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