct. The details of Jackson’s neo-descriptivism have been questioned elsewhere (e.g. Byrne and Pryor 2006; Block and Stalnaker 1999; Nimtz 2004).

Here, however, I intend both to question Jackson’s founding semantic assumption according to which competence with a term involves adherence to an invariant core of beliefs, and to provide an alternative account; coordinated semantic convergence.

I will say, contra Jackson, that formulating competence conditions with the meaning of a public term in terms of shared understanding rests upon controversial psychological assumptions; there is no invariant set of roles to which a speaker must assent in order to count as possessing a concept.

ESPP2010

156

And, moreover, if the theory is to cope with divergent intuitions and disagreement, it faces a stark dilemma: (i) either relax the set of roles necessary to be a competent concept user, in which case the criteria will be too weak to determinately pick out a unique property; or (ii) say that divergent intuitions can be put down to difference in concept, in which case the phenomenology of disagreement is elided.

In response, I sketch an alternative account that is psychologically accurate and better placed to explain the nature of inquiry and disagreement. On this story, understanding a public term is a matter of participating in a linguistic practice: shared meaning, and competence with one’s terms does not require agreement on a specific set of reference-fixing roles; rather, it is dependent upon relation with past linguistic practice with a term, the practice of the community, and empirical investigation.

References Block, N. & Stalnaker, R. (1999). Conceptual Analysis,

Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap. Philosophical Review 108 (1):1-46.

Byrne, A. & Pryor, J. (2006). Bad Intensions. In Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Maci (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics: Foundations and Applications. Oxford University Press.

Jackson, F. (1998). From Ethics to Metaphysics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nimtz, C. (2004). Two-Dimensionalism and Natural Kind Terms. Synthese 138 (1): 125-48.

PAWEŁ ŁUPKOWSKI Semantically motivated CAPTCHA systems. A next step in CAPTCHA development?

The issue of safety of the current CAPTCHA systems is discussed and main disadvantages of them are pointed out. Three selected semantically motivated systems (SQUIGL-PIX, Eggglue, SemCAPTCHA) are presented and discussed as an alternative solution for OCR-based CAPTCHAs.

Bochum & Essen

157

ESPP2010

158

Thursday, August 26th 14.00 – 15.30 Room II

Paper Session 19: Theory of Mind and Communication

CHRISTOPHER PETERS, ADAM QURESHI AND IAN APPERLY Effects of gaze direction of a virtual agent in an online communication game

This study was designed to investigate the effect of the gaze direction and head orientation of a virtual agent in an online communication game. Participants were instructed to move items by the virtual agent, who had an opposite perspective to themselves, within a 4 x 4 grid array containing five occluded slots. Items in an occluded slot were only visible to the participant. In critical instructions, the item referred to could be one in an occluded slot that was only visible to the participant (that the director had no knowledge of) or one in a mutually visible slot. The latter item was the correct item to select. Previous studies (Apperly, Carroll, Samson, Qureshi, Humphreys, & Moffatt, in press) have shown that participants do not reliably use the information gained from taking the directors perspective and so select the mutually visible item (i.e. that the director cannot see or has knowledge of the item in the occluded slot); they often select the item in the occluded slot.

In the original task, the director’s eye gaze was obscured to constrain this as a variable (pilot studies showed that it randomly interfered with participants’ selection of items). In this study we systematically varied where the virtual agent is looking by using three separate conditions:

In condition 1, the eye gaze of the director was focused towards the mutually visible object; in condition 2, the eye gaze of the director was focused towards the occluded object; in condition 3, the eye gaze of the director was fixed at the centre of the grid. Preliminary data suggests that the head orientation

Bochum & Essen

159

and eye gaze facilitates selection of the correct mutually visible object in condition 1, facilitates selection of the occluded object in condition 2, and has no effect on object selection in condi-tion 3. The presentation will based on a full sample of data collection.

This research provides a starting point in the investigation of the processing of eye gaze and head orientation of other agents in online communication – when, how and what effect this has.

RICHARD MOORE On the Cognitive Structure of Communicative Intentions

Communicative intentions are fulfilled only by being recognised as such by their intended audience. For example, in order to communicate to you that there’s a rabbit near your foot, I must not only bring you to grasp that there’s a rabbit near your foot, but also to recognise that it's my intention that you know that. This feature of communicative intent was first described by Paul Grice (Grice 1991). It's also central to the following neo-Gricean characterisation of the communicative act (defended in Neale 1992) that I will take as my starting point: A speaker S non-naturally means something by an utterance x if and only if, for some hearer (or audience) H, S utters x intending:

(1) H to produce a particular response r, and (2) H to recognise that S intends (1).

In addition to acting with intentions (1) and (2), it's also necessary that the speaker should not act with any further intention:

(3) that H should be deceived about intentions (1) and (2).

The complexity of this intentional structure has led numerous commentators (for example, Breheny 2006) to argue that communicative intentions with a Gricean (or neo-Gricean) structure could not be grasped by young infants. One argument for this claim takes as its starting point Dan Sperber’s claim

ESPP2010

160

(Sperber 2000) that grasping a communicative intention requires entertaining a ‘fourth order meta-representation’. Since even adults struggle to grasp such thoughts, it’s thought that infants could not possibly do so.

In the proposed paper, I set out a way of thinking about communicative intentions that is Gricean in spirit, but according to which one could grasp the components of communicative intentions without entertaining fourth order thoughts. On this account, acting with communicative intent requires performing an action that consists of two parts: a communicative cue, and a content cue. These actions parts correspond to the first and second clauses of Grice’s analysis of the communicative act. A content cue – including sentences and non-verbal gestures – is the action performed by a speaker as a means of specifying the content of her first clause inten-tion. A communicative cue – for example, eye-contact or direc-ted speech – is produced by a speaker in order to guide the attention of her interlocutor onto her production of a content cue – that is, in order to bring the hearer to recognise that she has a first clause intention that she wants him to grasp.

Once communicative acts are understood to have this structure, it becomes apparent that grasping a communicative intention requires (at most) grasping only a pair of second order thoughts: first, grasping the speaker’s intention that one attend to her content cue; and second, inferring from this the intended content of her message. Hearers who grasped commu-nicative intentions in this manner would be functionally indis-tinguishable from those who entertained fourth order thoughts, but need not entertain such thoughts. Consequently the ‘higher order thoughts’ argument for doubting that infants could grasp Grice-like communicative intentions does not go through.

Time permitting, and against Breheny (2006), I will also argue that on this account of the cognitive architecture of communication, it’s not necessary to possess a concept of belief in order to act with or grasp communicative intent.

Bochum & Essen

161

References Breheny, R. 2006: Communication and folk psychology. Mind

& Language, 21(1), 74-107. Grice, P. 1991: Studies in the Way of Words. London: Harvard

UP. Neale, S. 1992: Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 15(5), 509–59. Sperber, D. 2000: Metarepresentations in an evolutionary

perspective. In Sperber (ed.) Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: OUP. pp. 117-137.

KRISZTINA ORBAN Inserted Thoughts, the Comparator Model

and the Immunity of the ‘I’ In this paper, I examine John Campbell’s (1999) account of how the possibility of the phenomena of ‘inserted thoughts’ in schizophrenics requires us to modify our account of the immunity of I-judgements. In particular, I argue against his claim that the comparator model due to Frith (1992) of the underlying cognitive neuroscience provides enabling conditions for immunity as such. My disagreement with Campbell is on two fronts: whilst we agree that the comparator functions as an enabling condition for the immunity of I-judgements, (1) I deny that the immunity phenomena is restricted to judgements (in this case, I-judgements) and, thus, (2) I deny that the comparator provides enabling conditions for immunity as such. I begin by discussing the phenomena of immunity to error through misidentification generally, turning to discuss the sole object view of bodily awareness (Martin 1995) and how it might provide a model for understanding why some I-judgements are immune. Finally I turn to discuss Campbell’s account and argue that the comparator model cannot provide enabling conditions for the immunity phenomena.

Certain I-judgements, such as ‘I have a headache’ or ‘I am thinking’, seem to be immune to error through misidentifica-tion relative to ‘I’. By this, I mean that it cannot happen that I judge that I have a headache but be mistaken in that someone else has a headache which I think I have. When I have a war-rant to judge ‘I have a headache’, it cannot turn out that I am

ESPP2010

162

mistaken because my warrant is not for thinking ‘I have H’ but rather a warrant to think something like ‘you have H’. More generally, a term a is immune in the judgement ‘Fa’ iff when-ever the subject s has a warrant to judge Fa, it cannot be the case that it warranted him to judge Fb, even when it is not the case that a is F (Evans 1982, Campbell 2002). In contrast with our examples of I-judgements, judgements such as ‘Here is Romulus’ are open to misidentification relative to ‘Romulus’ – e.g., when the speaker misidentifies him with Remus – and similarly with judgements like ‘Romulus has a headache’. Although it may seem to me that I am warranted in attributing a headache to Romulus, it turns out that my warrant is one for attributing a headache to Remus, rather than Romulus.

I want to suggest that I-judgements such as ‘I have pain’ or ‘I am thinking’ are immune to error through misidentification because of something distinctive about how we know the referent of the first-person pronoun. In particular, I will argue that our knowledge of the referent of the first-person pronoun is warranted by our awareness of that referent which is distinctive in that it is a form of awareness that presents one and only one object. Prima facie, there are two such forms of awareness: introspection and our awareness of our own body.

Consider a toy world with a species of creatures which have a special form of awareness which is sensitive to only one particular object O and nothing else. These creatures have no way to misidentify O via this special form of awareness. My suggestion is that certain of our self-ascriptive practices work in a similar way. If introspection gives information just about ourselves, and bodily sensations are ways in which we sense the one individual object that is our own body, then sentient beings like us cannot misidentify our body via bodily awareness or ourselves via introspection. And this is because our know-ledge of the referents is warranted by this distinctive kind of awareness which is sensitive just one and only one object. I explore the sole object view as an attempt to answer the question of what makes misidentification impossible.

In Campbell’s account, the comparator is an enabling condition for immunity which is a feature of some I-judgements. The idea is that the comparator labels one’s

Bochum & Essen

163

thoughts as generated by oneself, and when this fails, as in the case of schizophrenics who have ‘inserted thoughts’, immunity is lost. Whilst I agree that a working comparator mechanism functions as the enabling condition of I-judgements, certain I-thoughts may still be immune relative to ‘I’. If a schizophrenic subject Z has the thought ‘I think the world will end now’, but claims that it is not his thought, but is somehow ‘inserted’ into his mind, whilst we do not have an I-judgement – since Z possess no warrant for that judgement – we seem to have an I-thought. Here the ‘I’ is not immune. But this cannot be the case with every occurrence of ‘I’ in Z’s thoughts. Z thinks: ‘You insert an idea into my mind’, but ‘my mind’ refers to Z’s mind, and in thinking that Z cannot think it is someone’s else mind. So some I-thoughts are still immune relative to ‘I’, but not all of them. The breakdown of the comparator mechanism results in Z thinking that he is not the agent of his thought – but the thought appears ‘in’ him for sure and strikes him as such. If he did not think that the offending thought is ‘in’ his mind, or inserted ‘into’ him, then he would have no sense of conflict at all, but would at most be very puzzled. The source of internal strife is precisely due to his realisation that it is in his mind without claiming agency of that thought. If this is correct, then immunity is a more widespread phenomena, restricted not just to judgements, and thus the comparator cannot be an enabling condition for the immunity phenomena.

ESPP2010

164

Thursday, August 26th 14.00 – 15.30 Room III

Paper Session 20: Cognition and Action

WAYNE CHRISTENSEN Cognitive control in skilled action

This paper investigates the role of cognitive control in skilled action, and considers some implications for human agency. Common views of skill acquisition see an increase in auto-mation and a corresponding reduction of higher cognitive con-trol. Indeed, higher cognitive control is thought by many to interfere with skilled action. The thesis defended here is that cognitive control may be may be widespread in human agency after all. The analysis begins with experiments by Beilock and Carr (2001) that appear to support a non-cognitive view of skill. It is argued that Beilock and Carr interpret their results using an impoverished theoretical context, and that when we consider an expanded range of options that includes a plausible cognitive position the experiments are not decisive. Moreover, a great deal of evidence in expertise research points to cognitive involvement in skilled action. If this is right then it supports a more optimistic view of human agency, however there may nevertheless be important to reconsider the deliberative reason-ning model of rational control.

ELISABETH STOETTINGER AND JOSEF PERNER Does grasping count on numbers? Influence of Digit Magnitude on Grasping and Manual Estimation

The perception vs. action hypothesis of Goodale and Milner (1992; Milner & Goodale, 1995) postulated two different pathways within the visual system – one for action (dorsal stream) and one for perception (ventral stream). With the help

Bochum & Essen

165

of pictorial illusions – for example the well known Ebbinghaus illusion (two identical discs—one surrounded by smaller rings, the other surrounded by larger rings) – evidence for this dissociation was found in various studies: In keeping with the well known effect of the illusion the disc surrounded by smaller rings was judged to be larger than the one surrounded by larger rings. In sharp contrast, however, when people reached out to pick up each of the discs in turn, grip-size scaling (thumb-finger opening) in-flight was solely matched to the actual size of the discs independent of the illusion (for an overview see Goodale & Milner, 2008).

In the last decade this hypothesis has been supplemented by an additional theoretical account: a functional interaction between the programming of action and the processing of number magnitude – proposed by Walsh (2003) – based on the assumption that quantity information like number magnitude and the size of objects for programming grip aperture are both represented by a single generalized magnitude system located in the parietal cortex. This theory was supported by behaviou-ral data showing an influence of number magnitude on various kinematic action parameters like initiation of opening/closure movements during grasping (Andres et al. 2004) the selection of grasping gestures (Moretto & di Pellegrino, 2008), grip force (Viereck & Liesel (2010) and even the maximum grip aperture (Lindemann et al (2007). These data therefore strengthen the assumption that grasping and number processing are linked. There are however doubts whether it is really the dorsal stream that contributes to this interaction because all those para-meters that are influenced by numbers (grip selection, grip force and velocity of movement) are influenced in the same way by visual illusions and therefore may rather be ventrally driven. The only kinematic parameter for which it is argued that it is exclusively dorsally driven is the maximum grip aperture (MGA) (see Goodale 2008 for an overview). A closer look at the procedure of Lindemann et al (2007) however revealed that participants were forced to grasp the objects without any visual feedback. In another experiment where participants had full visual feedback (Andres et al, 2008) no influence of number magnitude on MGA was evident. This again resembles results of studies on visual illusions (no feedback – influence of the

ESPP2010

166

illusion on MGA; feedback – no influence (see for example Westwood & Goodale, 2003). Based on these considerations we assume that perception rather than grasping should be influenced by numbers. We therefore contrasted manual estimation (a typical perceptual measurement) with grasping. Participants in our study had to grasp black bars with small or large numbers on it or they had to estimate the length of these bars manually with their index finger and thumb. Data showed a small influence of numbers only for perception and none for grasping.

LINDA APSE, ĢIRTS BURGMANIS, ZAIGA KRIŠJĀNE AND JURGIS SKILTERS The Structure of Spatial Cognition and Perception of Environment: Evidence from Latvia

Our study explores perception of geographic environment and its encoding into the system of spatial prepositions. Furthermore, we analyze the constraining mechanisms in cognitive processing of spatial information in general. Our guiding assumption that is tested both empirically (analysing different focus groups) and computationally (corpus analysis) is that spatial prepositional structure is a strong system of cognitive constraining that links linguistic representations with cognitive topology and a wide range of functional knowledge (socio-economic factors including).

In analyzing spatial language we, first, define the structural invariants of cognitive topology involved in processing geographic information. Further, we reconstruct certain mental models of language users with respect to comprehension of geographic environment assuming the prepositional system as structural invariants of spatial cognition.

Further we explore the divergences between the so called objective topology of environment and the cognitive topology of environment constrained by (a) geometric and functional knowledge (Coventry & Garrod, 2004), and (b) individual’s spatial experience linked to a variety of social factors (e.g. place of residence, socio-economic background which reflects the level of income, gender, age, period of life-cycle and ethnicity; the factors of environmental quality such as physical

Bochum & Essen

167

safety, quality of local environment, social infrastructure, social milieu, landscape, transport accessibility and leisure opportu-nities). The results of our study suggest that in comprehension of spatial environment we generate a mental map different from the physical environment; the mental map contains different scopes of search domains for prepositions where the scope depends on the location of the living place (home) of the test person (for different theoretical frameworks cp.: Carlson & Kenny, 2005, Downs, & Stea, 1973, Tuan, 1977). We assume there is the following correlation: the more central (within a city) is the home of a test person the bigger is the scope of the search domain, e.g. the region denoted by “near the house” is larger for those who live more central in city.

Our results have direct implications for explaining seman-tics of spatial prepositions and other spatial expressions as well. Our study has used a twofold complementary methodology:

a. we use large scale empirical results from a focus group analysis, i.e. categorization experiments used on the perception of environmental information in city;

b. we implement a corpus analysis in extraction and research of spatial collocations containing the relevant prepositions.

References Carlson, L. A & Kenny, R.. (2005). Constraints on Spatial

Language Comprehension. In D. Pecher & R. A. Zwaan (Eds), The Grounding of Cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language and thinking (pp. 35-64). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Downs, R., & Stea, D. (1973). Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.

Coventry, K.R. & Garrod, S.C. (2004). Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial Prepositions. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

Tuan, Y-F. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Expierence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

ESPP2010

168

Thursday, August 26th 14.00 – 15.30 Room IV

Paper Session 21: Conditionals and Word Learning

BRIAN LEAHY The Function of Conditional Sentences

On some accounts, the function of a reproduced device – a biological mechanism, a linguistic device – is whatever it causes that keeps it getting reproduced. As a result, we can test the function of a device – biological or linguistic – counterfactually, by looking for effects of that device such that, if that device should cease to have those effects, the device would cease being selected for/reproduced. The is the foundation of Millikan-style semantics (Millikan 1984), (Millikan 2005): to give a semantics for a linguistic device is, in the first instance, to give its function. However, Millikan’s theory does not as yet account for the function of conditional sentences.

I argue that conditionals have only relational proper functions, and that they have fully fledged “adapted” proper functions only relative to other representations. Then I provide a modification of the counterfactual test outlined above that allows us to explore the relational proper functions of conditionals.

ARTHUR MERIN The Myth of Conditional Acts

It is alleged that there exist, in our world, explicitly conditional acts, which become acts when some condition specified in their verbal performance is true, but which remain non-acts of the consequent genre otherwise or simply non-acts. It is shown, first, by appeal to juridical considerations that the claim is false, then also by more mathematical arguments that it is false

Bochum & Essen

169

for commands aas well as both implausible and superfluous for questions. A similarly mathematical argument about assertions is in Merin (2007).

SUSANNE GRASSMANN Inferences by exclusion in word learning and beyond

Young children learn some object labels by exclusion. That is, when they hear a novel word they exclude as referents objects for which they already know a name. Explanations for this effect focus on children’s assumptions about object categories (Markman, 1990) or on children’s social-pragmatic under-standing of their communicative partners (Clark, 1990). There is growing evidence that social-pragmatic information is prima-ry and lexical-semantic information is derivative (Diesendruck, 2005; Saylor, Baldwin, & Sabbagh, 2004).

In my talk I will present a series of new studies that exa-mined the conditions of children’s word learning by exclusion in order to determine the pragmatic origin of the underlying infe-rence. Additionally, I will present an analysis of the logical structure of word learning by exclusion. Specifically, I suggest it comprises a complex inference of a Modus Tollens embedded in a Disjunctive Syllogism. This analysis makes it possible to identify inferences that are similar to the exclusion in word learning in other domains.

I propose a new view of word learning by exclusion as resulting from children’s social-pragmatic understanding of how and why people direct one another’s attention to different things, which has its roots in pre-verbal communication and which is likely to apply to many more domains in communi-cation than just reference resolution and object label learning.

ESPP2010

170

Thursday, August 26th 14.00 – 15.30 Room V

Paper Session 22: Pragmatics

CORNELIA SCHULZE, SUSANNE GRASSMANN AND MICHAEL TOMASELLO Relevance inferences in 3-year-olds

In every-day conversation, speakers often communicate mea-ning indirectly beyond that what they explicitly say. Recipients therefore need to infer the speaker’s actual communicative intention. Consider a child holding a packet of biscuits asking her mother: “May I eat biscuits?”. And the mother answers: “We are having lunch in a couple of minutes.”

This answer is a typical utterance that requires a relevance inference, since the mother’s reply to the child’s question at first seems irrelevant as it does not convey the appropriate information (yes or no) required by the child. Relevance inferences rely on the assumption that a rational cooperative speaker would only provide relevant information (Grice 1975/1989, Sperber & Wilson 1985/1996).

To address the question whether young children are able to derive relevance inferences, we conducted a study with 36-month-old children (range 2.10-3.2 years of age). An object-selection task was used. Two experimenters played a game with a child that required an object to use with an apparatus. E1 asked the child to hand E2 a particular object (e.g., “Should we give you the elephant?”) and E2 indirectly agreed or disagreed to this by expressing her general preference or dislike (e.g., “I like elephants.” or “I don’t like lions“). Her remark (on the basis of what she says) therefore is not connected with the game-interaction. If children understood E2’s statement as relevant, they should infer that E2’s communicative intention was not to state her preference or dislike for a category of objects but rather to ask the child to give (or not give) her a particular object. Since affirmation and rejection are confounded with the

Bochum & Essen

171

presence of grammatical negation we varied both factors in a 2x2-design. Additionally, children’s understanding of negation was also assessed seperately in a 2-way object choice task in order to ensure that children’s success with the relevance infe-rence is not influenced by their understanding of negation as such.

Since de Villiers et al. (2009) suggest that children’s comprehension of relevance inferences correlates with their mastery of a false belief task, children’s understanding of other’s mental states was assessed by a first-order false-belief change of location-task.

We found that, when confronted with seemingly irrelevant utterances, young 3-year-olds are able to integrate these utterances into the current context by deriving relevance inferences. The children did not follow blindly the object selection request by E1, but interpreted E2’s utterance as being relevant to their object selection. The fact that in the current study even 3-year-olds were successful in making relevance inferences is especially interesting given that previous research found that only from 6 years on children are able to make rele-vance inferences (cf. Bucciarelli et al., 2003; de Villiers et al., 2009; Loukusa, Leinonen, & Ryder, 2007; Verbuk, 2009). We suggest that earlier studies’ results underestimated children’s pragmatic abilities, because of the complex and not very child-friendly methods employed. Furthermore, the current study shows that understanding relevance is independent of under-standing false belief. Rather, children use their knowledge of common ground as well as their basic intention-reading skills, which they’ve already acquired non-linguistically and used in early language acquisition.

References Bucciarelli, M., Colle, L., & Bara, B.G. (2003). How children

comprehend speech acts and communicative gestures. Journal of Pragmatics, 35 (2), 207-241.

de Villiers, P.A., de Villiers, J., Coles-White, D., & Carpenter, L. (2009). Acquisition of Relevance Implicatures in Typically-Developing Children and Children with Autism. In: J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, G.M. Rheiner (Eds), Proceedings of the 33th Annual Boston

ESPP2010

172

University Conference on Language Development (121-132). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press. Grice, H.P. (1975/1989). Studies in the way of words.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loukusa, S., Leinonen, E., & Ryder, N. (2007). Development of

pragmatic language comprehension in Finnish-speaking children. First Language, 27 (3), 279-296.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1985/1996). Relevance: Communi-cation and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Verbuk, A. (2009). Acquisition of Relevance Implicatures and Modularity. In: J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, G.M. Rheiner (Eds), Proceedings of the 33th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (575-586). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.

CHARLES LASSITER Grice’s Private Language Problem

Paul Grice’s theory of implicature is a landmark in pragmatics; the audience A hears an utterance performed by the speaker S and calculates, through the use of conversational maxims, what S meant by her utterance. Grice’s theory is plausibly a psychological one, giving an account of the mental processes performed by a subject to decode an unspoken message: S conveys p via x and A does some mental processing, figures out ‘in the head’, what S meant. For both S and A, figuring out (or predicting) that x conversationally implicates p is an internal affair. I argue in this paper that if this process is construed as internal – as happening entirely within the skin of the commu-nicative agents – then cases of implicature are impossible. This is because in order for S to implicate p via x to A, p must be calculable from x. What this amounts to is that A has to be able to ascribe to S the belief that p on the basis of S’s utterance x. But, the possibility of A’s ascribing to S the belief that p depends on S and A sharing an interpretation of the conversational maxims: S presumes that A can figure out what S meant and A has to manifest S’s presumption. While S and A may agree on the content of the conversational maxims, they

Bochum & Essen

173

may disagree as to how to interpret those maxims on some given occasion. If all implicature calculation is internal, then no two communicative agents knowingly share interpretations of the maxims, making implicature impossible. But, surely unspoken communication isn’t impossible, and I close by suggesting that implicature calculation is an external process in the way discussed by those philosophers, e.g. Andy Clark or Mark Rowlands, endorsing active externalism.

MATTHIAS UNTERHUBER AND GERHARD SCHURZ Gricean Factors Accounting for Failures

of Default-to-Stereotype Inferences? Connolly, Fodor, Gleitman, and Gleitman (2007) present theoretical and empirical evidence against the Default-to-Stereotype (in short: DS) inference and argue that prototype theories of concepts predict (DS)-inferences. Hence, they conclude that prototype theories of concepts are inadequate. Jönsson and Hampton (2008) and Hampton, Jönsson, and Passanisi (2009), however, show that Gricean pragmatic effects can largely account for Connolly et al.’s empirical results. Despite this fact, they interpret a minor but still substantial part of the findings as a genuine deviation from the (DS)-inference rule. In this paper we, first, critically review the theoretical arguments against prototype theories by Connolly et al. (2007). Second, we call for a closer inspection of Connolly et al.’s findings in terms of Gricean effects. In particular, (a) non-redundancy preferences and (b) informa-tiveness suppositions seem to be relevant Gricean factors.

ESPP2010

174


Paper Session 24: Theories of Social Cognition

LEON DE BRUIN AND DEREK STRIJBOS A Developmental Theory of Intention Attribution

In this article we present the basic building blocks of a developmental model of intention attribution. Our main aim is to explain the ontogenetic relation between the attribution of motor-intentions (M-intentions) on the one, and the attribution of non-linguistically specified affordance-intentions (A-inten-tions) and linguistically specified affordance-intentions (LSA-intentions) on the other hand. We argue in particular that the ability to attribute A- and LSA-intentions is developmentally continuous with the ability to attribute M-intentions, in the sense that both can be explicated in terms of offline resonance-inhibition processes. However, the attribution of individuated A- and LSA-intentions depends on a second-order mode of offline resonance that requires not only the inhibition of action (as in the first-order mode of offline resonance that is charac-teristic for M-intention and ‘naked’ A- and LSA-intention attribution), but also the inhibition of perception.

HANNES RAKOCZY Understanding direction of fit in children’s developing theory of mind

Intentional states and speech acts fall into two broad classes depending on their so-called direction of fit (Anscombe, 1957; Searle, 1983): Propositional attitudes such as beliefs and perceptions, and speech acts of assertion have mind (word)-to-world direction of fit. These states and acts are said to aim at truth, their job description, so to speak, being to bring them-selves in line with how the world is. In contrast, intentional

Bochum & Essen

175

states such as desires and intentions, and directive speech acts have the opposing, world-to-mind (word) direction of fit. Their job description, so to speak, is to bring the world in line with the content of the representational state or act, and they thus do not aim at truth, but at fulfillment.

In the present talk, I pursue the question how children come to understand these different directions of fit and their normative implications in their developing theory of mind reasoning. First, some recent studies on young children’s (aged 3-5) developing understanding of different propositional atti-tudes with different directions of fit, beliefs versus desires in particular, will be reported (Rakoczy, in press; Rakoczy, Barthel & Peters, in preparation). These studies suggest that in cognitive development some attitudes with world-to mind direction of fit are grasped earlier than analogous ones with mind-to-world direction of fit.

Second, a recent set of studies on children’s understanding of the normative structure of speech acts will be presented (Rakoczy & Tomasello, 2009; Lohse & Rakoczy, in preparation). Young children (aged 2-3) in these studies showed some basic awareness of the normative structure of different speech acts with different directions of fit: There were two characters, a speaker who said something about the actor with a fixed propositional content (e.g. to the effect that “the actor takes object X”), who did something that did not match what the actor said. In one condition, the speaker made an assertion (e.g. “the actor is taking object X”), whereas in the other condition, the same content was embedded in a directive speech act “actor, take object X”). Slightly older children (age 3) understood the basic normative structure of both kinds of acts: they criticized the speaker in the assertion case and the actor in the directive case. The younger children (age 2), however, only showed clear signs of understanding the normative consequences of the directive acts.

These findings will then be discussed with regard to the question whether children’s developing understanding of intentionality proceeds in such an asymmetrical way (world-to-mind first), and if so, what potential explanations there might be. One possibility is that the normative structure involved in beliefs – their aiming at truth – makes them particularly diffi-

ESPP2010

176

cult to understand and ascribe: In ascribing subjective, poten-tially false beliefs to others one has to deviate from a normative standard, namely truth. No such deviation is required for ascribing subjective desire, as there is no question of truth or other objective normative standard (at least according to a Humean conception of desires). This possibility, and some recent empirical evidence that speaks to it, will be discussed more carefully.

OLLE BLOMBERG Joint Action for Kids

Philosophical accounts of joint action typically appeal to the existence of joint/shared/ collective intentions and require participants to have highly sophisticated socio-cognitive capacities. For a joint intention to be in place, on Bratman’s account (1992; 1993; 2009), the agents involved must both have the capacity to read the intentions of other participants, as well as the capacity to understand others in terms of mental states such as beliefs. But infants and toddlers engage in coordinated activities (such as pretend play) which, intuitively at least, appear to be involve joint action, despite the fact that they do not have the allegedly required mind-reading capaci-ties. In this paper I examine Deborah Tollefsen’s intention-in-action version of Bratman’s account (2005), which is tailored to deal with the joint actions of infants and toddlers, but find it wanting because it still requires capacities in children which they lack. But neither is it adequate to simply account for the joint activities of young children in terms of “thin joint actions” that merely involve participants happening to share a goal (see also Pacherie & Dokic 2006).

Tollefsen (2005) argues that what she calls the mutual responsiveness problem of Bratman’s view (1-3-year-olds, while being able to participate in joint action, aren’t able to respond to the intentions of others in the way required by his account), can be avoided by reading Bratman’s conditions on shared intention being in place as about intentions-in-action rather than prior intentions (Searle 1983). Unlike prior intentions, such intentions are behaviourally overt, according to Tollefsen, and therefore available as objects of joint attention and

Bochum & Essen

177

perception. I think Tollefsen’s revised account is promising, but her revised account, unlike Bratman’s, requires infants and toddlers to be able not only to perceive, but also to have intentions-in-action which have the content “that we J” (such contents are less problematic in the case of prior intentions, see Bratman [1999]). But there are good reasons to think that intentions-in-action with that kind of content are, if not impossible, then at least very rare. Furthermore, it is unlikely that intentions-in-action are the kind of states that can be perceived. The general approach of Tollefsen, as well as Pacherie and Dokic, is right: to look for constraints on accounts of joint action based on the kind of capacities that participants have when it comes to understanding other minds, plan and coordinate actions. However, the accounts they propose are unsatisfactory when it comes to the joint activities of young children.

ESPP2010

178

Friday, August 27th 11.45 – 13.15 Room 2b (Level 4)


KELLIE WILLIAMSON Are Groups Thinkers?

Our everyday language treats certain groups of people as if they are thinkers. We often attribute to groups the same sort of mental states that we attribute to individual thinkers. We talk of companies as being responsible, sporting teams as regretting, groups of friends as remembering, and juries as believing. But just how accurate are these expressions? Are these mental state ascriptions capturing something real about the world?

This question of whether or not group minds are real has caught the attention of a wide range of researchers in philosophy, and increasingly in psychology and the cognitive sciences. As is to be expected, not everybody agrees that groups have mental states in their own right. Instead, it is argued, group beliefs or group desires are merely the aggregation of individual beliefs or desires. This argument is often framed in terms of the reduction of group mental states to individual mental states. According to this particular reductionist strategy, group mental states are nothing more than the aggregation of individual mental states. If this is the case, then group mental states are explanatorily superfluous, and what may appear to be a group level phenomenon is actually an individual level phenomenon.

My research brings together two distinct, yet complemen-tary, ways of thinking about group mental states as real and distinct from the mental states of individuals. I argue that by integrating work from social ontology and philosophy of science, we are able to get a clearer understanding of the nature of groups as thinkers.

Bochum & Essen

179

In addressing the problem of group mental states, work in social ontology has sought to show that group mental states are starkly different and discontinuous with individual mental states. For example, in some group situations the beliefs of individuals, even if aggregated to get a majority, can be the opposite of the group’s belief (Pettit 2003, Gilbert 1992). While this is a promising way of showing that group mental states are real and distinct from the individuals’ mental states, I question just how strong the discontinuity has to be.

To do this, I invoke a mechanistic account of emergence from the philosophy of science. On this account, group mental states emerge from the organisation of individual mental states (Theiner and O’Connor In Press). I argue that a mechanistic account of emergence has the resources to explain situations where, in contrast to the social ontology examples, there is not clear-cut discontinuation between group properties and individual properties. Mechanistic emergence shows that in situations of this kind the relation between group and individual mental states is more than mere aggregation.

One of the advantages of adopting the framework of mechanistic emergence is that it provides us with a new way of thinking about reduction. I show that by adopting a characteri-sation of reduction that is informed by mechanistic emergence it is possible to reduce explanations of group mental states to explanations of individual mental states, without denying that group mental states are real.

EVA-MARIA JUNG

The concept of practical knowledge in enactivism One of the main purposes of enactivist views in philosophy and cognitive sciences is to reject the so called ‘rules and represen-tations’ approach to cognitive phenomena. A main assumption shared by most enactivists is that we can make sense of our cognitive phenomena without referring to explicit, language-based representations, or knowledge. Enactivists usually hold that these approaches fail in appropriately explaining the cognitive realm by neglecting its embodied, enacted, and situated nature. Against the background of their famous

ESPP2010

180

sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience, O’Reagon and Noë argue that the specific character of our perceptual experience is based on ‘practical knowledge’ (or ‘skillful activity’) rather than on formal representations or (propositional) knowledge. Yet, Hutto (2005) and Rowlands (2007) have shown that appealing to these notions is highly problematic since enactivist approaches either lose their explanatory forces by referring to these concepts, or become assimilated to the representationalist approaches they try to reject.

The aim of the paper is twofold: First, I will investigate how the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ can best be understood within O’Reagon and Noë’s framework. Based upon recent discussions on ̕knowing how̕ and ̕knowing that̕ in philosophy (cf. Ryle 1949, Stanley/Williamson 2001, Stanley (forth-coming)), I will suggest four different possible interpretations for that concept: a non-representational understanding of ̕practical knowledge̕ and three representational ones that differ in the structure of representation (cf. Jung and Newen 2010). I will conclude that none of these interpretations can appropriately be integrated into O’Reagon and Noë’s enactivist approach. Yet, I will argue that even abandoning the concept of ‘practical knowledge’ is problematic. Second, based upon the foregoing considerations, I will draw some conclusions concer-ning the discussion between enactivism and representationa-lism in general. References Shaun Gallagher (2008): Philosophical antecedents of Situated

Cognition, in: Robbins, P. and Aydede, M. (eds): Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daniel D. Hutto (2005): Knowing what? Radical versus conservative enactivism, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, 389-405.

Eva-Maria Jung/Albert Newen (2010): Knowledge and Abilities: For a new understanding of knowing how, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, 113-131.

Bochum & Essen

181

J. K. O’Reagon/A. Noë (2001): A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24: 939-1031.

Mark Rowlands (2007): Understanding the ‘active’ in ‘enactive’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 , 427-443.

Gilbert Ryle (1949): The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.

Jason Stanley/Timothy Williamson (2001): Knowing how, The Journal of Philosophy,

Jason Stanley (forthcoming): Knowing (how), Noũs.

MARTIN GODWYN

Extended Cognition and the Coupling-Constitution Fallacy In recent years a number of cognitive scientists and philosophers have advanced the thesis that an individual’s cognitive processes or states sometimes lie (at least in part) outside of their brain or body. The purpose of this paper is to defend this view – which I shall refer to as ‘extended cognitivism’ – against a recent line of criticism from two of its most prominent critics: Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa. They argue that the extended cognitivist commits what they call the ‘coupling-constitution fallacy’. This fallacy, they suggest, ‘is the most common mistake that extended mind theorists make’ and which (they contend) involves a tacit move from the obser-vation that process X is in some way causally connected (coupled) to a cognitive process Y to the conclusion that X is part of the cognitive process Y. After setting out some important definitions that allow us to state extended cogniti-vism precisely, I argue that their objection fails in at least two distinct respects. Firstly, it mischaracterises the essential argumentative basis for the extended cognitivist position and presents, thereby, a straw man. Secondly, and notwithstanding the first respect, it places too strong a demand on functional explanation generally, and, qua species of functional explanation, on cognitive explanation in particular.

ESPP2010

182



GEORG KJOLL Semantic externalism and the representation of abstract objects

Externalism about semantic content, seen here as the claim that the content of concepts and/or words are primarily consti-tuted by their standing in a referential/correspondance relation to something in the world, is a widely held philosophical thesis. However, many theorists see the fact that much of people’s thoughts and utterances are about abstract entities (Chomsky 2000, Hinzen 2007, Jackendoff 2002, McGilvray 2002, Rey 2005, Stainton 2006) as a prima facie objection to strong versions of externalism. Even though the theory might be well suited to explain how content is constituted in such cases as ‘table’, ‘chair’ and ‘dog’, it inevitably fails when forced to address how people think and speak about things without directly perceivable spatio-temporal realisations, such as infla-tion, feminism, democracy and reputation, the argument goes.

In this paper I address this critique and show how one particular version of externalism, the informational semantics of Jerry Fodor (1998, 2008), can deal with the problematic case of abstract objects.

The paper is made up of a negative and a positive component. The negative part consists of showing that much of the anti-externalist critique relies on an equivocation of different uses of the term “reference” and diverging views of what semantics amount to. I argue that that semantic content is best conceived of as constituted by a brute-causal relation between concepts and properties, not words and the world, and hold that the many ways in which a word such as ‘London’ can be used to talk about the world (see e.g. Chomsky 2000: 37)

Bochum & Essen

183

should be accounted for by a pragmatic, not semantic, framework. Furthermore, I show how Fodor isn’t committed to conceptual content having to be constituted by direct perceptual access. I argue that the way he allows for deference (Putnam 1975, Burge 1979) to play a role in “mediating mechanisms of seman-tic access” (Fodor 1998) makes his account both ontologically and epistemologically neutral with respect to what abstract entities are and how individual thinkers get acquainted with them.

The positive side of the argument consists of supplementing informational semantics with a cognitive and pragmatic expla-nation for how beliefs can be transferred in conversation, and how novel, individual concepts can be derived from these. Using Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Wilson and Sperber 2004), I show how the metapsychological capacity underlying successful inferential-intentional communication also plays a role in the acquisition and representation of beliefs about entities that are not directly perceived or even perceivable.

My claim is that the ability to adopt the beliefs of trusted others and a willingness to act upon them as one’s own is what underlies the way people acquire concepts denoting abstract entities. I conclude by outlining some consequences of the theory for semantics and epistemology, and ask whether all abstract entities are amenable to the deferential treatment I have proposed. List of references Burge, Tyler 1979: ‘Individualism and the mental’. In Studies

in Metaphysics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. IV. French, P.A., T. E. Uehling and H. K. Wettstein (eds.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 73-121.

Chomsky, Noam 2000: New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fodor, Jerry A. 1998: Concepts: where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fodor, Jerry A. 2008: LOT 2: the language of thought revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ESPP2010

184

Hinzen, Wolfram 2007: An essay on names and truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackendoff, Ray 2002: Foundations of language: brain,

meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McGilvray, James 2002: ‘MOPs: the Science of Concepts’. In Belief and meaning: essays at the interface. Hinzen, W. and Rott, H. (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Hansel-Hohenhausen.

Putnam, Hilary 1975: ‘The meaning of ‘meaning’’. In Philosophical papers, volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-71.

Rey, Georges. 2005: ‘Philosophical analysis as cognitive psychology: the Case of empty concepts. In Cohen, H. and Lefebvre, C. (eds.), Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Dordrecht: Elsevier, pp. 71-89.

Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre 1995: Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell:

Stainton, Robert J. 2006 ‘Meaning and reference: some Chomskian themes’. In Lepore, E. and Smith. B. C (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 913-941

Wilson, Deirdre and Sperber, Dan 2004: ‘Relevance Theory’. In The Handbook of pragmatics. Horn, Laurence R. and Ward, Gregory L. (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 607-32.

LIEVEN DECOCK AND IGOR DOUVEN Similarity after Goodman

In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recentwork on similarity in psychology and cognitive science.

Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account toshow that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of similarity.

Bochum & Essen

185

VINCENT C. MÜLLER Which symbol grounding problem should we try to solve?

The traditional symbol grounding problem suggests that mere syntactic symbol manipulation in a computer will never lead to meaning – notoriously formulated in John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room argument’. So, how can the symbols in a computational system be ‘grounded’ such that they acquire that causal link to their referents? Some people in AI, notably Luc Steels, have claimed that interactive talking robots have solved this grounding problem. The traditional response of anti-compu-tationalism is that robotics provides just ‘more data’ to the central processor of the system – and ‘more data’ is ‘just more Chinese’, no matter where that data comes from. I want to suggest that this response says something right, but ignores the depth of embodied robotics. The proposed solution is that there are really two symbol grounding problems, only one of which robotics is presently in the position to attack - and perhaps this is quite sufficient.

ESPP2010

186


Paper Session 27: Linguistic Knowledge

DELPHINE BLITMAN What is innateness? The lessons of linguistic nativism

Nativism is still a high controversial topic in cognitive science. Not only because nativist claims remain controversial, but also because, at a conceptual level, the way the notion of innateness has to be defined is not clear. This confusion leads a number of philosophers and cognitive psychologists to claim that the notion is more harmful than useful and must be eliminated (s. for example Griffiths & Machery 2008). However, nativist programs, such as, perhaps first of all, Chomsky’s one in linguistics, but also the evolutionary psychology and the so-called core knowledge research program, have been and still are of great importance for cognitive science. This contrast consti-tutes a kind of paradox, which has to be solved.

In cognitive science, Chomsky’s research program played a foundational role. Against empiricism and behaviorism, which were dominant at the end of the fifties in the philosophy and in the American psychology as well, Chomsky showed the methodological contribution of a nativist perspective for the study of mental faculties and particularly language (s. Chomsky 1975, 1986). It has been used as a model for the study of other cognitive functions. That’s why it constitutes a crucial case study to clarify the notion of innateness. The aim of this article is to investigate what meaning can be given to the innateness of the language faculty in Chomsky’s theory and to show how it contributes to clarify the notion of innateness as used more generally in cognitive science.

In a first part, I examine what it means for the language faculty to be innate. I dissociate Chomsky’s thesis from the idea of a genetic determination of the language faculty

Bochum & Essen

187

Chomsky calls Universal Grammar. Against what Chomsky himself sometimes writes, I argue that it is no sense to inter-pret linguistic nativism as a genetic claim. Moreover, the interpretation we give to linguistic nativism must be compa-tible with the “interactionist consensus” in biology, as Griffiths and Sterelny. Interactionism means that for each trait of the organism development involves the genes and the environment as well. So I emphasize that Chomsky’s claim is about the modularity and the domain-specificity of the language faculty.

In a second part, I compare the meaning, which can be given, I think, to the innateness of the language faculty with two other examples, which involve the notion of innateness: the case of genetic diseases and the case of birdsong. I make the point that in these three cases the opposition of the innate and the acquired has a different meaning. Then I present the general conclusions I draw from this analysis: the notion of innateness has no absolute or general meaning. A series of particular definitions, specific to each case or each kind of cases must be substituted a general notion of innateness.

HIROYUKI UCHIDA AND NICK CASSIMATIS A singular NP lattice without explicit quantification

This paper provides a uniform type e analysis of the semantics of all the singular noun phrases (NPs) in natural language, which include quantificational NPs (QNPs) such as “every boy” and “a girl”. The analysis extends Link’s (1983) lattice structures for plural and mass terms to singular QNPs.

A standard predicate logic does not have individual constant terms for such QNPs. This is because the interpre-tation models in which we interpret a Predicate Logic language do not have adequate individual denotations for QNPs. For example, a conceivable logical form

‘smoke (everyboy)’

would not capture the semantics of “Every boy smokes”, since there is no adequate individual that the term ‘everyboy’ can

ESPP2010

188

denote in a standard interpretation model. Thus, a standard analysis uses an expli tly quantified logical form such as ci

‘ x(boy(x) → smoke(x)).’

However, using explicitly quantified formulas to represent the semantics of natural language sentences poses difficulty for the natural language syntax that pairs phonological expressions with their semantics. At least, we cannot then interpret all the syntactic NPs as type e expressions. Moreover, a compositional derivation of such a logical form is not easy, since it normally involves the use of a free variable at an intermediate stage of the derivation. Also, use of explicitly quantified formulas makes the search for an interpretation model that satisfies a given set of propositions less efficient. This is because without an additional tool, interpretations of universally quantified formu-las will require an exhaustive search through all the individuals in the domain with regard to the formulas in question. Such an exhaustive search is also cognitively implausible in the analysis of human’s spontaneous inferences. Use of a higher order logic as the semantic representation can solve the compositionality problem above, but the syntax might become undecidable and incomplete. Also, first order logic is generally preferred to higher order logic from the viewpoint of the efficiency of the inference.

Based on such considerations, we propose a first order predicate logic language that contains individual constant terms both for (singular) quantificational and referential NPs, together with novel model theoretic structures that have individuals that the proposed individual terms for the singular QNPs can denote. These individual denotations form particular lattice structures that correctly capture the logical entailment relations among the propositions that contain quantificational and referential NP expressions. We also show that we can deal with negated quantifier sentences with such lattice structures. We deal with scope ambiguity in natural language by way of the dependence and independence of the singular term for an indefinite (or an existential) NP relative to another ‘quantifier’ term, such as the term for “every boy”. After explaining our first order language without explicit quantifiers together with our novel model structures, we briefly show with an example

Bochum & Essen

189

how our system can improve the efficiency of the search for an interpretation model that satisfies a given set of formulas.

DAVID JAMES LOBINA Recursion and AGL tasks:

the significance of Marr’s levels of explanation Much of the “artificial grammar learning” literature (AGL) is currently focusing on recursion, but these studies are characte-rised by the blurring of Marr’s first two levels of analysis (the computational and the algorithmic), plus an incessant focus on the third level, the hardware implementation.

Roughly, this is the state of affairs: sets of production rules are used to generate sequences of nonsense syllables; some strings are generated by recursive rules (viz., a category on the left-hand side is rewritten on the right-hand side), yielding centre-embedding in some cases, crossed dependencies in others; appropriate tests are used to check if subjects are able to process the strings (or learn the rules); it has been noted that the mere processing of these strings is not a test for recursion, as many non-recursive strategies may be employed; modifications are introduced to make sure that subjects are processing the hierarchy of the strings correctly (by employing, inter alia, “cues”); and finally, brain scans identify the region activated during the processing of hierarchical strings.

Note the two extrapolations and the omission. Extrapo-lation 1: the ability to process the hierarchy of a string is taken to be synonymous with recursion (Friederici et al., 2006, p.2458), but this is not correct. Recursion always involves hierarchy, but not all hierarchy involves recursion. Further, non-recursive mechanisms are indeed capable of processing recursive structures such as self-embedding. The correct processing of hierarchical structures means not hierarchical processing building, let alone recursive processing building.

Extrapolation 2: we know humans possess a grammar in which recursion is a central property, a grammar that gene-rates hierarchical structures of a certain type, but this is a property of the grammar, and not necessarily of the parser. Recursive specifications of algorithms may well be implemented

ESPP2010

190

iteratively, and since the successful processing of hierarchical structures are performance data, much care must therefore be employed in the ascription of successful processing to properties of the grammar. One would naturally expect that linguistic knowledge makes processing and acquisition at all possible, but the relationship between competence and performance is rather tricky and not so straightforward. As Chomsky (1963, p.390) pointed out, even though a finite automaton can’t capture the basic facts of linguistic competence, the system underlying linguistic performance is in fact such a thing, with the obvious corollaries. Omission: there is a leap from the correct processing of hierarchical structures, by extrapolations 1 and 2, to the neural basis of recursion, but nothing is being said about the second level of analysis. That is, we know nothing about the actual operations and mechanisms being executed in the processing of these sequences.

It is here defended that AGL studies, much like psycho-linguistics, ought to postulate the operations that must be in place for the correct processing of certain structures in order to carry out a differential analysis. It is only thus that one can work out which operation is in fact crucial, and if this opera-tion requires a recursive step, the place of recursion therein.

Bochum & Essen

191


Paper Session 28: Realisation and Causation

GERALD VISION

Conscious Properties and their Realizers Physicalists, who holding that all is matter, believe that conscious properties such as pains can be regarded as identical with neurological configurations because the latter ‘realize’ the former. But a difference in the persistence conditions between them indicates that the two differ in their properties, and thus they cannot be identical. A familiar physicalist rejoinder is based on what I call ‘the generalization principle’,GP, which holds that anything’s modal properties must be reflected in its nonmodal properties. Since the properties implied by persis-tence conditions – dispositional properties – are modal, physicalists hold that it can be shown via GP that this argument for distinguishing the conscious from the material is no good. I argue that GP is simply false, and that others who have relied on it to make their case therefore fail.

MARKUS SCHLOSSER Real Mental Causation

According to Wegner (1999 and 2002), conscious will is an illusion. Wegner’s main argument for this view is an inference to the best explanation: a model of 2apparent mental causation” provides the best explanation of numerous curious, abnormal and pathological cases of human behaviour (called automatisms and illusions of control). In this paper, I will propose an alternative model of “real mental causation”, and I will argue that it can accommodate automatisms and illusions of control equally well. In the concluding section, I will briefly explain why there is ample reason to prefer the proposed model of real mental causation.

ESPP2010

192

VERA HOFFMANN-KOLSS The Supervenience Argument Is Alive and Kicking

Several authors have recently claimed that Kim’s supervenience argument, according to which mental properties cannot be causally relevant to physical properties, can be avoided if causal relevance is understood in terms of Woodward’s interventionist account of causation. I argue that the argument purported to establish this claim fails and that to the contrary, if causal relevance is defined along the lines suggested by Woodward, mental properties are causally pre-empted by the physical properties on which they supervene.

Bochum & Essen

193


Paper Session 29: Explanation

GERHARD CHR. BUKOW AND HOLGER LYRE

Grounding Experimental Realism in Cognitive Neuroscience The Cognitive Neuroscience investigate in cognitive functions and their affective and social modulations realized by the brain. Despite of thousands of experiments, there is no strong background theory of cognition and brain. How are experi-ments conducted and how are explanations given in absence of a strong background theory? How can we be sure to investigate “real entities” and not artifacts? The situation in Cognitive Neuroscience seems to be an ideal testbed for the experimental realist, who claims that we do not need to be committed to theory to be realist about entities.

VÍCTOR M VERDEJO Levels of Explanation Vindicated

Marr’s celebrated contribution to cognitive science (Marr 1982) was the introduction of (at least) three levels of description/ explanation. However, most contemporary research has rele-gated the distinction between levels to a rather dispensable remark. Ignoring such an important contribution comes at a price, or so I shall argue. In the present paper, first I review Marr’s main points and motivations regarding levels of explanation. Second, I examine three cases in which the distinc-tion between levels has been neglected when considering the structure of mental representations: Cummins et al.’s distinction between structural representation and encodings (Cummins 1996, Cummins et al. 2001), Calvo’s notion of dynamical constituency (Calvo Garzón 2004, 2008); and

ESPP2010

194

Fodor’s account of iconic representation (Fodor 2008). All these cases illustrate the kind of problems in which researchers can find themselves if they overlook distinctions between levels and how easily these problems can be solved when levels are carefully examined. As a conclusion, researchers in the cognitive sciences are well advised to avoid risks of confusion by respecting Marr’s old lesson.

KEVIN REUTER The Appearance-Reality Distinction of Pain Reconsidered

Many pain researchers claim that there is a tension between the semantic properties of pain and its conceptual role (e.g. Hill, Dretske). On the one hand, we ascribe pains to specific locations in the body (‘There is a pain in my stomach’) and treat them as objects external to the mind, on the other hand, we behave as if there was no distinction between the appearance and the reality of pains, e.g. if a person claims to experience a pain, then there really is a pain. I will show in this paper that people use expressions of pain in a way that challen-ges the rejection of the appearance-reality distinction of pain. I begin by introducing the appearance-reality distinction of the traditional five sense modalities in the first part of this paper. Moreover, children need to understand the appearance-reality distinction before they can make truly introspective judgments. I then expound why many philosophers believe that the appea-rance-reality distinction is not applicable to pain. The conceptual role of pain (CRP) simply seems to suggest that

(CRP): If a person feels a pain, then the person has a pain.

In the second part of this paper I argue that the intensity of a property of an object like saltiness, loudness, colour has a decisive effect on how confident people are in judging that objects really have this property. In turn, a low degree of confidence will often lead people to make introspective state-ments, ascribing the property to the content of their mental states (“the shirt looks blue”) rather than ascribing it to the non-mental object (“the shirt is blue”). The correlation between low signal intensity and introspection pervades all sense modalities but has not yet been identified for pain.

Bochum & Essen

195

I have done a web-based statistical analysis (section 3) that demonstrates that people use the phrase “having pain” about five times more often than “feeling a pain” when they describe a strong pain, but when they assert a less intense pain they use these two expressions with equal probability. This analysis shows that people are confident in ascribing pain to a body part only if the pain is sufficiently strong, and thus that they use expressions of pain in the same way as expressions of other sense modalities. These empirical results seem to make following argument sound: (1) Empirical data shows that the intensity of pain has a deci-

sive effect on whether people assert that they have a pain or feel a pain. (section 3)

(2) ‘Having a pain’ and ‘feeling a pain’ can be identified as objective report and introspective report respectively if their use demonstrates a dependency on the intensity of pain. (section 2)

(3) People’s ability to make objective and introspective reports on pain depends on them distinguishing the appearance from the reality of pain. (section 1)

From (1), (2) and (3) it follows: (4) People distinguish between the appearance and the reality

of pain. QED Thus, our ‘unconscious’ use of pain expressions contradicts our ‘conscious’ analysis of the concept of pain.

ESPP2010

196

ESPP2010

198

Wednesday, August 25th 16.00-17.15

Poster Session 1

LINDA APSE AND JURGIS SKILTERS Geometric Structure, Functional Knowledge, and Search Domain Determination: Evidence from the System of Spatial Prepositions in Latvian

The underlying assumption of the current study is that cognitive topology is structured according to (1) geometric structure, (2) functional knowledge (Coventry & Garrod, 2004) and (3) search domain determination. We assume a minimal model of spatial constraining of prepositional system (consis-tent with Svenonius, in press): PATH (trajectory) and PLACE (encoding the relations between the figure and ground) where PATH specifies the PLACE as the goal, source and orientation of the trajectory. Equally important is extra-geometric functional knowledge explaining the functional relations and interactions between objects (and how we use objects) in real world environments.

The linguistic evidence from Latvian, supported by a corpus study and an extensive focus group analysis, confirms the hypothesized perceptual and cognitive constraints on the prepositional system in Latvian. We present several case studies of some prepositions showing that the topological model described predicts the semantic structure of prepositions – in particular, the structural invariants PATH and PLACE. Both invariants encode the relations between the located object (figure) and the reference object (ground). The located object’s location is specified according to the reference object. The relation between the reference object and the located object is embedded in the preposition’s search domain (Carlson & Kenny, 2005), e.g.,:

Bochum & Essen

199

Jānis dzīvo aiz Rīgas Janis lives behind/beyond Riga.

Despite the clear distinction between the located object (Jānis) and the reference object (Rīga) the overall region (what is “behind/beyond Riga”) must be specified where, we think, the preposition’s search domain comes into play. The factors determining preposition’s search domain are to a large extent language specific and depend on social, cultural and functional knowledge structures combined with geometric regularities. Consider also the use of ‘on’ in the English constructions:

The fly is on the ceiling. The cake is on the table.

Where in the first case the ‘fly’ is located with respect to the ceiling in perceptually inverse relationship than, say, in a prototypical locative expression where the object is on top of the object designating location. Also, ‘the cake’ is not directly on the table as the cake is perhaps on a tray and then the tray with the cake is on the table. The preposition’s search domain resolves most of such possible ambiguities and vagueness in processing yielding a contextually relevant interpretation. The change of preposition’s search domain determines the relations between the figure and ground regions of the prepositional expression. The other determinants of the search domain depend on the situational and experiential parameters of the agent.

An interesting range of examples where the geometric relations are secondary with respect to extageometric know-ledge is the use of Latvian locative:

Kurpes kājā (loc.) Shoes are in the feet. Mētelis mugurā (loc.) The coat is in the back.

ESPP2010

200

We also get a potentially ambiguous construction in Latvian where

Cimdi rokā (loc.) Gloves in the hands.

can be interpreted either as where the gloves enclose the hand or where the gloves are contained in the hands (enclosure vs. containment).

The extra-geometric knowledge provides for a cognitive mechanism that assigns only one particular meaning to such linguistic constructions depending on and taking into account the situational context.

In fact, different prepositions may differ with respect to what extent the extra-geometric, functional knowledge and to what extent the geometric invariants determine the meaning of a preposition’s search domain. References Carlson, L. A & Kenny, R.. (2005). Constraints on Spatial

Language Comprehension. In D. Pecher & R. A. Zwaan (Eds), The Grounding of Cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language and thinking (pp. 35-64). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coventry, K.R. & Garrod, S.C. (2004). Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial Prepositions. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

Svenonius, P. (in press). Spatial P in English. In G. Cinque & Luigi Rizzi (Eds.), The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MAJID DAVOODY BENI Empirical Psychology and Fregean mathematical ontolog

Quine (1969) have baptized boldly natural science as the only legitimate form of knowledge and accordingly denied existence of any a priori status for philosophers to estimate scientific claims. But he disregarded his own advice in the case of psychology. There he denied subduing to eminent scientists’

Bochum & Essen

201

(psychologists’) opinion in preferring cognitive science to behaviorism. How this issue can be resolved? Taking Quine’s naturalism seriously we will deprive ourselves of any criterion for judging the case, so in what follows I propose a Fregean solution for this lack of criterion in deciding the situation.

SARA BIZARRO First Person Authority and Mental Imagery

The debate on Mental Imagery (Pylyshyn, Kosslyn, Fodor, Block, etc) is the discussion of whether our mental imagery is more spacial or visual in nature or more syntactical or abstract. Even though there is no definite resolution for this debate, it does seem to have consequences for issues such as First Person Authority, Consciousness and Epistemology of Psychology. In this poster I will present some of the experiments usually presented in the mental imagery debate and show how the fact that such simple experiments can have different interpretations has consequences for the debate on first person authority.

ANNA CIAUNICA Incommunicable Knowledge: Back to Mary with ‘Ramseyan Humility’

Recently, Nagasawa (2008) has claimed that both Jackson’s Mary and Nagel’s bat arguments fail to derive the conclusion that physicalism is false and drew a parallel between these two knowledge arguments (KA) and two other arguments from philosophy of religion, namely the argument from concept possession, and Grim’s argument (1991) from knowledge de se. He consequently argues that the failure of both KA leads us to an interesting metaphysical view, called ‘nontheoretical physicalism’ (NP), i.e. the position which holds that although the world is entirely physically uniform, it is not necessarily theoretically uniform. According to Nagasawa, what Mary learns by reading text books and watching television is all theoretically communicable physical facts. In other words, room is left for some incommunicable physical facts: the perception of color might be one of them.

In this paper I discuss one particular and unexpected consequence of Nagasawa’s NP: more specifically, I argue that

ESPP2010

202

its rejection of the thesis that everything in this world is subsumed by complete communicable theoretical physical facts goes much further than Nagasawa’s initial intentions, that is to say, NP proves too much and might undermine the very core of the metaphysical ambitions of today’s physicalism itself.

What follows falls into two parts: in section (I) I briefly summarize Nagasawa’s NP and introduce the ‘Ramseyan humility’ thesis (Lewis 2009) as applied to KA. In section (II) I put forward an argument designed to illustrate that from the premise that grasping phenomenal properties is a form of knowledge which is not reducible to theoretical communicable knowledge of physical facts, one might derive the conclusion that a priori physicalism is grounded on a godlike type of knowledge (Jackson 2007) in contrast with a “human-Mary”-type knowledge.

STEFAN FLOREK Aesthetic evaluation and the mere exposure effect – an investigation in philosophy and psychology

The question of what constitutes beauty of artwork has been a subject of philosophical debate for centuries. With the beginning of the XX-century this problem became also a subject of investigations undertaken by sciences, and for the last two decades by cognitive neuroscience. Although philosophical and scientific perspectives appear to be completely different, it is possible to find some convergences between results gained both by philosophers and neuroscientists. An interesting and striking similarity may be noticed between the theory of visual art proposed by the founder of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki and the theory of an aesthetic experience developed by the Polish phenomenologist, Roman Ingarden.

Though the theory invented by Ingarden primarily focused on literary work, he underlied that its validity may be also extended to other forms of art. Ingarden and Zeki unanimously maintain that a genuine work of art is in some sense incomplete and ambiguous. Therefore, both completing the aesthetic object in a coherent manner and finding the interpretation of artwork demand an creative activity of

Bochum & Essen

203

spectator’s brain/ mind. This kind of activity seems to be required when we want to solve cognitive problems emerged from the complexity and ambiguity of artwork. Process of searching for a solution may occur at different levels, starting with the purely perceptual level and aiming at the conceptual one. Moreover such the complex process seems to be directed by affective clues. The pleasant affective arousal that is a base of positive aesthetic evaluation may be at the same time under-stood in terms of feedback that the solution has already been found. This account suggests that essential feature of a genuine work of art is its novelty. It is so, because once solved problem cannot be a real problem when it appears again. Simultanously, strength of aesthetic preference for the work of art should be weaker if the artifact were seen many times before and if there is high probability that all its “areas of indetermination” have been fulfilled in a coherent interpretation. This hypothesis derived from the stance of both Zeki and Ingarden is to some extent contrary to the theory of mere exposure and for this reason it seems to be very interesting.

An empirical study was conducted to test this hypothesis. Pictures of well-known as well as unknown paintings were presented to undergraduate students. After being shown each painting participants had to estimate its beauty (on a scale of 1 to 5) and their familiarity with the artwork in question (by estimating how many times before they had seen it). Finally, the participants completed NEO Five Factor Personality Inventory (analysis of data in progress).

The results showed that for some paintings aesthetic evaluations were significantly higher (p < 0.05) when participants had been less familiar with them. It is hard to reconcile this result with the mere exposure effect, but if fits well with the elaborated hypothesis. Presumably as it can be inferred from theories of Zeki and Ingarden, the mere exposure effect vanishes in case of some works of art. On the other hand, fact that the hypothesis was not confirmed in case of all presented paintings suggests that Zeki’s and Ingarden’s idea of incompleteness and ambiguity as a mark of great artwork is not fully satisfactory.

ESPP2010

204

ILARIA GRAZZANI AND VERONICA ORNAGHI

Improving 3 and 4 year-old children’s theory of mind: a training study with language games

The theoretical background of this study deals with the role of language in developing theory of mind (Astington, Baird, 2005). The study investigates whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a causal role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants recluted in Milan and hinterland were divided into two age groups (3 year olds and 4 year olds) and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. All participants were pre- and post-tested with linguistic and cognitive measures. Analyses of pre-test data did not show any significant differences between experimental and control groups. During a two-month period of intervention, children were read stories enriched with mental lexicon. After listening to the story, the experimental group took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating them to use mental terms. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any special linguistic activities. The experimental group outperformed the control group on language comprehension, comprehension of metacognitive verbs, comprehension of emo-tion, and, especially in the 4 year old group, on false belief understanding. No significant age and gender differences emerged. These findings support the hypothesis that language is an important factor in children’s development of theory of mind.

MARIE JUANCHICH, DENIS HILTON AND DAVID E. OVER Uncertain conditional statement: descriptive form but performative goal

In these studies, we examined the interpersonal effects of uttering simple indicative conditionals that – on the surface of it – seem to express disinterested “scientific” knowledge descri-

Bochum & Essen

205

bing the expected relation between a cause and effect. For example, the indicative conditionals “If you take this treatment, there is a 40% chance that you will be cured” and “If you take this treatment there is a 60% chance that you will not be cured” appear to express the same relationship between cause and effect. Yet in many advice situations these indicative conditionals are likely to be interpreted as conveying a “deontic” message, as they contain an implicit recommendation that the hearer should (or should not) take the treatment in question. Moreover, this effect on the hearer seems to occur despite the fact that the same “scientific” information is expressed in the two formulations. We propose a pragmatic perspective in which the framing of uncertainty expression gives polarity to conditional advice. E.g., “If Anne takes out this loan, it’s not certain that her business will work out” vs. “If Anne takes out this loan, there is a chance that her business will work out”. Using a within-subjects design, the first experiment demonstrated the performative function of polarity of numerical and verbal probabilities in conditional advice. We argue that accentuating positive or negative aspects of the outcome through the formulation chosen can determine whether the expression is interpreted as encouraging or discouraging the action in question. We accordingly measured the participants’ willingness to recommend the action in question, their subjective proba-bility that the target outcome would occur in the absence of the target action being taken (p(q|Γp), and their evaluation of the balance of reasons for and against taking course of action in question.

Our results confirm that the polarity of conditional advice has a strong impact on willingness to follow advice. Further-more the polarity of the conditional influenced the balance of reasons: people had in mind reasons more favorable to the outcome occurrence after the reading of a positive conditional statement than after a negative polarity one. Also the polarity of uncertain conditional in the numerical condition (if you do this, there is a 20% probability that you’ll have that) influenced the subjective probability (q|Γp); this probability was higher when the framing was negative (if you do that, there is an 80% probability that you won’t have that).

ESPP2010

206

In a second experiment using a within-subject design, we studied two potential mediators of the polarity effect on this decision: the available balance of pro and con reasons and the subjective probability of q if not p (P(q|Γp)). Our mediation hypothesis by P(q|Γp) was rejected, whereas we found strong support toward the mediation of the decision by the available balance of reasons. We found important implications of those variables on subsequent reasoning and decision making. We will discuss these results within the theoretical frameworks of reason based decision making (Shafir, Simonson and Tversky, 1993) and expected utility.

MARTIN JUNGE, VERA LOUREIRO DE ASSUNCAO AND RAINER REISENZEIN The near miss effect: Counterfactual thinking or disconfirmation of expectancies?

Everyday experience tells us that near misses – the near-occurrence of a desired or an undesired outcome – elicit more intense emotions than far misses. According to one explanation of this phenomenon, the near miss effect is due to counter-factual thinking (e.g. Kahneman & Miller, 1986). According to this explanation, (a) counterfactual thoughts have an amplifying effect on emotions and (b) the likelihood of counterfactual thoughts increases with the perceived (semantic or spatio-temporal) proximity of the actual to the missed outcome. For example, if five of the six digits of the winning lottery number agree with one’s own number, it is easy to imagine that the sixth number could also have been drawn, and this counterfactual thought intensifies the feeling of disappointment. Hence, the near miss effect is caused by retrospective comparisons between actual and missed outcomes. In contrast, the belief-desire theory of emotion (e.g. Reisenzein, 2009) assumes that, at least with respect to the emotions of disappointment and relief, the near miss effect is mediated by higher expectations of wins and losses. These two explanations of the near miss effect (counterfactual thinking versus expectancy disconfirmation) were experimentally compared using lotteries involving wins and losses. In a previous study

Bochum & Essen

207

(Junge & Reisenzein, 2010), the predictions of BDTE were largely confirmed, but we also found a small effect of proximity on the intensity of experienced disappointment and relief. To clarify this finding, we conducted a follow-up experiment using an improved design that allows a more fine-grained comparison of the two theories. Results of this study will be presented at the conference.

LENA KÄSTNER, ELENI ORFANIDOU, BENCIE WOLL, MARY RUDNER, JERKER RÖNNBERG AND CHERYL CAPEK

The What and Where of Sign Language Most our knowledge about the neural basis of language processing derives from spoken language (SpL) research. While SpL is conveyed in the auditory domain, information in sign language (SL) is processed visuo-spatially via movements of face, hands and arms suggesting that spatial processing is important in SL recognition.

Signed languages are genuine languages with semantics, syntax, and phonology. While the syntax and semantics of SLs resemble those of SpLs, SL phonology is – rather than auditorily – conveyed by hand shape, hand movement, and hand location [1]. Non-signers cannot assign linguistic information to these features, while signers of a specific SL may be able to access the phonology of another SL but not its semantics.

Previous studies found that SL processing is supported by the classical left-lateralised language areas identified for SpL processing while compared to SpL, SL appears to recruit additional right hemisphere structures. It is unclear, however, to what extent these systems are SL specific or related to visuo-spatial processing inherent in SL [2]. Non-linguistic visuo-spatial processing is supported by a ventral “what” and a dorsal “where”/“how” stream [3]. Thus, at a non-linguistic level, SL processing in terms of hand shape (“what”) vs. location (“where”) monitoring may recruit differential cortical networks.

“Where” and “what”/”how” streams have also been identified in other domains including audition [4] and touch [5]. Analo-gously, cortical pathways for semantics (“what”) and phonology

ESPP2010

208

(“how”) may be hypothesised in linguistic processing. Studying SL provides a unique opportunity to address this question as it allows isolating phonology directly and semantics via subtraction of conditions. If different neural correlates of phonological and semantic processing can be identified in SL, these may guide future research into the neural basis of language processing more generally.

The current study employs functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how native signers of British Sign Language (BSL) process (a) BSL signs (phonology and semantics), (b) foreign signs from Swedish Sign Language (phonology only), and pseudosigns (non-existing signs violating phonological rules; neither phonology nor semantics) when asked to monitor for either a specified hand shape or location. Their data will be compared with and contrasted to that of hearing non-signers exposed to the same conditions. For them, however, all stimuli are equally gesture-like with no associated phonological and semantic information. By comparing activation across groups and conditions we will be able to dissociate neural networks supporting phonological and semantic processing and networks supporting visuo-spatial processing that is not specifically linguistic. Results will be eva-luated against the background of contemporary theories of linguistic processing. References (1) Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, Cognition, and the Brain.

Insights from Sign Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

(2) MacSweeney, M., Capek, C.M., Campbell, R. & Woll, B. (2008). The signing brain: the neurobiology of sign language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 432-440.

(3) Ungerleider, L.G. & Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In: D.J. Ingle, M.A: Goodale and R.J.W. Mansfield (eds.), Analysis of Visual Behavior, pp. 549-586.

(4) Scott, S.K. and Johnsrude, I.S. (2003). The neuroanatomical and functional organization of speech perception. Trends in Neurosciences, 26, 100-107.

(5) Reed, C.L., Klatz, R.L. & Halgren, W. (2005). What vs. where in touch: an fMRI study. NeuroImage, 25, 718-726.

Bochum & Essen

209

LIAM KAVANAGH, PIOTR WINKIELMAN AND PATRICIA CHURCHLAND Social Inferences Based on Mimicry

Interpersonal mimicry (i.e. the tendency of individuals to share postures, facial expressions and so on) has been shown to commonly take place without conscious awareness on the part of either party. Mimicry has been shown to improve the attitude of the model (micked person) towards the mimic, but only then the mimic is not an outgroup member. Mimicry is also indicative of good rapport between individuals and is far (see Van Baaren and Chartrand (2009) for a review).

Mimicry can thus be seen as a form of interpersonal communication, but without conscious awareness of this communication by members of a dyad. The current research program explores the limits of this communication, investi-gating how third parties who observe pairs interacting (but without their attention being drawn to the mimicry) are influenced by mimicry in their assessments of members of the dyad.

In contrast to widely publicized findings that mimicry improves perceptions of the mimic in the eyes of others, the current research shows that the impact of mimicry of observers is dependent on the observers’ perceptions of the model. Further research explores the processes by which observers judgements are influenced, including how sensitive judgements are to context and how mimicry acts as an observable signal of group membership.

KAROLINA KRZYZANOWSKA What is going on in the nearest possible world?

The link between counterfactuals and belief reports

Sentences about beliefs are perplexing philosophers since the very beginning of analytic philosophy. Proper use of them as well as cognitive mechanisms that underpin it are also widely discussed in psychology. In what way the psychological data may (or should) affect a semantic theory of belief reports? Riggs et al (1998) pointed at the correlation between

ESPP2010

210

understanding of other people’s false beliefs and counterfactual conditionals, since both of them involve a mechanisms called ‘modified derivation’ which is strikingly similar to the ‘Ramsey Test’ (Ramsey 1929). Stalnaker (1968) developed Ramsey’s idea into the full-fledged semantics for conditionals, in terms of which in order to decide whether to accept a conditional statement ‘If P, then Q’, we need to look into the closest possible world in which P is the case. The same constraint applies to belief ascription. In the standard false belief task (Wimmer and Perner 1983) a child has to modify her own beliefs and “put herself in the protagonist’s shoes” in oder to answer a question about the protagonist’s belief about a localization of the object. The child has to delete only a piece of information that the protagonist is not aware of, namely that the object has been removed. Her modified belief set plays similar role as an antecedent of a conditional: it selects the closest possible world in which the counterfactual information is true. Stalnaker’s semantics for conditionals may be modified in such a way that it will constitute a model for belief ascription. The selection function maps possible worlds and sets of agent’s beliefs, denoted as BS, into possible worlds (w,x,y...). For every agent A whose beliefs are reported there is a selection function f such that: f(BS, x) = y and x belongs to the set of worlds considered by A as candidates for the actual one. Belief report „A believes that p” is true if and only if p is true in the possoble world w that is a value of f(BS,w). Formally:

v(„A believes that p”,w) = 1 iff v(p, f(BS,w)) = 1.

The world selected by f is the nearest possible world from the ascriber’s point of view.

Bochum & Essen

211

EMMA MARTIN AND PACO CALVO Is cognitive science on the right track? Wandering down the cognitive

science blind-alley, and (hopefully) swerving out of it

Cognitive science is on the move. Nowadays, cognitivism not only includes Newell and Simon (1972) and their physical symbol system hypothesis, Chomsky (1980) and his theory of rules and representations, Marr (1982) and his theory of vision paired with the well-known threefold distinction between computation, algorithm, and implementation, and Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) with their seminal critique of connectionism. Cognitivism has also taken in connectionism itself, at least in the classical formulation of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). According to both classicist and connectionist cognitivism, the mind can in principle be understood in computational and representational terms, or at least that is a promising working hypothesis. On the other hand, newer post-cognitivist methodo-logies have consolidated in the last decade as more or less radical scientific alternatives to cognitivism. Post-cognitivism (understood as the vindication of embodiment for the understanding of cognition) comprises ecological psychology, behavior-based AI, embodied and distributed cognition, perceptual symbol systems, non-classical forms of connectio-nism, and dynamical systems theory (see Calvo and Gomila, 2008). Although brands of post-cognitivism, such as dynami-cism, entered the debate under the banner of anti-computatio-nalism/representationalism, cognitivism is in the process of incorporating, once again, as it happened in the case of connectionism, post-cognitivism. This is due to the fact that the dynamicist toolkit has been re-interpreted in computational terms (see Calvo, 2008, and references therein).

Under this encompassing framework, most cognitivist and post-cognitivist scientists alike believe that the dismiss of behaviorism (Chomsky, 1959), first, and subsequently, the emergence of computational approaches to the study of cogni-tion, in one form or another, have contributed considerably to our understanding of the mind. Unfortunately, in our view, such an optimistic rendering of the situation, however widely shared in the cognitive science community, is due to the unemployment of a robust methodology of reasoning akin to

ESPP2010

212

the one being systematically applied in fields such as molecular biology (Platt, 1964). In this talk, we shall argue that the progress being made over the last fifty years, since the collapse of behaviorism, and that goes from cognitivism to post-cognitivism, is an illusion fostered by an acritical framing of the following two questions: (i) what experimental setting and/or modelling could disprove either cognitivism or post-cognitivism?, and (ii) what post-cognitivist hypothesis does your cognitivist experimental setting and/or modelling disprove? As we shall try to show, there are a number of implicit misunderstandings in the way cognitivist and post-cognitivist hypotheses are usually tested. In particular, we shall illustrate what these misunderstandings consist in by paying close attention to the following three recent episodes where the hypotheses of sympathizers and foes of cognitivism have been contrasted: First, the “great past-tense debate” (Pinker & Ullman, 2002; Ramscar, 2002); second, the debate over “rule learning” in infants (Marcus et al., 1999; Seidenberg & Elman, 1999), and finally, the debate over speech processing in adults (Peña et al., 2002; Endress & Bonatti, 2007; Laakso & Calvo, 2008; Calvo & Laakso, submitted).

These debates illustrate the blind alley that cognitive science has got into (Calvo, 2005). To make a long story short, the problem resides in the fact that the burden of proof is always placed on the side of one of the contenders; typically, on the side of the post-cognitivist. This prevents genuine hypothe-ses testing episodes from being performed. As a result, cognitive science is driven into a blind alley because classicist rules and symbols, and connectionist weight matrices and subsymbols, on the one hand, and post-cognitivist patterns of trajectories and states of attraction, on the other, have become empirically equivalent models of the mind. Instead of having a hidden state space wihtin a static connectionist network that gets partitioned into n subspaces, where each subspace stands for a category being posited by the classical cognitivist, we now have n basins of attraction in a dynamical network, with each attractor representing the very same category. Despite the technical jargon of bifurcations, trajectories and basins of attraction, an air of déjà vu remains. But, perhaps, brand new approaches in the study of cognition, such as the employment of globally stable controllers inspired in cortical circuitry and

Bochum & Essen

213

that hold single basins of attraction (Buckley et al., 2008), may allow cognitive science to swerve out of blind alleys, and into the main road again. Directions for future research will be suggested. References Buckley, C., Fine, P. Bullock, S. and Di Paolo, E. A. (2008). Monostable controllers for adaptive behaviour. In From

Animats to Animals 10, The Tenth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior.

Calvo, P. (2005) Rules, Similarity, and the Information-Processing Blind Alley. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 17-8.

Calvo, P. (2008) Towards a general theory of antirepresentatio-nalism. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59: 259-292.

Calvo, P. & Laakso, A. (submitted) How many mechanisms are needed to analyze speech? A connectionist stimulation of structural rule learning in artificial language acquisition.

Chomsky , N. (1959) Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Language 35 (1), 26-57.

Chomsky , N. (1980). Rules and Representations , New York : Columbia University Press. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher .

Endress, A. D., & Bonatti, L. L. (2007). Rapid learning of syllable classes from a perceptually continuous speech stream. Cognition, 105(2), 247-299.

Fodor , J. & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture. Cognition 28: 3–71.

Gomila, T. & Calvo, P. (2008) Directions for an embodied cognitive science: Toward an integrated approach. In P. Calvo & T. Gomila (2008) Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, Elsevier, pp. 1-25.

Laakso, A., & Calvo, P. (2008). A connectionist simulation of structural rule learning in language acquisition. In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 709-714). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

ESPP2010

214

Marcus , G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press .

Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science, 283, 77-80.

Marr , D. (1982) Vision. New York: W.H. Freeman. Newell , A. & Simon , H. A. (1972). Human Problem Solving .

Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall. Peña, M., Bonatti, L. L., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2002).

Signal-driven computations in speech processing. Science, 298(5593), 604-607.

Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(11), 456-463.

Platt, J. (1964) Strong Inference: Certain systematic methods of scientific thinking may produce much more rapid progress than others. Science 1463: 47–353.

Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not require a rule. Cognitive Psychology, 45(1), 45-94.

Rumelhart , D. E. & McClelland , J. L. and the PDP Research Group (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstucture of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Seidenberg, M. S., & Elman, J. L. (1999). Networks are not ‘hidden rules.’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(8): 288-289.

RICHARD MOORE, KRISTIN LIEBAL AND MICHAEL TOMASELLO On Knowing that Someone is Communicating

In order to grasp what speakers (or non-verbal communicators) are saying, it’s necessary to grasp that their actions are intended to be communicative. If a speaker’s utterance was not grasped as communicative, then its hearer would have no basis for taking it to reveal any message at all, and so no basis for trying to interpret it. It might be more like a cough than a meaningful act. In this case, interpreters – including young infants engaging in their first communicative interactions with others – must be able to recognise meaningful actions as such.

Bochum & Essen

215

In a recently published paper (Csibra 2010), Gergely Csibra has defended the claim that infants know that others are trying to communicate with them because they are hardwired to decode ostensive cues – in particular, eye-contact, the distinctive prosodic pattern of infant directed speech (‘motherese’), and the turn-taking structure of conversation – as indicators of a speaker’s acting with communicative intent. When presented with these cues, infants recognise that their interlocutor also has an ‘informative intention’ the content of which they are then disposed to seek out.

On Csibra’s account, for ‘ostensive cues’ to do what is required of them they must meet two functional requirements. They must both (1) indicate that a speaker is making manifest her having an ‘informative intention’ and (2) identify the addressee of this intention. In this paper, I argue that while Csibra’s second functional requirement can be met by ostensive cues, the first requirement cannot be met by them even in theory – because the cues to which he appeals are also present in many non-communicative interactions. Against Csibra, I argue that we don’t grasp actions as communicative on the basis of a speaker’s production of ostensive cues. Rather, I argue that meaningful actions consist of two parts: commu-nicative (Csibra’s ‘ostensive’) cues, and content cues. Content cues are actions that function as vehicles of meaning, and which encode the message with which a speaker utters. In order for a speaker’s action to be recognisable as communicative, it must contain both a communicative cue, and an action that is recognisable as a content cue. I support this claim with reference to an ongoing empirical study undertaken by myself and Kristin Liebal, in which communicatively competent two years olds participate in a simple forced-choice task in which non-standard vehicles of meaning are used.

I finish by reflecting on what makes actions recognisable as content cues, and discussing implications for Gergely & Csibra’s Pedagogical model of social learning in infancy.

Reference Csibra, G. (2010). Recognizing communicative intentions in

infancy. Mind & Language, 25, 141-168.

ESPP2010

216

SHIRLEY-ANN RUESCHEMEYER Wessel van Dam and Harold Bekkering. Embodied Lexical Representations Reflect Degree of Motor Information Conveyed by Action Verbs

Numerous studies have demonstrated that understanding words activates neural resources generally activated when a word’s referent is actually perceived (i.e., embodied cognition). For example, it has been shown that neural motor areas (i.e., areas involved in co-ordinating the execution of actions) are activated when a participant listens to or reads words denoting motor acts (e.g., grasp, kick). It remains an open question, however, how specific semantic features are represented within perceptual and motor systems. Previous research suggests that within the visual modality, basic level members (i.e., members of a category that lack a specific form) are less richly encoded within primary visual cortices than members of the subordinate level (for which the visual form is better specified). In the present study we were interested in whether we could extend these observations to the motor domain. To this end, we measured event-related BOLD response to verbs that were either associated with a general motor program (e.g., to clean) or with a more specific motor program (e.g., to wipe). Based on the results of previous studies we hypothesized greater activa-tions for action verbs associated with a more specific motor program in both the left ventral premotor cortex and the left inferior parietal cortex (IPL). A preliminary regions of interest (ROIs) analysis revealed that fMRI activations in both ROIs were sensitive to the specificity of the motor programs associated with the action verbs. In particular action verbs associated with a specific motor program showed greater activation in the left IPL. Beyond previous research, these findings suggest that the concreteness of an action semantic feature is reflected in the neural response to action verbs.

Bochum & Essen

217

MARCO F. H. SCHMIDT, HANNES RAKOCZY AND MICHAEL TOMASELLO Conventional Relativists, but Moral Realists: Young Children Tolerate

Outgroup Conventional (but not Moral) Norm Transgressions Normative phenomena pose difficulties that begin with defini-tional disagreements. At least one major distinction within the jungle of norms has attracted many supporters among psycho-logists and philosophers: the distinction between moral norms and conventional norms. This distinction is empirically backed by developmental research, which suggests that young children regard moral transgressions as more severe than conventional ones, and moral rules as unalterable, but conventional rules as alterable (Nucci & Nucci, 1982; Smetana, 1983; Turiel, 1983). But this distinction has been criticized for example by cultural psychologists like Shweder (1987) who argued for cultural relativism and more recently by philosophers and anthropo-logists who have doubted the validity and generalizability of the moral-conventional task findings by Turiel and colleagues (Kelly, Stich, Haley, Eng, & Fessler, 2007).

The moral-conventional distinction is intimately linked to the dichotomy between universality and relativity of norms. Surprisingly, no experimental study has hitherto directly assessed young children’s understanding of the moral-conven-tional distinction in combination with social identity (ingroup vs. outgroup norm violators), although only this way, one can gain a complete picture of (i) whether the distinction is justi-fied, and (ii) how young children decide between relativity and universality of conventional and moral norms.

Regarding conventional norms, it is a commonplace that these differ from culture to culture. But the open question is whether young children would tolerate conventional trans-gressions by an outgroup member or reprimand and enlighten her about how “we do things here”.

The goal of the present study was to assess 3.5-year-old children’s spontaneous protest in response to conventional or moral transgressions performed by an ingroup or outgroup member (hand puppets). We therefore systematically varied two factors in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design: the type of norm transgression (conventional vs. moral) and the norm violator’s social identity (ingroup vs. outgroup). Children (n =

ESPP2010

218

64) received four target tasks (order counterbalanced), which consisted of three phases: In the model phase, children watched an ingroup model perform novel actions with objects (conventional conditions) or create something (moral condi-tions). Subsequently, in the action phase, children could imitate the model’s action. In the test phase, children’s protest responses to a puppet performing an alternative action with the objects (conventional conditions) or destroying the model’s creation (moral conditions) were scored.

Results suggest that young children are tolerant toward outgroup members performing conventional norm trans-gressions, but not toward ingroup members performing the same mistakes (as indicated by higher average protest respon-ses against ingroup vs. outgroup mistakes). When it comes to moral norm transgressions, however, our findings suggest that young children treat ingroup and outgroup members equally: they reprimand moral norm violators irrespective of their social identity. These findings are discussed with reference to theoretical positions that posit a qualitative difference between moral and conventional norms (e.g., Turiel, 1983), and to the notions of ingroup conformity and sanctioning mechanisms to maintain cooperation (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004; Tomasello, 2009).

NILS SCHUHMACHER, JOSCHA KÄRTNER AND JENNIFER COLLARD Social and Social-Cognitive Influences on the Development of Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year

The main goal of this study is to further investigate the possibility of different developmental pathways towards early helping behavior. This behavior usually emerges in the toddlers’ second year of life. The path that the toddlers’ development takes is contingent on specific socio-cultural influences, namely the emphasis primary caretakers put on the development of their toddlers’ subjective experience as an autonomous and independent intentional agent. The pathway commonly suggested in the literature is one in which the development of a categorical self concept is a necessary precon-dition for early helping behavior. This development allows the

Bochum & Essen

219

toddlers to differentiate between their own and others’ psychological states. As a consequence, toddlers understand that the other person is experiencing negative affect (and this state is different from their own) and so can act prosocially. In addition to this pathway we would like to propose an alterna-tive pathway to early helping behavior. This pathway is based on shared intentional relations (Barresi & Moore, 1996) resulting in situational helping behavior. By this we mean that toddlers understand a situation based on two types of infor-mation: on the one hand, their own affective reaction induced by emotional contagion, and on the other hand, the expressive behavior of the other person in relation to an object or person. This kind of understanding enables toddlers to show the same types of helping behavior as does empathic concern. We assessed data from 40 German and 40 Turkish-German families when their toddlers were 17-19 months old. To test our model we designed several tasks for emotional (simulation of pain and sadness by the experimenter and the mother) and instrumental (grasping for objects out of reach by the experimenter) helping behavior and analyzed their relation to other developmental markers that necessarily presuppose self-other differentiation: understanding the subjectivity of preferences (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997), mirror self-recognition, and cooperative behavior (especially reengagement attempts) with parallel and complementary roles. Preliminary analyses suggest that emotional helping is associated with instrumental helping. Furthermore the relationship between helping behavior and other developmental achievements (MSR, subjective prefer-ences, cooperative behavior) is mediated by social and sociocultural variables, e.g., mothers’ socialization goals, paren-ting styles, and dominant values.

ESPP2010

220

ERIC SCHULZ, EDWARD T. COKELY AND ADAM FELTZ Why can’t we agree about freedom and moral responsibility? Independent influences of expertise and heritable personality traits

Theory suggests that certain moral beliefs are crucial for happiness and healthy social relationships. Yet people often dis-agree on important moral issues. Even experts, such as professional philosophers and ethicists, fail to reach consensus on some fundamental issues. Recent research bridging psychology and experimental philosophy has suggested that philosophically relevant intuitions of the folk (i.e., philosophi-cally naïve individuals) are related to heritable differences in personality (i.e., extraversion) (Cokely & Feltz, 2009; Feltz & Cokely, 2009). Here, we extend this research to assess the influences of both personality and philosophical expertise.

Data was collected via an online experiment circulated to both students and professional philosophers. In order to objec-tively assess philosophical expertise, we developed an instrument to measure knowledge of issues in the free will debate. We also measured all facets of the personality trait extraversion. Finally, participants responded to a scenario de-scribing a violent crime in a deterministic universe, which revealed intuitions about free will and moral responsibility’s relation to determinism. Results provide the first evidence that philosophical expertise is associated with differences in incom-patibilistic intuitions (i.e., free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with the truth of determinism). Critically, controlling for the influence of philosophical expertise, extraver-sion continued to uniquely predict compatibilistic judgments (particularly the facet Warmth).

Findings provide converging evidence that fundamental philosophical debates may reflect, in part, heritable tendencies that are highly resistant to change. As such, satisfying lives may require more than a “one size fits all” view of morality. We further speculate that the diversity of these fundamental intuitions reflects evolutionary adaptive variation that has helped our ancestors to cope with our complex, risky, and uncertain world. Implications for moral psychology, ethical theory, and applied ethics will be briefly discussed.

Bochum & Essen

221

VASSILIS SEVDALIS AND PETER E. KELLER Perceiving performer identity and intention

in point-light displays of dance Musical communication is a dynamic interactive process. Per-formers can communicate with observers in musical contexts. Which cues provided by performers or prevailing in the inter-action influence this process? The aim of this study is to investigate the role of spatial and temporal cues used by observers to detect the identity and intentions of performers acting in musical contexts. In a first session, participants were invited to dance with different expression intensities, solo or in dyads, to musical stimuli of different tempi. Performances were recorded by a motion capture system. In subsequent sessions, previously acting and external observers were invited to decode the performers’ intentions and to make additional judgements about their responses (e.g. level of certainty) after watching point-light displays of various durations. Previously acting observers were also invited to discriminate between self and other agents. Performer intentions and identity could be discerned reliably from point-light displays of very brief duration (i.e. <5s). In both tasks, performance accuracy and certainty in judgment increased when more kinematic information was available (e.g. increased stimulus duration and greater expression intensity). Results are discussed in relation to common coding and embodied simulation theories.

THOMAS STEMMLER AND FRITZ STRACK How guilt motivates prosocial behavior

– a cognitive dissonance approach

There is evidence that guilt motivates prosocial behavior (e.g. De Hooge, Zeelenberg, & Breugelmans, 2007; Ketelaar & Au, 2003). The relation between autobiographical guilt-priming and increased motivation to show prosocial behavior is explained by either the activation of prosocial goals or feelings of guilt. However, there is reason to believe that prosocial behavior which follows autobiographical guilt-priming is due to cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957).

ESPP2010

222

As a prototypical moral emotion, guilt emerges after the violation of moral standards (Lazarus, 1991), particularly in the interpersonal domain (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1995). Dissonance is supposed to be experienced after engaging in actions that leaves oneself feeling stupid, immoral, or confused (Aronson, Chase, Helmreich, & Ruhnke, 1974). Thus, reminiscence of past moral transgressions should also lead to feelings of dissonance. Dissonance motivates people to reduce it immediately by bringing dissonant cognitions in line with each other (Festinger, 1957) which can also affect behavior (e.g. Stone, Wiegand, Cooper, & Aronson, 1997).

Results of two studies show that cognitive dissonance which follows the reminiscence of a moral transgression can motivate prosocial behavior. In Experiment 1, results show the well-documented effect that autobiographical guilt-priming led to prosocial behavior (e.g. De Hooge et al., 2007). However, prosocial behavior disappeared if people were able to misattri-bute their negative affect to a salient, but irrelevant source (the laboratory room).

Furthermore, results of Experiment 2 show that prosocial behavior is due to a lack of self-consistency. Moral rationaliza-tion (i.e. making excuses) which followed autobiographical guilt-priming led to the disappearance of prosocial behavior subject to the chronic social orientation of a person. Whereas people high in social orientation showed prosocial behavior exclusively if they generated excuses from the perspective of others, people low in social orientation showed prosocial beha-vior exclusively if they generated excuses from their own perspective. Both findings suggest that the relation between autobiographical guilt-priming and prosocial behavior is due to cognitive dissonance.

Bochum & Essen

223

ANDRZEJ TARLOWSKI Naming patterns and inductive inference: The case of birds

Inductive inference is one of the fundamental reasoning processes. It allows people to go beyond direct experience by capitalizing on regularities that exist in the world. It is of interest how label use relates to inductive inference. On-line presentation of labels affects inductive judgments. Labels are vital to category learning . Cross-language differences in boun-daries of linguistic labels are quite common.

There has been little cross-linguistic research reporting the relationship between naming and inductive inference. The present set of 4 experiments explores differences between Polish and Spanish in naming birds, how these differences relate to inductive inference, and perception of similarity. In Polish birds are named with one label, ptak. Spanish uses two labels, ave and pájaro to name birds. One of the features that influence Spanish speakers’ choice of label is size.

In Experiment 1 Polish and Spanish speakers sorted animals including birds and provided justifications to their sor-tings. Polish speakers justified 87% of bird sortings with the category label ptak. Spanish speakers used category labels significantly less frequently (53% ave and 10% pájaro). This suggests that for Polish speakers, unlike for Spanish speakers, a single label unifies the class Aves.

In Experiment 2 Spanish speakers were presented names of objects and asked to decide which of them belong to the category ave or pájaro. Small birds were identified faster as pájaro than as ave. No label difference was observed for large birds. This suggests that Spanish speakers pay attention to size when deciding how to label a bird. In Experiment 3 Polish and Spanish speakers made inductive inferences from large or small birds to animals of varying sizes. Compared to Polish speakers, Spanish speakers’ perception of strength of inferences from birds decreased more strongly as a function of size dissimilarity between premise and conclusion. This pattern applied both to inferences within birds and inferences from birds to other animals.

ESPP2010

224

In Experiment 4 Polish and Spanish speakers provided pairwise similarity ratings for animals including birds and ranked the animals according to size. Overall, Polish and Spanish speakers coincided in their size rankings and similarity ratings. We subtracted Polish similarity ratings from Spanish similarity ratings and regressed these values on size differences between animals obtained from both language groups’ rankings. Size differences correlated with cross-language similarity differences at r = 0.39 for bird-bird comparisons, r = 0.40 for bird-non-bird comparisons and r = 0.23 for non-bird-non-bird comparisons. This pattern of results shows that size contri-butes more to Spanish than to Polish speakers’ similarity ratings involving birds.

The present research suggests that naming patterns affect inductive inferences and the process that mediates this relation-ship has to do with differences in perception of similarity. Diag-nostic features receive heightened attention and are weighted more heavily in similarity judgments. Bird size is diagnostic for Spanish but not for Polish speakers. Consequently, Spanish speakers weigh size more strongly when they perceive simi-larities involving birds, this in turn leads to greater impact of size on Spanish than on Polish speakers’ inductive inferences from birds.

ANDRZEJ TARLOWSKI Preschoolers’ ontological commitments. Frank Keil’s transformations study revisited

Some researchers argue that development progresses from concrete to abstract or from perceptual to conceptual. Others believe that even young children are equipped with conceptual knowledge and hold abstract assumptions about the world. In this research I contribute to this debate by looking at preschooler’s ontological commitments.

According to naïve ontologies there are fundamental diffe-rences between living kinds and artefacts. Living kinds are construed as organized around essences, internal properties that determine kind identity and causally determine kind-specific features. In contrast to living kinds, artefacts are seen as

Bochum & Essen

225

devoid of essences. Their identity and their properties depend on their function and creators’ intention. Do preschoolers represent this distinction?

There is considerable evidence that preschoolers hold essentialist beliefs about living kinds but there is also contradicting data. One of the key challenges to early essentialism view comes from Frank Keil’s transformations study. In this study preschoolers, older children, and adults were told that living kinds and artefacts underwent series of transformations resulting in their changed appearance. Partici-pants were asked what the transformed object really was. While older children and adults judged artefact identity on the basis of present appearance, they relied on origins to determine the identity of living kinds. This was not the case for preschoo-lers who tended to rely on present looks regardless of object kind. This result suggests that preschoolers’ essentialist under-standing of living kinds has yet to develop and they are confined to perceptual properties.

In this work I argue that Keil’s procedure underestimates preschoolers’ ontological commitments. Keil presented partici-pants with hypothetical situations, which for most living kind scenarios would be impossible in reality. Keil did not examine whether children or adults believed that such transformations as possible.

In the present study I asked preschoolers whether transformations to living kinds and artefacts are possible in real life. 5-6-year-olds were presented with scenarios in which various producers made products that were either living kinds or artefacts, e.g. a farmer grew pigs or engineers made cars. I asked children whether the producers could modify some of the features of their products. The modifications included color, shape, sound, energy source, and taste. Children were also asked whether the objects with modified properties actually existed. The results showed that in general children were unwilling to accept the possibility of transformations to objects (mean acceptance of modifications reached 17%) but they accepted the possibility of modifications of artefacts signitifantly more often than the modifications of living kinds (9% vs 25%). This difference was not explained by children’s

ESPP2010

226

beliefs regarding whether the modified objects actually exist and it was consistent across all kinds of features. The results of this study are a clear demonstration of children’s abstract understanding of differences between artefacts and living kinds. While artefact properties depend on creator’s intention living kind properties are determined by essences and therefore are impervious to human intervention. Children’s greater acceptance of the possibility of modification to artefacts than to living kinds suggests that they are guided by this ontological distinction in their reasoning.

MARIUSZ URBAŃSKI AND PAWEŁ ŁUPKOWSKI SemCAPTCHA: positive semantic priming and web security

In many domains there is an increasing demand for simple and efficient way to differentiate real human users from malicious programs (bots). Just a few examples of such domains are: services offering free e-mail accounts, community portals, online polls etc. One of the most popular ways to tell human users and bot users apart are so called CAPTCHA systems (this acronym stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). Most of them are based on an Optical Character Recognition problem and they make advantage of human’s ability to recognize distorted symbols more accurate than computer programs do. However, these tests are challenged recently with increasing rate of success. Our proposal is to base a CAPTCHA system on a combination of an OCR problem and some linguistic task. We designed a system SemCAPTCHA (‘Sem’ stands for ‘semantic’). The process of solving SemCAPTCHA task consists of three steps, based on different cognitive activities (which must be comple-ted within a certain amount of time): reading a text – under-standing it – applying a user’s knowledge about the world. A SemCAPTCHA test instance consists of a distorted picture, on which three words are presented. All of them are the names of animals. One animal differs from the rest (e.g. it is a mammal among reptiles). The task is to recognize its name and point it by a mouse click. It has to be stressed that the words do not differ substantially as for their graphical properties (like,

Bochum & Essen

227

e.g. length). The difference is of semantic character: one word differs from the other two in its meaning To solve this task a user first has to recognize the words from a distorted picture, then identify their meaning and finally find an underlying pattern and the word which does not fit it. The choice of words makes it easy even for not very fluent language users.

Our problem was: is the effect of positive semantic priming significant for both solution time and accuracy of SemCAPTCHA tasks in case of humans? Experimental set con-sisted of ten test instances; each test instance was preceded by a prime, semantically connected with the correct solution, and a mask. Control set consisted of the same test instances without primes. As experimental group solved test instances faster than control group (although with similar accuracy), exploitation of positive semantic priming seems promising in web security.

ESPP2010

228

Friday, August 27th 15.45-17.00

Poster Session 2

SARAY AYALA The Limits of a Functionalist Description. To Implement or Not To Implement The Same Function, That Is The Question

The Multiple Realizability thesis has been taken to warrant the autonomy of high-level sciences such as psychology. Here I defend that psychological explanations are not autonomous by showing that (some) mental states are not multiply realizable. Under the embodied cognition framework, cognition depends on body and environment. I argue for one interpretation of this dependency according to which implementational details matter in a non-trivial way. I illustrate my argument with a case of morphological computation (a robot that approximates Boolean XOR courtesy of its morphology), and I claim that the functionalist independent-of-implementational-details explana-tion is incorrect. Functionalist explanation is fed by the fantasy that sameness at Marr’s computational level warrants that the same function is being implemented. By means of analyzing cases where a system fails to get the expected behaviour, I conclude that there is no same function implemented in different ways, and that we need to dig into implementational details in order to correctly explain what a system is doing and why. If my argument is right, a psychological description of an organism’s mind cannot be made in the allegedly autonomous way that psychology is supposed to provide.

Bochum & Essen

229

TANYA BEHNE, MALINDA CARPENTER AND MICHAEL TOMASELLO Young two-year-olds create ‘iconic’ gestures to teach others

Whereas much is known about young children’s use of deictic gestures such as pointing, far less is known about their ability to use ‘symbolic’ or ‘iconic’ gestures. Observational data suggest that toddlers’ use of such gestures may be based on conventionalized routines (e.g., Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988; see also Iverson et al. 1994, Camaioni et al. 2003 and Volterra et al. 2005). It is not known whether young children are also able to use iconic gestures creatively to communicate with others. Thus, we examined young two-year-olds’ ability to create iconic gestures themselves, using a design in which children were confronted with the task of informing an ignorant partner how to perform novel instrumental actions.

Twenty-four 27-month-old children participated in the gesture study. First a warm-up introduced a hand puppet and established her general ignorance and need for assistance. Then there were five tasks, four iconic-gesture tasks and one pointing task. For each task, E1 and the child first took turns acting on a novel apparatus, while the puppet, played by E2, was ‘asleep’ in her room, separated from the others by a low transparent barrier. Once the child operated the apparatus reliably, the puppet ‘woke up’ and the apparatus was placed in her room. The puppet announced her intention to operate it, but attempted to do so using an incorrect action (e.g., twisting instead of pushing). In the iconic-gesture tasks, the puppet’s mistakes were designed so that correcting her required the use of iconic gestures (or verbal descriptions generally too complex for young two-year-olds). Children’s gestural and verbal responses were coded.

In addition, twelve children the same age participated in a control study. The session was identical except that the puppet remained asleep once the apparatus was placed in her room. Instead of the puppet trying to operate the apparatus, E1 drew the child’s attention to it repeatedly (paralleling the puppet’s schedule in the other condition.

Children produced significantly more iconic gestures in the gesture than the control study (U-test, U=60.0, p<0.001). In fact, whereas children on average created appropriate iconic

ESPP2010

230

gestures on 1.5 (out of four) tasks, this response was never observed in the control condition. In the gesture study, nearly all children (96%) used gestures to instruct the puppet and for the majority (63%) this included the use of iconic gestures.

These findings suggest that the gestures children produced when instructing the puppet were communicative and not simple recognitory gestures (produced in response to the apparatus itself). This view is supported by looking at children’s verbal comments. The relation of the gestural to the verbal information given (complementary or supplementary) is currently being analysed, as is the relation to children’s language development as measured by a parental checklist.

To our knowledge this study is the first to show that young children create iconic gestures to communicate information to others. Ongoing data collection with one-year-olds is exploring the developmental origins of this ability.

MASSIMILIANO CAPPUCCIO Handling with Symbols. Pointing, Joint Attention and the Extended Mind

In order to differentiate the extended account of human cognition from a merely embodied/embedded account, I shall prove that only the former can describe how representational processes and symbolic contents are functionally implemented in the most fundamental schematic operations of motor cognition and social cognition: gestures. I intend to analyze the specific function of the hand-gestures endowed with a demonstrative valence (such as pointing and holding) in order to assess its crucial role for corroborating the extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers).

On the one hand, the idea that some human-specific cognitive processes are extended outside the bodily boundaries requires as its precondition a specific symbolic interface between internal and external representations: from the evolutionary and the developmental point of view this interface is specifically linked with the human predisposition to joint attention, as it is acquired together with the capacity of internally simulating of the others’ perspective, one of the main

Bochum & Essen

231

requirements for sharing intentionality and mental contents in a representational format. I will argue that gestures such as pointing constitute a precondition for developing a symbolic/material culture and an indispensable vehicle for encompassing external objects (tools or images) as constitutive elements of truly extended cognitive dynamics.

On the other hand, the cognitive extension of the mind into the symbolic culture is not juxtaposed to a previous layer of non-representational cognitive capabilities but, once acquired, is responsible for a deep re-organization of the motor and social cognitive skills (such as dance and pantomime), in accordance to an intersubjective code created by joint attention. My theses will draw from three kinds of evidences. (1) In the field of primatology and developmental psychology,

M. Tomasello’s studies illustrated that pointing is associated with the access to a truly intersubjective modality of experience, which relies on the possibility of sharing intentional/attentional foci as they become explicitly highlighted by demonstrative gestures. This cognitive attitude toward shared contents is human-specific and supports the development of model-based tool use, abstract problem solving and proto-cultural behaviors.

(2) Cognitive semiotics (referring to T. Deacon and C.S. Peirce) allowed describing the peculiar indexical valence of pointing: this kind of demonstrative gesture relies on the causal contiguity between representamen (the pointing finger) and meaning (the object target); at the same, this kind of indexical relationship discloses the possibility of signifying representational contents in a merely arbitrary and context-independent way, allowing the decoupling between the cognizer and her cognitive contents.

(3) Phenomenology (referring to M. Wheeler’s interpretation of M. Heidegger) confirms that pointing implements the kind of intelligence responsible for the emergence of merely detached and objective experiential contents, i.e. disengaged from any absorbed embodied interaction between agent and environment, and as such indispensable as representational models for more disembodied, general and abstract activities.

ESPP2010

232

I will conclude by arguing that the availability of detached representations through symbolic media is a constitutive element of extended functionalism, because it creates the criteria of interfaceability and interchangeability between inter-nal and external informational processes, as logically required by the parity principle.

JUAN JOSÉ COLOMINA-ALMIÑANA. A No-Intentional Approach on Absent Qualia, Inverted Spectrum and Other Anomalies on Perception and Awareness

Nowadays, some contemporary approaches to mind and consciousness adopt Intentionalism. This is the account on mind and consciousness that affirms that inner states must have a content directed to an external object to own mind or consciousness. Usually, this intentionalism is representational. In this sense, it considers that the content of phenomenal ex-periences is the existing relation between certain representations and things that are experienced. We can call this account as intentional representationalism.

Though we share his externalism about mind and phenomenal consciousness, we think that his account can report certain problems. We can find a clear example in the explanation of certain mysteries like classical contexts of inver-ted spectrum or standard variation or blurry vision (contexts when the same experience can be appear different to two identical beings) or sceneries of blind sight (contexts that involve absent qualia), because often we can find phenomenal states that are directly directed on nothing. In this sense, we can affirm that the content of some inner states can be non-intentional.

Representationalism falls in problems because holds: 1. we can have a direct access to our phenomenical inner states as well as we can have access to our propositional attitudes (the ‘Transparency Condition’) and 2. if we think that what precisely characterizes the existence of this first person authority about our own inner states is our capacities that permit us to express them through the assertional force of our

Bochum & Essen

233

avowal of them, we are thinking in our avowal in a de re sense and this fact requires that the same inner state recurs in all conscious beings that felt the same situation (when two different beings can experience the same situation in a diverse way), it cannot permit to our avowal an evaluative character (when it is the normal way in that a conscious being lives is own experiences), and it converts in ineffable our inner experience (when we know that we can be wrong when we self-ascribe us our own inner states).

We would oppose a more realistic view about our own phenomenal inner states. This affirms: 1. we cannot be conscious about all our phenomenal inner states because some states lack of intentional character, though our non-intentional inner states can have an influence in the way that we can express our other inner states, 2. what characterizes our own phenomenal inner states self-ascription cannot be our capacity for express them through the assertion of our avowal them because our awareness of a certain inner experience is de dicto. If we think in this sense about our experiences, we can explain why sometimes two conscious beings experience a certain situ-ation in a diverse way, we have an evaluative impression of this situation, and we can explain why we cannot always know our own inner states.

ESA DIAZ-LEON Tye on the Phenomenal Concept Strategy

Michael Tye (2009) has recently offered a detailed reconstruction and criticism of the Phenomenal Concept Strate-gy (PCS). The PCS aims to refute an influential anti-physica-list argument, namely, the conceivability argument (prominent-ly defended by David Chalmers 1996). In this paper, my main aim is to examine Tye’s arguments against the PCS and argue that they do not succeed.

ESPP2010

234

PIERA FILIPPI Emotional sounds at the origins of language

The animal cognition analysis could present a profitable challenge in understanding the evolutionary basis of any human complex behaviour. Recent researches have shown that there are remarkable traits in some non human species, whose evolution has been addressed by the same environmental - and mainly social – pressures. The hypothesis advanced in this paper is that the care giving interactions’ structural features and emotional effects might have represented an essential evolutionary condition for the rising of an intrinsically musical kind of protolanguage, and thus, for the emergency of the ability of joint agency. Specifically, from this perspective, it would be interesting to investigate the sound patterns nature in care giving contexts, in order to find some common features in songbirds, non human primates and humans, taking into account their emotional and cognitive effects.

According to the research conducted about the function of emotions in infants’ cognitive development, the idea is to switch the communicating dynamics between children and their caregiver on the first Homo’s utterances, in order to distinguish the common communicative patterns. Indeed, in mother-child (nonverbal) interactions, emotions play a decisive role in addressing the interagents ability to focus their attention on sensorial variations, processing meanings tied to their emotio-nal fine tuning, and then towards objects of the external environment.

In other words, emotions represent the cognitive basis for the development of the capacity of regulation and interest in the external world and subjects. This paper proposes to apply such latter considerations on the very first interactions among hominids. In this direction, an investigation about Wray’s holistic protolanguage assumption could offer significant research hints. Her idea is that the first expressions were formulaic and internally amorphous, though efficient in their performative, manipulative purposes.

While accepting the considerations about the pragmatical nature of these messages, I find more likely that a main role in addressing the manipulative and exploring process of meaning

Bochum & Essen

235

was assumed precisely by a sort of adaptive phonological syntax, intrinsically tied to the emotional sphere.

In this direction, some recent studies on bird songs could provide us with interesting data. Indeed, it is proved that birds and humans share an evolutionary path addressed by the same environmental (and mainly social) pressures. In particular, some experiments have demonstrated that birdsongs display a discrete internal structure, whose length and articulation provide a highly adaptive sexual attraction and territory defen-siveness. This data suggests the possibility that the first homi-nids’ utterances were likely to be phonologically structured, for the same adaptive reasons.

On the basis of such arguments, I find very plausible the idea that the first Homo individuals displayed a discrete phono-syntactical and non semantic structure. These utterances might have been nonetheless absolutely able to affect the companion’s behaviours, since creating emotionally meaningful communica-tive streams with the ability to guide the perception of the external world. Moreover, this kind of “sound emotional” exchange plausibly provided the individuals with a crucially selective reassuring sense of affiliation, and consequently with an evolving mutual cooperative living space, which puts the care-giving context into perspective.

ALFRED GERSTENKORN

Entities and Quiddities

Let us say that anything we can talk about is an “entity“, anything we can truly say about an entity is a “quiddity” (Latin “quid” what). Each quiddity is in turn an entity. So objects, concepts and names (terms) are entities and have quiddities. The properties (quiddities) of objects are represented by characteristics (quiddities) of concepts, and these quiddities are concepts themselves. There are simple concepts and complex “sets of concepts”. Entities and quiddities can be regarded differently in different languages and disciplines, their ontological categorization depends on the respective epistemological point of view. Material objects usually represent themselves, names usually represent some-

ESPP2010

236

thing else (objects via concepts), but both are part of the world outside the brain, where only individuals exist. However, names can also represent themselves and then their quiddities refer to their appearance (eg black letters) or function (eg noun) etc. Immaterial objects as “preconceptual” entities and concepts exist only within the brain. A concept, general or individual, is composed of a name concept and an object concept, which although stored in different parts of the brain (brain research) usually remain in contact with each other.

RAOUL GERVAIS Towards a pragmatic framework for understanding psychological explanations

With the rise of explanatory pluralism in the philosophy of mind, the character of psychological explanations is vigorously debated. There is no consensus among philosophers as to what types of explanation are on offer for the psychologist. Particularly controversial in this respect is the covering law model, for the existence and status of laws in psychology has been called into question: are they non-existent, as Davidson holds, or do the generalizations of psychology merely describe effects, as Cummins has argued, without really explaining them? If explanatory pluralism is to be a robust position, that is, more than a ‘anything goes’ kind of pluralism, we should be able to at least take stock of what types of explanations feature in psychology. This paper will attempt to do just that by taking its cue from the so-called erotetic account of explanation, according to which explanations are answers to why-questions.

Focusing on the context of epistemic interests that shape the kinds of questions we ask, I will distinguish three types of psychological explanation by considering an example of each. These are: covering law explanations, functional or decomposi-tional explanations and etiological or evolutionary explana-tions. By taking the examples from scientific practice itself, explanatory pluralism is vindicated ‘bottom up’: scientific explanation is simply too dynamic, too heterogeneous an acti-vity to be accounted for in terms of a simple, preconceived

Bochum & Essen

237

model. As the examples show, in thinking about psychological explanation, one should take the existence of these forms as a given, and then try to reconstruct how such different kinds of explanation may arise. It is here that the erotetic account of explanation comes into its own: by acknowledging and indeed describing the role of epistemic interests in the forming of context specific why questions, it makes intelligible how these different questions may require different kinds of answers, depending both on their form and the particular explanandum they address.

RICO HAUSWALD Psychiatric Categories as Natural and Social Kinds

In recent years, there have been considerable debates in philosophy over the nature of “human kinds”, i.e. categories by which people are classified into different scientifically or socially relevant groups, such as gender, race, class, or mental illness. In particular, it is a matter of controversy whether or not these categories correspond to natural kinds. Those authors who deny that mental illnesses or other “human kinds” are natural frequently hold that they are instead “social kinds”. Unfortunately, it is usually not sufficiently clear what is actually meant by claims like this.

Now, it is not the aim of this paper to present yet another account of mental disorders as either natural kinds, social kinds, or anything else. Rather, I shall try to specify the different options a philosopher actually has when he wants to characterize the fundamental nature of mental illnesses, to clarify what could be meant by claims like “mental disorders are natural kinds” or “mental disorders are social kinds”, and to consider the ontological and theoretical commitments these different alternatives entail. I will proceed as follows: Firstly, I characterize different approaches of mental disorders as natural kinds. In particular, I address (1) descriptivism, according to which there are defining

conditions for every mental disorder, (2) essentialism, which states that there is a causally relevant

hidden structure which is essential to a disease, and

ESPP2010

238

(3) cluster kind accounts, according to which essentialism should be dismissed, though the notion of natural kinds may nonetheless be retained.

Secondly, some versions of the claim that mental disorders should be understood as social kinds are discussed. I shall deal with a. the possibility that certain factors which are causally

relevant to the pathogenesis of a disease are culture-dependent,

b. the influence of social values, c. the notion that the formation of the categories itself is in

a certain sense culture-dependent, d. the possibility of “feedback mechanisms”, and e. the “no-travel” constraint and institutionalism.

I particularly focus on the question of how these claims are related to those accounts that interpret mental disorders as natural kinds. It is argued that the decision between a “natural” or a “social-kind” theory is not to be equated with the approval or the dismissal of a “constructivist” theory; neither is it to be equated with the choice between the so called “biopsychosocial model” and the “medical model”. One may hold that mental disorders are at least partially determined by social forces in that they are caused by culture-specific factors, as the “biopsychosocial model” claims, without being committed to the rejection of a natural kind theory. Likewise, the emphasis on values, culture-dependent categories, and looping mechanisms, as it is characteristic to “constructivist” thinking, does not a priori rule out the possibility of mental disorders being natural kinds. I underline the importance of detailed distinctions within the debate over the nature of psychiatric categories. Simply referring to slogans like “natural kinds”, “social kinds” “construc-tivism”, “realism”, “the biopsychosocial model” or “the medical model” is often not very helpful, as it tends to even increase confusion.

Bochum & Essen

239

REBEKKA HUFENDIEK How Emotions Motivate Us for Action

In the philosophical and psychological literature on emotions the following claims have been repeatedly connected either implicitly or explicitly: (1) emotions represent things as being good or bad, (2) that emotions feel good or bad i.e. that they have a

valence and the claim that (3) emotions motivate us for action. I argue that an embodied approach on emotions like the one presented by Jesse Prinz (2004) makes a promising start in explaining the connection between these three claims by taking emotions to be perceptions of bodily arousal that indicates core relational themes such as danger or offense. The feeling of our racing heart in fear is unpleasant and thereby alarms us. It tells that the situation in front of us is dangerous and that we should avoid it. But I will show, that Prinz fails to adequately explain the close relation of the perception of an event and the motivation to act on it in emotion. This is because Prinz, using Dretske’s theory of representation, takes emotions to have a merely descriptive content. According to Prinz, if you are afraid you represent “danger” by perceiving the ongoing bodily changes, like the acceleration of your heartbeat. But that in it self doesn’t motivate you to flee.

What is needed additionally to achieve that is an uncon-scious neural valence-marker that evaluates the fear reaction as being wanted or unwanted by the organism. This unconscious neural mechanism adds the directive component and thereby the motivational aspect to an emotion. This has the consequence that emotional motivation is no longer explained by the feeling of bodily arousal. Prinz, therefore, cannot really account for the intuition that in emotions representing something as good or bad, having a pleasant or unpleasant feeling towards it and being motivated to act accordingly are closely connected. What made Prinz Neojamesian approach look interesting is the explanation of emotional motivation with reference to the feeling of bodily arousal. But Prinz cannot make this connection, I argue, because the Dretskean framework has nothing else to offer then simple norm-free

ESPP2010

240

perceptual representations to explain emotions. But emotions seem to represent things as being good and bad for the organism and this normative dimension is what makes them intrinsically motivating. Therefore, I suggest that the represen-tation of core relational themes by means of bodily changes can better be explained using Millikan’s concept of pushmi-pullyu representations. Emotions, according to the approach I want to put forth, are a form of affordance-perception: Seeing that something is dangerous immediately motivates to avoid it.

HEIKKI IKAHEIMO Why don’t apes point but humans do? The case for intersubjective recognition as intrinsic motivational altruism

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in one of the relevant senses is. The second part explores the possibility that the ‘recognitive attitudes’ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean commu-nicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a de-cisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today

Bochum & Essen

241

mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a useful tool in empirical work focused on the specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth

THEA IONESCU The Nature of Cognitive Flexibility

Flexibility is considered a hallmark of human cognition and one of the features that essentially differentiate us from other species. Besides being praised whenever we talk about problem-solving or daily functioning, psychological research on cognitive flexibility points to different meanings for this construct. Some authors view it as a cognitive ability, namely as shifting, in the bigger family of executive functions, which refers to the ability to shift back and forth among rules or tasks. Others do not mention explicitly what it is, but investigate flexible categorization, or flexible problem-solving, or flexible language use, hinting to the fact that flexibility is in fact an attribute of these different cognitive subsystems. The present paper will offer an overview of some evidence from the literature, espe-cially from developmental psychology; then I will argue for cognitive flexibility as being an attribute, providing arguments for the necessity of changing our research framework from viewing it as cognitive ability to considering it as attribute of the cognitive system.

This view is reconcilable with the dynamic systems approach and with the embodied cognition approach, and can lead to a better understanding of what cognitive flexibility is and how it develops. The quest for the status of cognitive flexibility in psychological research is an important one. As we will underline in the end of the paper, the methods and the research framework are different when we consider cognitive flexibility to be an ability compared to considering it an attri-bute. In the first case, we need to describe a mechanism or some mechanisms that would make us have flexible responses in every domain or situation (domain-general ability). In the second case, we have to understand how cognitive functioning in certain areas (e.g., categorization, language, rule-use,

ESPP2010

242

problem-solving) becomes flexible (i.e., the emergence of flexibility), by describing and explaining the cognitive mechanisms that are involved and the specific circumstances that foster its development (e.g., expertise or task familiarity). From an embodied cognition perspective the second approach appears to be more fruitful in our quest for the nature of cognitive flexibility.

SEBASTIAN KOŁODZIEJCZYK Non-conceptual Content and the Demonstrative Strategy

In my paper I will analyse Demonstrative Strategy (DS) as a part of conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate (G. Evans vs. J. McDowell, and followers). Main arguments I put here is for distinguishing between two different functions of demon-stratives not clearly seen by protagonists of aforementioned discussion. This distinction is made between the initiative function of demonstratives (Z. Pylyshyn) on the one hand, the instantiating function of demonstratives (J. McDowell, W. Brewer, S. Kelly) on the other. In both cases, demonstratives are engaged in cognitive processes but they do different job and as the result give different answers to questions of scope of conceptualization.

MIKE LÜDMANN Neurons and Hallucinations. Examining the Ontological Dimension of Schizophrenia in the Case of Auditory Hallucinations

Using the example of auditory hallucinations which especially occur in the psychopathology of schizophrenia this text tries to bridge the gap between empirical research in psychology or psychiatry and philosophical reflection on the mind-body problem. It is a fact that the neuronal manifestations of schizophrenia are significantly associated with psychic characte-ristics of this disorder. But nevertheless, it is questionable how these dimensions of schizophrenia are related to each other, exactly. Which sorts of relation between both dimensions are conceptually possible and are they consistent with scientific

Bochum & Essen

243

models and assumptions, which are based upon the empirical data gathered on schizophrenia? And what are the implications for the pathology of schizophrenia if we take different psycho-physical conceptions for its basis?

The suggested intuitive plausible dualistic solutions of the mind-body problem are problematic with regard to conceptual consistency as well as to the empirically founded theories about Schizophrenia. A promising approach seems to be the monistic conception of the identity theory of mind (type or token physicalism). In contrast to interactionism the Identity Theory of Mind does not contradict to the causal closure of the physical world and to the law of the conservation of energy. Furthermore, it can be demonstrated that the processes of interaction between psychic and physical entities, often being postulated within the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, can be integrated. Functionalism holds advantages, too. Functionalist explanations make it possible to understand many pathogenetic aspects of schizophrenia. In this way psychopathological phenomena can be accounted for failed attempts to induce certain functional states. According to the functionalism two psychic processes of similar type cannot necessarily be ascribed to a certain neuronal process, but they can only be regarded as functional equivalent.

Consequently, the resulting problem is that the concrete observed processes in the disease pattern of schizophrenia cannot be considered sufficiently. A reasonable research paradigm should be raised from the connection between principles from identity theory of mind and functionalism.

JORDI MAJA

Contrasting associacionist vs. propositionalist psychological models of discourse comprehension

The current investigation focuses on the issue of propositional representation and inference processing, by comparing two proposals of inference processing: the Direct link model (an associative type model) and the Scaffold model (a propositio-nalist/inferentialist type model). An experiment is presented to test the predictions derived from these two models regarding the processing of different types of inference, using reading and

ESPP2010

244

verification tasks and causal sentences. The results obtained will be discussed in relation to previous evidence as well as in terms of their implications for associative and propositional accounts of inference processing and of the relevance of the type of inferences involved. Implications in both psychology and philosophy fields for a characterization of the notion of proposition will be also discussed.

MARCIN MIŁKOWSKI Explanatory value of computer simulations in cognitive science

In this talk, I defend the claim that computer simulations can be explanatory, at least if we accept that there is some link between predicting and explaining, as in deductive-nomological models of explanation. It may also be explanatory if it models causal interaction, as required by mechanistic models of explanation. The explanatory value of simulation in cognitive science depends on the levels at which the simulation is doing the work. If it models only the system-wide behavior, it may be offering quite trivial predictions. It seems more explanatory if it accounts for system parts’ interactions, for the explanation in such cases may cease to be trivial.

Current computer models in cognitive science are best conceived as simulation, as they are mostly highly incomplete. Yet, only some of them may become fully explanatory in the future. The ones that have the chance are the ones whose architecture allows for constraining by insights gained from psychological research.

JAN PRAUSE-STAMM The Structuring Cause Account of Intentions

Intentions are widely acknowledged as causes of action whereby the causal function of the intention is often supposed to be like the causal function of a burning matching stick that causes the gas to explode. According to this picture the intention

Bochum & Essen

245

triggers the action. Some of the protagonists of causal action theory argue for this triggering cause understanding of intentions for conceptual reasons. They claim that it is constitutive for the performance of an action that it is triggered by an intention. Some philosophers and psychologists defend it for phenomenological reasons. They claim that we have the experience that our intentions are the proximal causes of our actions. However, I think that both of these claims are wrong. Intentions are not triggering causes and there are neither conceptual nor phenomenological considerations that compel us to such an understanding. Drawing on Fred Dretske’s distinction between structuring causes and triggering causes I develop a positive account of intention: the structuring cause account. This account conceives of intentions in terms of structuring causes. In particular intentions are viewed as mental states which configure stimulus response patterns of an agent. The intention is not a state that emerges between the perception of a stimulus and the initiation of an action. Intention do their work before. They define how to react to a perceived stimulus.

I argue that the structuring cause account of intention can, whereas a triggering cause account of intentions cannot, take up the challenge that psychological research has put forward for our self-understanding as self-controlled agents. I shall focus in particular on studies concerning fast and skilled actions which show that an agent acts without forming a new intention that functions as the trigger of the action. Some people are inclined to conclude from this observation that the agent’s amount of control over these actions is reduced or even nullified. However, the structuring cause account allows us to conceive of actions like these as being under the control of the agent. This is an advantage of the account because it undermines a major thread of skeptical denials of agential control. A further advantage is that the structuring cause account fits the phenomenology of intentional action better than the triggering cause account. The feeling that I intended to perform a certain action and that this intention was the cause of the action is pervasive. However, a closer look reveals that it is not the case that this feeling represents the intention as the trigger of the action. It is more apt to describe the intention in terms of an structuring cause.

ESPP2010

246

MARISA PRZYREMBEL Kant’s ‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’ – antisocial sociability revisited

In 1784, Immanuel Kant elaborated on the concept of “antisocial sociablity” (“ungesellige Geselligkeit”). He described this phenomenon as an inherent antagonism of human nature. This antagonism serves as a drive or impetus for cultural pro-gress in society throughout history. Were there no discordance (“Zwietracht”) but only concordance (“Eintracht”) between humans, there would be neither social order, nor art, nor culture and nor approximation to the perfection of humankind.

Kant’s background was a telological one. Affected by the zeitgeist and the discussion on theodicy in the 18th century, he described the manifest evilness, the aggressiveness, and the egotism of manhood as part of an entelechy towards their moral refinement. His motives reinforcing this euphemistic interpretation may prove superannuated or even erroneous today, but his idea behind it can legitimately be reconsidered. This is the aim of this article. In spite of what is suggested by intuition and language, antisocial behavior may in effect be thoroughly social. An act that is directed against another person cannot per se be defined as “non-social.”

Antisocial behavior needs to be considered as functional for interpersonal, i.e. social relations. Social structures necessary for the stability and survival of kin (human or non-human) seem to require reinforcement by punishment, aggression and hierarchies – in other words, mechanisms which are considered as antisocial and thus have a negative connotation.

In this respect, antisocial behavior cannot be normatively designated as either “good” or “bad,” but simply as functional as well as adaptive for sociability.

In addition to that, social interactions are needed in order to perform any action that should harm someone. Conceptu-ally, antisocial behavior demands social context.

I will argue that the essence of the antisocial can be virtu-ally social by using social-psychological, neurobiological, evolu-tionary biological and philosophical evidence.

Bochum & Essen

247

PIERRE SAINT-GERMIER Does the body shape the musical mind?

We show how the explanations of the classical cognitive science of music can be challenged by an embodied cognition approach, without changing the explanandum. Even with this strong constraint, it appears that the embodied cognition approach can succeed. We consider two empirical arguments to that effect, that provide grounds for the idea that the apparently highly mental operations posited by the classical cognitive science of music are non trivially embodied. We then analyze in what sense these cognitive operations can be said to be embodied.

MARCO F. H. SCHMIDT, HANNES RAKOCZY AND MICHAEL TOMASELLO Promiscuous Normativists: Young Children’s Normative Learning Can

Do Without Pedagogy or Normative Language From early on in life, children are confronted with issues of normativity: Adults (and peers) tell them what one “ought” (not) to do in a certain situation. In particular, children learn about the way “we” do things in our culture (Bruner, 1993). A great deal of children’s cultural learning therefore deals with acquiring knowledge about the structure of conventional norms, which is an integral part of the process of enculturation. Previous work has documented that young children understand the normative structure of simple conventional activities, such as games and artifact use (Casler, Terziyan, & Greene, 2009; Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008). These studies, however, conflated three types of cues, i. pedagogical cues (e.g., eye contact), ii. explicit normative language (e.g., “This is how daxing

goes!”), and iii. social-pragmatic marking that the activity is a token of

a familiar type. Hence, it remains nebulous which are the decisive cues that lead children to interpret certain model actions as conventional and normative. One recent theory, for example (Csibra &

ESPP2010

248

Gergely, 2009) holds that the main driving force is pedagogy (i.e., ostensive cues). The present study aimed at disentangling this Gordian knot of conflated cues by exposing young 3-year-olds to novel adult actions without normative language, and systematically varying pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues.

Across children (n = 64), two factors were varied in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design: (i) the context of observation (ostensive communication vs. incidental observation), and (ii) the marking of the modeled action: the model either appeared to perform an existing action (“recognizing”) or to invent a new action on the spot (“inventing”). Each child received four tasks, which consisted of three phases: In the model phase, children watched a model perform novel actions with objects (never using any normative language). Subsequently, in the action phase, children could imitate the model’s action. In the test phase, children’s protest responses to a puppet performing an alternative action were scored.

Children’s imitative and protest responses suggest that young 3-year-olds attribute normativity to novel actions without any exposure to normative language or pedagogical cues. The sole cue they used was adult social-pragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). Thus, ostensive cues are not necessary for young children’s normative learning, and contra natural pedagogy (Csibra & Gergely, 2009), these findings suggest that ostensive cues do not “automatically” elicit generic action interpretations in young children.

Interestingly, even in the inventing conditions, children attributed normativity to the actions in roughly 25% of the trials. Maybe children have a default assumption that others’ actions are normatively governed? Perhaps young children start off as “promiscuous normativists” – wildly projecting normative structure onto adult actions they see – just as they have been argued to start off as “promiscuous teleologists” – projecting purpose onto all kinds of things they encounter (Kelemen, 1999). Further research will clarify under what conditions young children do not make any normative interpretations at all (e.g., when being exposed to clearly accidental acts).

Bochum & Essen

249

TIM SEUCHTER Phenomenal Concepts, Direct Reference and Perceptual Concepts

Few philosophers of mind deny the existence of phenomenal concepts, they are “a common coin among nearly all contempo-rary philosophers working on consciousness” (Papineau 2006). The main interest in phenomenal concepts is their strategic use against either anti-physicalist arguments or physicalist argu-ments. The famous thought experiment involving Mary, the brilliant scientist, known as the knowledge argument (Jackson 1986) or the threat posed by the argument involving the expla-natory gap (Levine 1983) are paradigm cases where the pheno-menal concept strategy has been applied. Nevertheless, the nature of phenomenal concepts is still unclear. The focus of this paper is on the notion and the nature of phenomenal concepts, leaving aside strategic considerations, since the usefulness of phenomenal concepts depends on whether a positive account of phenomenal concepts can be established. I will show that the notion of phenomenal concepts cannot be explicated in a way which leaves room for an addi-tional explanatory role that is not already fulfilled by perceptual concepts.

In order to establish this thesis, I will examine various accounts of phenomenal concepts (e.g. Loar 1990/97, Balog, Papineau 2002/2006, Tye 2003/2009). According to these theoretical approaches, I will work out the basic constraints for a theory of phenomenal concepts: 1) Phenomenal concepts refer directly, i.e. they are intimately connected to their referent and do not refer by means of causal or functional relation. In that they refer directly, phenomenal concepts are unique and special among all other concepts. 2) Phenomenal concepts are essentially involving perceptual experience. Although these constraints are quite controversial, it will be shown that no account of phenomenal concepts can fulfil them.

First, the claim that phenomenal concepts refer directly is at odds with the notion of mental concepts in general, which are assumed to necessarily refer indirectly. The notion of phenomenal concepts thus implies that two people cannot refer to different experiences with the same phenomenal concepts, nor can they apply different concepts to the same kind of

ESPP2010

250

experience. That is to state that every experience type involves a specific phenomenal concept, which is inseparably connected to the experience. But there is clearly a sense in which one can attribute two people undergoing the same kind of experience the application of different phenomenal concepts. At least, this cannot be ruled out apriori by the notion of phenomenal concepts, if that notion should be informative and state more than “an experience type phenomenally is just like what is experienced”. But if we give up the idea of direct reference, we give up on the idea of conceptual uniqueness and phenomenal concepts are like other mental concepts. Regarding the second claim, Papineau (2006) has explicitly related perceptual concepts to phenomenal concepts: their application always involves perceptual concepts. He holds that one of the basic features of (conscious) experience is the forming and application of perceptual concepts. But if the notion of perceptual concepts is taken seriously, they alone are sufficient to explain the full phenomenon of experience, such that the assumption of phenomenal concepts cannot do any additional explanatory work.

ORON SHAGRIR The Brain as a Model of the World

In his Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey (2007) argues that classical theories of cognition, but not the “newer accounts”, posit structural representation (S-representations). I will argue that the notion of S-representation is entrenched in the current computational accounts in cognitive neuroscience. My claim is exemplified through a detailed examination of the computational work on the oculomotor memory system.

ALEXANDROS TILLAS Language of Thought vs. Language in Thought

What is thinking? What is the relation between language and cognition? In this paper I try to answer these questions. In particular, I present an account about the role that language plays in thought production. My main claim is that language plays a crucial role in the production of thoughts, whilst

Bochum & Essen

251

maintaining a different view to Carruthers who claims that an identity relation holds between language and thought. In my view thoughts are comprised of concepts and concepts, in turn, are comprised of perceptual representations produced of experiences with their instances and linguistic symbols, i.e. perceptual representations of words. These representations are interlinked in networks and as a result activation of a concept further activates other representations. This indirect activation of representations alters the network’s activation patterns and influence thought production. It is in this way that language influences cognition. My account enjoys support from empirical evidence from work done with aphasic and autistic subjects.

Recommended Restaurants

Name

Address Adega Portuguesa Königsallee 169

0234/356783

Aubergine Pieperstr. 13

0234/66611 [email protected]

Arli Luisenstr. 14

0234/6404778

Best FriendsBrüderstraße 5

0234/58630000 0234/58630001 www.best-friends-sushi.de

Burg Blankenstein Burgstr., Hattingen

02324/33231 02324/33870 [email protected]

Haus Herbede Von-Elverfeldt-Allee 12

02302/72258 02302/79283 [email protected]

Haus KemnadeAn der Kemnade 10

02324/93310 02324/933199 [email protected]

Haus OekeyUniversitätsstr.

0234/388130 3881388 [email protected]

Hotel LottentalIm Lottental

0234/793342

Indra PrastaTheoderichstr. 27

0234/9380815

Landau Alte Bahnhofstraße 13

0234/9272853

Nils Freiligrathstr. 21, 44623 Herne

02323/965890 02323/959931 [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]




http://www.oekey.de/mail.htm

Name

Address Pablo Goystr. 27

0234/9362080 [email protected]

Pizzeria Bei EinzoAlte Bahnhofstr. 56

0234/291564

Pizzeria Da Gervasio Oskar-Hoffmann-Str. 101

0234/337953 0234/337953

Pizzeria Gallo Südring 25

0234/64509 0234/64509

Strätlingshof Altenbochumer Str. 64

0234/9350405 0234/9350407 [email protected]

Suntums Hof Ümminger See 11

0234/9270884

Taj Mahal Kortumstr. 9

0234/683714

Tapas Kortumstr. 3

0234/96436400 0234/96436436 [email protected]




Name Affiliation / Mail Session DateAKSU-KOÇ Ayhan Bogazici University

[email protected] Paper 13 Thursday

11.45-13.15ALLEN Colin Indiana University

[email protected] Inv. Sym. 4 Saturday

10.45-13.00APPERLY Ian University of Birmingham

[email protected] Paper 10 Inv. Sym. 2 Paper 19

Wednesday 17.15-19.15 Thursday 9.00-11.15 Thursday 14.00-15.30

APSE Linda University of Latvia [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 20

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Thursday 14.00-15.30

ARANGO MUÑOZ Santiago Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience Tübingen [email protected]

Paper 12 Thursday 11.45-13.15

ARCANGELI Margherita Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]

Paper 10 Wednesday 17.15-19.15

ASSUNCAO Vera Loureiro de University of Greifswald [email protected]

Poster 1 Wednesday 16.00-17.15

AYALA Saray University of Barcelona [email protected]

Poster 2 Friday 15.45-17.00

BADGER Julia Aston University [email protected]


BARLASSINA Luca University of Milan [email protected]


BARTHELMÉ Simon Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris [email protected]

Con. Sym. 1 Friday 17.00-19.15

BATES Alan Twycross Zoo [email protected]


BAYINDIR Hatice Middle East University [email protected]


BECK Sarah University of Birmingham [email protected]

Paper 11 Paper 16


BEHNE Tanya University of Göttingen [email protected]


BEKKERING Harold Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 10

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Wednesday 17.15-19.15

BELOVICOVA Zuzana Torvenyi Slovak Academy of Sciences [email protected]


BENI Majid [email protected]


BENTE Gary University of Cologne [email protected]

Contr. Sym 6 Friday 17.00-19.15

BERTRAM Chris University of Bristol [email protected]

Contr. Sym. 4 Friday 17.00-19.15

BIZARRO Sara Lisbon University [email protected]


BLITMAN Delphine Institut Jean Nicod, [email protected]

Paper 27 Friday11.45-13.15

BLOMBERG Olle University of EdinburghK.J.O.Blomberg @sms.ed.ac.uk


BROZZO Chiara University of Milan [email protected]


BRUIN Leon de Ruhr-University [email protected]

Paper 24 Contr. Sym. 6

Friday11.45-13.15 Friday 17.00-19.15

BUKOW Gerhard Chr. University of [email protected]


BURGMANIS Ģirts University of Latvia [email protected]


BURNS Patrick University of Birmingham [email protected]


BUTTERFILL Stephen Warwick University s.a.butterfill@warwick

Inv. Sym. 2 Thursday 9.00-11.15

CALL Josep Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 4 Saturday 10.45-13.00

CALVO Paco University of Murcia [email protected]


CAPEK Cheryl University College London [email protected]


CAPPUCCIO Massimiliano Bentley University [email protected]


CARPENTER Malinda Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


CASSIMATIS Nick Rensselaer Polytechnic [email protected]


CAVOJOVA Vladimira Slovak Academy of Sciences [email protected]


CHRISTENSEN Wayne Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition [email protected]


CHURCHLAND Patricia University of California, San Diego [email protected]


CIAUNICA Anna University of Burgundy [email protected]


CLARK Andy University of Edinburgh [email protected]

Lecture 1 Wednesday 9.00-10.20

COKELY Edward T. Max Planck Institute Berlin [email protected]


COLLARD Jennifer University of Osnabrück [email protected]


COLOMINA-ALMIÑANA

Juan José Universidad de La Laguna, Alicante [email protected]


COSTALL Alan University of Portsmouth [email protected]


CUCCIO Valentina University of Palermo [email protected]


DAM Wessel van Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


DECOCK Lieven University of [email protected]


DEFEYTER Margaret A. Northumbria University [email protected]


DEROY Ophelia University of Paris [email protected]


DIAZ-LEON Esa University of Manitoba [email protected]


DOHERTY Martin University of Stirling [email protected]


DORSCH Fabian University of California, Berkeley [email protected]


DOUVEN Igor University of [email protected]


DUTILH NOVAES Catarina University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Contr. Sym. 2 Wednesday 17.15-19.15

DUPOUX Emmanuel Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris [email protected]


ERVAS Francesca Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


FELTZ Adam Schreiner University [email protected]


FIEBICH Anika Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]


FILIPPI Piera University of Palermo [email protected]


FITCH W. Tecumseh University of Vienna [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 3 Friday 9.00-11.15

FLOREK Stefan Jagiellonian University [email protected]


FREUDENBERGER Silja RWTH Aachen [email protected]


FRIEDMAN Ori University of Waterloo [email protected]


FUGARD Andrew J.B. University of Salzburg [email protected]


GABALDA Belonia Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris [email protected]


GABBERT Fiona University of Abertay [email protected]

Contr. Sym. 8 Saturday 14.00-16.15

GERSTENKORN Alfred [email protected] Poster 2 Friday 15.45-17.00

GERVAIS Raoul University of Gent [email protected]


GJERSOE Nathalia University of Bristol [email protected]


GLÜER Kathrin Stockholm University [email protected]


GODWYN Martin Capilano [email protected]


GOURDON Amélie University of Birmingham [email protected]


GRASSMANN Susanne Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Paper 21Paper 22

Thursday 14.00-15.30

GRAZZANI Ilaria Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca [email protected]


GRÜNBAUM Thor University of Copenhagen [email protected]


HALL Alison University College London [email protected]


HARDY Joanna Twycross Zoo [email protected]


HAUSWALD Rico Dresden University of Technology [email protected]


HAYNES John-Dylan Humboldt-University Berlin [email protected]


HILTON Denis University of Toulouse [email protected]


HOFFMANN-KOLSS Vera University of Osnabrü[email protected]


HOHENBERGER Annette Middle East Technical University [email protected]

Paper 13Paper 17


HOOD Bruce M. University of Bristol [email protected]


HOPE Lorraine University of Portsmouth [email protected]


HUFENDIEK Rebekka Humboldt University Berlin [email protected]


HUNNIUS Sabine Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


IKAHEIMO Heikki Macquarie University [email protected]


IONESCU Theo Babes-Bolyai University [email protected]


IRVINE Elizabeth University of Edinburgh [email protected]


JACOB Pierre Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


JAMIESON Kat University of Abertay [email protected]


JUANCHICH Marie Kingston University London [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 16


JUNG Eva-Maria University of Mü[email protected]


JUNGE Martin University of Greifswald [email protected]


KÄRTNER Joscha University of Osnabrück [email protected]


KÄSTNER Lena University College London [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 8

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Wednesday 17.15-19.15

KANNGIESSER Patricia University of Bristol [email protected]


KAVANAGH Liam University of California, San Diego [email protected]


KELLER Peter E. Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


KETTNER Matthias University of Witten-Herdecke [email protected]


KJOLL Georg University of Oslo

[email protected] Paper 26 Friday

11.45-13.15 KNOBLICH Günther Radboud University Nijmegen

[email protected] Inv. Sym. 2 Thursday

9.00-11.15 KÖHNKEN Günter Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel


11.45-13.15 KOKKONEN Tomi University of Helsinki


11.45-13.15 KOŁODZIEJCZYK Saray Jagiellonian University

[email protected] Poster 2 Friday

15.45-17.00 KOMPA Nikola University of Bern


14.00-15.30 KRAUS Uta Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel


11.45-13.15 KRIŠJĀNE Zaiga University of Latvia


14.00-15.30 KRZYZANOWSKA Karolina Catholic University of Leuven

[email protected] Poster 1 Wednesday

16.00-17.15 LAMBALGEN Michiel van University of Amsterdam

[email protected] Paper 1 Wednesday

14.30-16.00 LASSITER Charles Fordham University

[email protected] Paper 22


LEAHY

Brian University of Konstanz [email protected]


LIEBAL Kristin Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


LIEVEN Elena Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 3 Friday 9.00-11.15

LOBINA David James University of [email protected]


LOUSSOUARN Anna Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


LÜDMANN Mike University of Duisburg-Essen [email protected]


ŁUPKOWSKI Pawel Adam Mickiewicz University [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 18


LYRE Holger University of [email protected]


MACIA Josep University of Barcelona [email protected]


MAJA Jordi University of Edinburgh [email protected]


MALCOLM Sarah L. Contr. Sym. 4 Friday 17.00-19.15

MAMASSIAN Pascal Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris [email protected]


MARSTALLER Lars Macquarie University Sydney [email protected]


MARTIN Emma University of Murcia [email protected]


MAZZONE Marco University of Catania [email protected]


MEADOWS Phillip Keele University [email protected]


MERIN

Arthur University of Konstanz [email protected]


MICHAELIAN Kourken Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


MIŁKOWSKI Marcin Polish Academy of Sciences [email protected]


MOLL Henrike Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


MOORE Richard Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 19


MOURENZA Alexis University of California Santa Cruz [email protected]


MÜLLER Vincent C. Anatolia [email protected]


NEARY Karen R. University of Waterloo [email protected]


NEWELL Fiona University of Dublin [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 1 Wednesday 10.45-13.00

NEWEN Albert Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 4 Saturday 10.45-13.00

NUDDS Matthew University of Edinburgh [email protected]


O’CALLAGHAN Casey Rice University [email protected]

Inv. Sym. 1 Wednesday 10.45-13.00

OGEL-BALABAN Hale Middle East Technical University [email protected]


ORBAN Krisztina Birkbeck, University of London [email protected]


ORFANIDOU Eleni University College London Poster 1 Wednesday 16.00-17.15

ORNAGHI Veronica Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca [email protected]


OVER David E. Durham University [email protected]


ÖZORAN Dinçer ATILIM University, Ankara [email protected]


PACHERIE Elisabeth Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


PAULUS Markus Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


PAVLOPOULOS Marc CEA - Larsim [email protected]


PERNER Josef University of Salzburg [email protected]

Paper 4 Paper 20


PETERS Christopher Coventry University [email protected]


PFEIFER Niki University of Salzburg [email protected]


PINNA Baingio University of Sassari [email protected]


PLEBE Alessio University Messina [email protected]


PÖYHÖNEN Samuli University of Helsinki [email protected]

Paper 9 Paper 17


POMPE Ulrike Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]


PRAUSE-STAMM Jan Humboldt-University Berlin [email protected]


PROUST Joëlle Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]


PRZYREMBEL Marisa Humboldt-University Berlin [email protected]


QURESHI Adam Coventry University [email protected]


RAFTOPOULOS Athanasios University of Cyprus [email protected]


RAKOCZY Hannes University of Göttingen [email protected]

Poster 1 Poster 2 Paper 24 Contr. Sym. 4

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Friday 15.45-17.00 Friday 11.45-13.15 Friday 17.00-19.15

REDDY Vasudevi University of Portsmouth [email protected]

Con. Sym. 3 Friday 17.00-19.15

REISENZEIN Rainer University of Greifswald [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 15


REUTER Kevin Birkbeck, University of [email protected]


RICHARDSON Louise University of Oxford [email protected]


RIGGS Kevin London Metropolitan University [email protected]


RÖNNBERG Jerker Linköping University Poster 1 Wednesday16.00-17.15

RÖSKA-HARDY Louise University of Essen [email protected]


ROOIJ Iris van Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


ROSELL Sergi University of Sheffield [email protected]


ROSSANO Federico Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Contr.Sym. 4

Friday 17.00-19.15

RUDNER Mary Linköping University [email protected]


RUESCHEMEYER Shirley-Ann Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


SACCHI Elisabetta Univeristy San Raffaele Milan [email protected]


SAINT-GERMIER Pierre Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon [email protected]


SCHADE Ulrich Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics [email protected]


SCHILBACH Leonhard University of Cologne [email protected]

Contr.Sym. 3

Friday 17.00-19.15

SCHLICHT Tobias Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen [email protected]

Contr.Sym. 3

Friday 17.00-19.15

SCHLOSSER Markus University of [email protected]


SCHMIDT Marco F. Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Poster 1 Poster 2

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Friday 15.45-17.00

SCHRÖDER Bernhard University of Duisburg-Essen [email protected]

Paper 16 Inv. Sym. 3

Thursday 11.45-13.15 Friday 9.00-11.15

SCHUHMACHER Nils University of Osnabrück [email protected]


SCHULZ Eric Max Planck Institute Berlin [email protected]


SCHULZE

Cornelia Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


SCHURGER Aaron INSERM-CEA, Paris [email protected]


SCHURZ Gerhard Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf [email protected]

Paper 22


SCHÜTZ-BOSBACH Simone Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


SEBANZ Natalie Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


SEQUOIAH-GRAYSON

Sebastian Catholic University of Leuven [email protected]


SEUCHTER Tim Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf [email protected]


SEVDALIS Vassilis Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]


SHAGRIR Oron The Hebrew University, Jerusalem [email protected]


SHAPIRO Laura Aston University [email protected]


SINIGAGLIA Corrado University of Milan [email protected]


SIROTA Miroslav Slovak Academy of Sciences Paper 15 Thursday 11.45-13.15

SKILTERS

Jurgis University of Latvia [email protected]

Paper 2 Poster 1 Paper 20

Wednesday 14.30-16.00 Wednesday 16.00-17.00 Thursday 14.00-15.30

SLORS Marc Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]

Contr.Sym. 6

Friday 17.00-19.15

SMITH Barry School of Advanced Study, London [email protected].

Inv. Sym. 1

Wednesday 10.45-13.00

SMITH Linda B. Indiana University [email protected]

Lecture 2 Thursday 16.00-17.30

SPENCE Charles University of Oxford

[email protected] Inv. Sym. 1 Wednesday

10.45-13.00 STARZAK Tobias Ruhr-University Bochum


14.30-16.00STEEDMAN Mark University of Edinburgh

[email protected] Lecture 4 Saturday

9.00-10.15 STEMMLER Thomas University of Würzburg


16.00-17.15STENNING Keith University of Edinburgh

[email protected] Inv. Sym. 3 Friday

9.00-11.15 STEVENS Sophie Twycross Zoo


11.45-13.15STÖCKLE-SCHOBEL Richard University of Edinburgh


17.15-19.15STOETTINGER Elisabeth University of Salzburg


14.00-15.30STRACK Fritz University of Würzburg


16.00-17.15STRIJBOS Derek Radboud University Nijmegen

[email protected] Paper 24 Friday

11.45-13.15SUTTON John Macquarie University

[email protected] Contr. Sym. 8 Saturday

14.00-16.15SYNOFZIK Matthis Centre for Neurology Tübingen

[email protected] Contr.Sym. 7

Saturday 14.00-16.15

TANCA Maria University of Sassari [email protected]


TARLOWSKI Andrzej University of Basque Country [email protected]


TEIGEN Karl-Halvor University of Oslo [email protected]


THEINER Georg University of Alberta [email protected]


TILLAS Alexandros University of Bristol [email protected]


TOMASELLO Michael Max Planck Institute Leipzig [email protected]

Poster 1 Paper 22 Lecture 3 Poster 2 Contr. Sym. 4

Wednesday 16.00-17.15 Thursday 14.00-15.30 Friday 14-30-15.45 Friday 15.45-17.00 Friday 17.00-19.15

TRAFFORD James University of East London [email protected]


UCHIDA Hiroyuki Rensselaer Polytechnic [email protected]


UEDA Tomo Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]


UNTERHUBER Matthias Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf [email protected]

Paper 22


URBAŃSKI Mariusz Adam Mickiewicz University [email protected]


VARGA Alexandra- Lucia Central European University Budapest [email protected]


VERDEJO Víctor M. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid [email protected]


VIERKANT Tillmann University of Edinburgh [email protected]


VISION Gerald Temple [email protected]


VISSERS Marlies Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


VOLTOLINI Alberto University of Turin [email protected]


VOSGERAU Gottfried Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf [email protected]


VRINS Sven Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


WAGENER Beate Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel Paper 13 Thursday 11.45-13.15

WANG Jessica University of Birmingham [email protected]


WELPINGHUS Anna Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]


WERNING Markus Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]


WIJNGAARDEN Carolien van Radboud University Nijmegen [email protected]


WILKINSON Sam University of Edinburgh [email protected]


WILLIAMSON Kellie Macquarie [email protected]


WINKIELMAN Piotr University of California, San Diego [email protected]


WOLL Bencie University College London [email protected]


WOLLERMANN Charlotte University of Bonn [email protected]


WONG Hong Yu University of London [email protected]


ZALLA Tiziana Institut Jean Nicod, Paris [email protected]

Paper 6 Paper 15


ZEDNIK Carlos Indiana University [email protected]


Here - an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Documents

Transcript of Here - an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum