Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Re-conceptualizing the role of stimuli: an enactive, ecological explanation of spontaneous-response tasks

  • Published:
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper addresses a challenge proposed against non-mindreading explanations of infant spontaneous-response task data. The challenge is a foundational assumption of mindreading explanations best summed up by Carruthers (Mind and Language, 28(2): 141-172, 2013, Consciousness and Cognition, 36: 498-507, 2015) claim that only by appealing to a theory of mind is it possible to explain infant responses in spontaneous-response false-belief tasks when there are no one-to-one correspondences between observable behavior and mental states. Heyes (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(2), 131–143, 2014a, Developmental Science, 17(5), 647–659. b) responds to this challenge arguing discrete stimuli is informationally wealthy, and interprets the spontaneous-response results in terms of low-level perceptual novelty. However, Scott and Baillargeon (Child Development, 80: 1172-1196, 2009, Developmental Science, 17(5): 660-664, 2014) challenge Heyes’ explanation on the grounds that her account of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks cannot also explain spontaneous-response ignorance tasks. In response to this, an enactive, ecological goal-tracking explanation of spontaneous-response tasks is presented, and argued to be superior to both mindreading explanations and Heyes’ account. This is done by recasting perception and anticipation and appealing to the central role social normativity plays in constraining social cognition. Finally, it is argued the cognitivist framework that both Heyes and mindreading proponents appeal to, begs the question in favor of the indispensability of mental representations for explaining perception and anticipation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

All data and material used in article are freely available.

Notes

  1. Heyes (2014b) claims infants are less able to resist retroactive interference—the maintenance of an active representation of X in spite of distraction by Y—as their prefrontal cortices are less developed (Olesen et al. 2007).

  2. Many recent accounts of perception (Bruineberg et al. 2018; Clark 2016; Gallagher 2017; Hohwy 2013) now build in a notion of anticipation, where perceptual processes are inherently anticipatory processes as well. The disagreement between these accounts lies in which framework—cognitivism, enactivism, and/or ecological psychology—is best suited for explaining the relationship between perception and anticipation.

  3. See Chemero (2009), Hutto and Myin (2017), and Turvey (2013) for further criticism of cognitivist appeals to the indispensability of mental representation and information processing for explaining perception and cognition.

  4. See Gallagher (2015) and De Jaegher (2018) for additional proposals on how to systematically redesign various social cognitive empirical studies in line with enactive and ecological commitments.

  5. As an example of tracking properties without having conceptual knowledge, it is possible to track the property of toxicity in the world by the smell that toxic materials give off, without utilizing the concept of toxins itself (Butterfill and Apperly 2013; Hutto 2017).

  6. The normative practices of the task involve the agent acting in a similar fashion in the test trials as the agent acted in the familiarization trials, which established acceptable acts as reaching acts towards one of two objects. Hypothetically, if the agent instead threw another object at either cover, the infants would likely display surprise looking behavior as this act would be violated the established normative practices.

  7. While a full defence of this claim cannot be made here, see Satne (2020) and Castro and Heras-Escribano (2019) for enactive and ecological psychology explanations of how infants learn to recognize and respond to normative features of the environment without conceptually understanding these normative features in rule-based terms.

References

  • Biro, S., Verschoor, S., & Coenen, L. (2011). Evidence for a unitary goal concept in 12-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 14, 1255–1260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bruineberg, J., Kiverstein, J., & Rietveld, E. (2018). The anticipating brain is not a scientist: the free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective. Synthese, 195(6), 2417–2444.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butterfill, S. A., & Apperly, I. A. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind and Language, 28(5), 606–637.

  • Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind and Language, 28(2), 141–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2015). Perceiving mental states. Consciousness and Cognition., 36, 498–507.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Castro, V. F., & Heras-Escribano, M. (2019). Social cognition: a normative approach. Acta Analytica, 35(1), 75–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press.

  • Cooper, R. P., Cook, R., Dickinson, A., & Heyes, C. M. (2013). Associative (not Hebbian) learning and the mirror neuron system. Neuroscience Letters, 540, 28–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Jaegher, H. (2018). The intersubjective turn. In A. Newen, L. De Bruin, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition (pp. 453–468). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Falck-Ytter, T., Gredebäck, G., & von Hofsten, C. (2006). Infants predict other people’s action goals. Natural Neuroscience, 9, 878–879.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fenici, M. (2014). A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 497–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fenici, M., & Zawidzki, T. W. (2016). Action understanding in infancy: do infant interpreters attribute enduring mental states or track relational properties of transient bouts of behavior? Studia Philosophica Estonica, 9(2), 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. A. (2008). Lot 2. The language of thought revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Frank, M. C., Vul, E., & Johnson, S. P. (2009). Development of infants’ attention to faces during the first year. Cognition, 110, 160–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. (2015). The problem with 3-year-olds. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22(1–2), 160–182.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. (2018). New mechanisms and the enactivist concept of constitution. In M. P. Guta (Ed.), The metaphysics of consciousness (pp. 207–220). London: Routlege.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S., & Povinelli, D. J. (2012). Enactive and behavioral abstraction accounts of social understanding in chimpanzees, infants, and adults. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(1), 145–169.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, J. J. (1979/2015). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. M. (2014a). Submentalizing: I am not really reading your mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(2), 131–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. M. (2014b). False belief in infancy: a fresh look. Developmental Science, 17(5), 647–659.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. M., & Frith, C. D. (2014). The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science, 344(6190), 1243091-1–1243091-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hohwy, J. (2013). The predictive mind. Oxford University Press.

  • Hutchins, E. (2011). Enculturating the supersized mind. Philosophical Studies, 152, 437–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D. D. (2017). Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents. Synthese, 194, 827–846.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2012). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Iacoboni, M. (2003). Understanding intentions through imitation. In S. H. Johnson-Frey (Ed.), Taking action: Cognitive neuroscience perspectives on intentional acts (pp. 107–138). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacob, P. (2020). What do false-belief tests show? Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 1–20.

  • Jurgens, A. (2020). Neurodiversity in a neurotypical world: An enactive framework for investigating autism and social institutions. In N. Chown, A. Stenning, & H. Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist (Eds.) Neurodiversity studies: A new critical paradigm.

  • Jurgens, A., & Kirchhoff, M. D. (2019). Enactive social cognition: diachronic constitution & coupled anticipation. Consciousness and Cognition, 70, 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kampis, D., Somogyi, E., Itakura, S., & Király, I. (2013). Do infants bind mental states to agents? Cognition, 129, 232–240.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maiese, M. (2018). Life shaping, habits of mind, and social institutions. Natureza Humana-Revista Internacional de Filosofia e Psicanálise, 20(1), 4–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGeer, V. (2007). The regulative dimension of folk psychology. In D. D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Folk psychology re-assessed (pp. 137–156). Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Olesen, P. J., Macoveanu, J., Tegnér, J., & Klingberg, T. (2007). Brain activity related to working memory and distraction in children and adults. Cerebral Cortex, 17(5), 1047–1054.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Onishi, K., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-olds understand false beliefs? Science, 308, 255–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ray, E., & Heyes, C. (2011). Imitation in infancy: the wealth of the stimulus. Developmental Science, 14(1), 92–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Satne, G. (2016). A two-step theory of the evolution of human thinking: joint and (various) collective forms of intentionality. Journal of Social Ontology, 2(1), 105–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Satne, G. (2020). Understanding others by doing things together: An enactive account. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02692-2.

  • Scott, R. M., & Baillargeon, R. (2009). Which penguin is this? Attributing false beliefs about object identity at 18 months. Child Development, 80, 1172–1196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, R. M., & Baillargeon, R. (2014). How fresh a look? A reply to Heyes. Developmental Science, 17(5), 660–664.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Segundo-Ortin, M., & Satne, G. (2020). Sharing attention, sharing affordances: From dyadic interaction to collective information. In Wehrle, M., Solomonova, E., and D’Angelo, D. (Eds) Mediation and Access. A New Approach to Attention, De Gruyter.

  • Segundo-Ortin, M., Heras-Escribano, M., & Raja, V. (2019). Ecological psychology is radical enough. A reply to radical enactivists. Philosophical Psychology, 32(7), 1001–1023.

  • Sommerville, J. A., & Woodward, A. L. (2005). Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy. Cognition, 95, 1–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stepp, N., & Turvey, M. T. (2015). The muddle of anticipation. Ecological Psychology, 27(2), 103–126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Troje, N. F., & Westhoff, C. (2006). The inversion effect in biological motion perception: evidence for a “life detector”? Current Biology, 16, 821–824.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turvey, M. T. (2013). Ecological perspective on perception-action: What kind of science does it entail? In W. Prinz, M. Beisert, & A. Herwig (Eds.), Action science (pp. 138–170). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Wheeler, M. (2008). Minimal representing: a response to Gallagher. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 371–376.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, M., & Knoblich, G. (2005). The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 460–473.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition, 69, 1–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, A. L. (2003). Infants’ developing understanding of the link between looker and object. Developmental Science, 6, 297–311.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, A. L., & Sommerville, J. A. (2000). Twelve-month-old infants interpret action in context. Psychological Science, 11, 73–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Whales, Australia

    Alan Jurgens

Authors
  1. Alan Jurgens
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alan Jurgens.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

No conflicts of interest or disclosures.

Code availability

Not Applicable.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Jurgens, A. Re-conceptualizing the role of stimuli: an enactive, ecological explanation of spontaneous-response tasks. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 915–934 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09717-8

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09717-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation