Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

doi:10.1016/S0021-9924(99)00009-X

Journal of Communication Disorders

Volume 32, Issue 4, July–August 1999, Pages 251-269

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0021-9924(99)00009-X Get rights and content

Abstract

There has been a revolution in our understanding of infant and toddler cognition that promises to have far-reaching implications for our understanding of communicative and linguistic development. Four empirical findings that helped to prompt this change in theory are analyzed: (a) Intermodal coordination—newborns operate with multimodal information, recognizing equivalences in information across sensory-modalities; (b) Imitation—newborns imitate the lip and tongue movements they see others perform; (c) Memory—young infants form long-lasting representations of perceived events and use these memories to generate motor productions after lengthy delays in novel contexts; (d) Theory of mind—by 18 months of age toddlers have adopted a theory of mind, reading below surface behavior to the goals and intentions in people's actions. This paper examines three views currently being offered in the literature to replace the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theory-theory. Arguments are marshaled to support the “theory-theory” view. This view emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things in their culture. It is suggested that preverbal cognition forms a substrate for language acquisition and that analyzing cognition may enhance our understanding of certain disorders of communication.

Section snippets

Facial imitation

A prime example from the new research on infant development concerns facial imitation. The research in this area has helped to change our understanding of the innate foundations of social cognition and nonverbal communication. In the classical view, young infants were initially devoid of the ability to imitate, and they developed through stages. A landmark development occurred at about 8–12 months of age when they first became able to imitate facial gestures, such as lip and tongue movements.

Intermodal mapping: oral-visual and speech perception-production

If the AIM hypothesis is correct, it should be possible to find converging evidence outside of facial imitation. A first study along these lines involved 29-day-old infants (Meltzoff & Borton, 1979). The infants were given tiny shapes to feel in their mouths. After a 90-second period, the shapes were withdrawn without the infant seeing them. The infants were then shown a pair of visual shapes, only one of which matched the shape they had felt. The results revealed that infants' visual attention

The mutual imitation game and why it's important

Once we begin to take seriously that infants can use intermodal matching to detect the equivalence between their own behavioral productions (movements, vocalizations, etc.) and the behavior they perceive, several other pieces of the developmental puzzle begin to fall into place. For example, a common observation in the social-developmental literature is that parent-infant games are often reciprocally imitative in nature. Infants shake a rattle and parents shake back; infants vocalize and

Origins of theory of mind

People are more than physical bodies. We are more than dynamic bags of skin that can be seen, heard, and weighed. In the adult framework, persons also have beliefs, desires, and intentions that lie below the surface behavior. One cannot directly see, taste, smell, or hear mental states, but it is an essential part of our ordinary adult understanding that other people have them. Theory of mind research investigates the development of this framework (e.g., Astington & Gopnik 1991, Flavell &

Memory

Imitation on the basis of memory, after the model has disappeared, is called deferred imitation. In classical developmental theory, the onset of deferred imitation was thought to be 18 months of age, during stage-6 of the sensory-motor period. Deferred imitation was part of a broad stage change involving symbolic play, high-level object permanence, language, and other indicators of the symbolic function (Piaget, 1962).

The new empirical findings have dissociated deferred imitation from these

Components of a new developmental theory

The modern research establishes a rich innate foundation for infant development. Infants are not blank slates waiting to be written on. They are born with predispositions, perceptual biases, and representational capacities that outstrip those attributed by classical theory. Moreover, there is fundamental change and reorganization in this structure as infants develop. The 1-day-old's construal of events is not the 12-month-old's, or the 18-month-old's—not to mention the adult's.

Acknowledgements

I thank Patricia Kuhl, Alison Gopnik, and Keith Moore for longtime collaboration on many of the topics discussed here. I also am indebted to Elena Plante and Carol Boliek for their cooperation in bringing this project to fruition. I am thankful for support from grants from the National Institutes of Health (HD 22514 and the Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism PO1HD34565).

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Vision is an important source of information about other minds for sighted children, especially prior to the onset of language. Visually observed actions, eye gaze, and facial expressions of others provide information about mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions. Does such experience contribute causally to the development of cortical networks supporting social cognition? To address this question we compared functional development of brain regions supporting theory of mind (ToM), as well as behavioral ToM reasoning, across congenitally blind (n=17) and sighted (n=114) children and adolescents (4–17 years old). We find that blind children in this age range show slightly lower ToM behavioral performance relative to sighted children. Likewise, the functional profile of ToM brain regions is qualitatively similar, but quantitatively weaker in blind relative to sighted children. Alongside prior research, these data suggest that vision facilitates, but is not necessary for, ToM development.
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Few issues have garnered as much attention as that of understanding mechanisms of developmental change. Understanding mechanisms of developmental change is important because it allows researchers to go beyond studying at what age an ability emerges to understanding the processes by which those abilities develop in the first place. Despite the clear importance of mechanisms, the notion of a developmental mechanism or mechanism of developmental change remains largely undefined and there exists no clear guidance on how to study these mechanisms systematically in the developmental literature. Given these outstanding questions, this paper has two main aims. The first aim was to provide a clear definition for mechanism and a discussion about what is meant by development. I argue that the definition of mechanism that is provided better aligns with how most, if not all, developmental scientists think about them. The second goal was to provide concrete suggestions for how developmental scientists might study and test different kinds of mechanisms of developmental change. One of the main arguments of the paper is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to studying and testing mechanisms of developmental change and that how developmental researchers study them depends on key features of the mechanism in question.
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Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

Abstract

Section snippets

Facial imitation

Intermodal mapping: oral-visual and speech perception-production

The mutual imitation game and why it's important

Origins of theory of mind

Memory

Components of a new developmental theory

Acknowledgements

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Cognitive Psychology

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Infant Behavior and Development

Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind

British Journal of Developmental Psychology

Early understanding of referential intent and attentional focusEvidence from language and emotion

Understanding other mindsPerspectives from autism

The emergence of symbolsCognition-communication in infancy

From first words to grammarIndividual differences and dissociable mechanism

Williams syndromeAn unusual neuropsychological profile

The moral significance of birth

Ethics

The paradox of self consciousness

One word at a timeThe use of single word utterances before syntax

Child's talkLearning to use language

Past, space, and self

Rules and representations

About face

Neurophysiological correlates of early symptoms of autism

Child Development

Children with autism fail to orient to naturally-occurring social stimuli

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

A crosslinguistic investigation of vowel formants in babbling

Journal of Child Language

Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language

Journal of Child Language

Social cognition

Modularity of mindAn essay on faculty psychology

The moral significance of primitive self-consciousness

Ethics

Relations between semantic and cognitive development in the one-word stageThe specificity hypothesis

Child Development

The development of categorization in the second year and its relation to other cognitive and linguistic developments

Child Development

Categorization and namingBasic-level sorting in eighteen-month-olds and its relation to language

Child Development

Words, thoughts, and theories

The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn

Utterer's meaning and intentions

Philosophical Review

Peer imitation by toddlers in laboratory, home, and day-care contextsImplications for social learning and memory

Developmental Psychology