Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner deserve congratulations for their well-reasoned ideas on the development of cultural learning. Their arguments are generally convincing, perhaps because their distinctions and developmental relations among types of cultural learning and agency mirror concepts of my own.

Barresi & Moore assume an equivalence between ontogenetic and evolutionaiy transformations of social understanding. The mechanisms of evolution allow for novel structures to arise, both through terminal addition and through the onset of novel pathways at time points that precede the end points of ancestral pathways. Terminal addition may not be the appropriate model for the evolution of human object-directed imitation, intermodal equivalence, or joint attention.

Barresi & Moore's account predicts that infants deprived of visual input will be delayed in achieving social understanding, a hypothesis that receives some support from studies of language use. by blind children. It is proposed that recently developed false belief and appearance/reality tasks be used to explore this issue further. Three possibly distracting conceptual issues are also discussed.

The “intentional schema” seems identical to or dependent upon kinesthetic–visual matching, both of which account for similar empirical findings. The intentional schema, however, fails to account for variability in children's understanding of false belief and differences in children's understanding of self and other in pretense.

The intentional schema may not be sufficiently characterized to make questions about its role in individual and species development intelligible. The idea of metarepresentation may perhaps give it enough content. The importance of metarepresentation itself, however, can be called into question.

Second person intentional relations, involving intentional activities directed at the perceptor, are qualitatively different from first and third person relations. They generate a peculiar, bidirectional kind of intentionality, especially in the realm of visual perception. Systems specialized in dealing with this have been selected by evolution. These systems can be considered to be the evolutionary precursors to the human theory of mind.

Barresi & Moore contrast two theories of autism: (1) in autism there is a general inability to integrate first and third person information (of any kind), and (2) in autism there is a specific inability to represent an agent's perceptual or volitional mental state being about another agents mental state. Two lines of experimental evidence suggest that the first of these is too broad, favoring instead the more specific “theory of mind” account.

Barresi & Moore fail to provide a satisfactory account for the development of social understanding because of (1) their ambiguous characterization of the relationship between the intentional schema and shared intentional activities, (2) their underestimation of the representational capacities of infants, and (3) their overreliance on the simulationist assumption that understanding others is tantamount to sharing their experience.

The comment addresses central issues of a "theory theory" approach as exemplified in Gopnik' and Goldman's BBS-articles. Gopnik, on the one hand, tries to demonstrate that empirical evidence from developmental psychology supports the view of a "theory theory" in which common sense beliefs are constructed to explain ourselves and others. Focusing the informational processing routes possibly involved we would like to argue that his main thesis (e.g. idea of intentionality as a cognitive construct) lacks support at least for two reasons: (...) one methodological and one structural. On the other hand, Goldman raises an important question when he is asking how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Reasons why Goldman's attempt to understand common sense mental representations by using an analogy from visual perception is problematic are discussed. The role which is attributed to a phenomenology is evaluated. (shrink)

In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

The study of the emergence of pretend play in developmental psychology has generally been restricted to analyses of children’s play with toys and everyday objects. The widely accepted criteria for establishing pretence are the child’s manipulation of object identities, attributes or existence. In this paper we argue that there is another arena for pretending—playful pretend teasing—which arises earlier than pretend play with objects and is therefore potentially relevant for understanding the more general emergence of pretence. We present examples of playful (...) pretend teasing in infancy before and around the end of the first year, involving pretend communicative gestures, mis-labelling and almost non-compliance with prohibitions. We argue that the roots of pretence not only lie earlier in human infancy than generally acknowledged, but also are rooted in playful emotional exchanges in which people recognise and respond to violations of communicative gestures and agreements. (shrink)

We consider the various criticisms and requests for clarification made by the commentators of our framework for understanding intentional relations. Our response is organized according to the main themes in the target article: general theory, phylogeny, development, and autism. We also add some discussion of further issues, such as simulation and moral theory, that were not addressed in the target article.

Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities may be termed “intentional relations.” We present a four-level framework of social understanding that organizes the ways in which social organisms represent the intentional relations of themselves and other agents. We presuppose that the information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about other agents’ intentional relations (or third (...) person information). However, through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals exist at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Of nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations with mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals are hypothesized to result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore's “intentional schema” will not do the work of “theory of mind.” Their model will account neither for fundamental facts of social competence, such as the social attributions of the 10-month-old infant, nor the possibility that, though having a theory of mind, the chimpanzee's theory is “weaker” than the human's.

Barresi & Moore do not consider information about intentional relations available within emotional engagement with others and do not see that others are perceived in the second as well as the third person. Recognising second person information forces recognition of similarities and connections not otherwise available. A developmental framework built on the assumption of the complete separateness of self and other is inevitably flawed.

Although their thesis is generally sound, Barresi & Moore give insufficient attention to the need for a methodology, whether simulation based or theory-based, for choosing among alternative possible matches of first person and third person information. This choice must be sensitive to contextual information, including past behavior. Moreover, apart from simulation or theory, first person information would not help predict future behavior.

The intentionality schema is an abstraction that relates phylogenetic and ontogenetic sequences of social understanding, but it also obscures the differences between humans and other primates. In particular, it ignores human social developmental and communicative history and the important roles that language plays in human understanding of others' intentional states.

Although Barresi & Moore could have grounded their framework more explicitly in existing models, they offer a provocative testbed for the assumptions of symbolic interactionism and further thinking about self-regulation, especially in autistics.

Barresi & Moore (B&M) provide a useful tool for the comparative study of social cognition that could, however, be improved by more subtle analysis of first person information about intentional relations. Knowledge of misrepresentation also needs to be better handled within the theory. I urge skepticism about B&M's sweeping phylogenetic claims.

The psychology of emotions illuminates the questions of intentional capacities raised by Barresi & Moore (B&M). Complex emotions require the development of a sense of self and are based on social comparisons between mainly imagined objects. The fourth level in B&M's framework requires something like a constructive agent rather than a mental agent.

A commentary on a target article by Alison Gopnik (1993) How we know our minds: the illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Focusing on evidence of how children acquire a theory of mind, this commentary argues that there are internal inconsistencies in theories that both argue for the functional role of conscious experiences and the irreducibility of those experiences to third-person viewable information processing.

This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...) Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. (shrink)