Academisch proefschrift--Amsterdam. / Summaries in French and German. "Literatuur": p. [321]-328.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb. 25, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Andrew Melnyk. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This study set out to collect reference data on, and uncover the developmental changes in, advanced Theory-of-Mind (ToM) ability of Hong Kong typically-developing (TD) children and children with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) / High-functioning Autism (HFA) aged 5-0 to 8-11 using a Chinese version of the Happé’s Strange Stories. The study also aimed to assess the difference in performance on this advanced test of ToM between Hong Kong TD children and children with AS/HFA. Cross-cultural comparisons of the performance on this advanced test of ToM between Hong Kong TD children and British TD children were also made. The results revealed that Hong Kong TD children showed improvement in ToM ability as they grew, and so did the children with AS/HFA, although the ToM ability of children with AS/HFA developed in a manner different from that of the TD children. Results also confirmed that the children with AS/HFA had impairment of social understanding, as compared to their TD peers. Cross-cultural comparisons revealed that Hong Kong TD children may have enhanced ToM ability when comparing to their British TD counterparts, although further validation is needed to confirm this preliminary finding. Finally, although preliminary results confirmed the discriminating power of the Happé’s Strange Stories task for young TD children and children with AS/HFA aged 5-0 to 6-11, further rigorous validation in children of varying cognitive ability and ages is needed in order to establish the clinical utility of this task as part of a comprehensive clinical assessment of high-functioning children referred for possible ASD. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Older adults with and without dementia have repeatedly shown poorer performance on tasks thought to tap theory of mind abilities. However these tasks may rely on other cognitive functions such as memory and as a result it is not clear if task difficulties reflect poorer ability to infer mental states or represent declines in general cognitive function. It is argued that theory of mind occurs as a result of decoding basic social information from others such as the emotion experienced, intentionality cues, the direction of eye gaze and the ability to engage in shared attention. This thesis contains a task assessing each of these precursors with the experimental chapters reporting two studies, the first establishes if differences emerge in healthy aging between young and older adults.The second study uses the same task to determine if those with dementia differ from healthy controls. When decoding facial emotion (chapter four) older adults were poorer than younger recognising negative emotions showing a bias for choosing the label disgust.Those with dementia differed qualitatively from age-matched controls showing a bias to label negative emotions as positive. When decoding intentionality from the body (chapter five) older adults showed most difficulty decoding negative affect. Those with dementia were significantly worse decoding emotions but also showed tendencies to choose positive emotion labels in this modality. The ability to discriminate between different directions of eye gaze (chapter six) revealed older adults were worse at discriminating between direct and averted gaze, dementia impacted further on this ability. When establishing shared attention (chapter seven) older adults used gaze cues significantly less than young however those with dementia performed comparably to their age matched controls.These results are evaluated in the context of relevant theories of aging and the implications for the social function of those with dementia are discusse

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Over the past 25 years, there has been tremendous interest in the development of children’s ability to reason about others’ mental states, or “theory of mind”. Much research has explored children's understanding of situational cues that lead to knowledge, but only recently has research begun to assess children's understanding of person-specific differences in knowledge. A number of studies (Birch, Vauthier & Bloom, 2008; Jaswal & Neely, 2006; Koenig, Clément & Harris, 2004) have recently demonstrated that at least by age 3 children pay attention to others' history of accuracy and use it as a cue when deciding from whom to learn. However, the nature and scope of children's interpretations of other's prior accuracy remains unclear. Experiment 1 assessed whether 4- and 5-year-olds interpret prior accuracy as indicative of knowledge, as opposed to two other accounts that do not involve epistemic attributions. This experiment revealed that preschool children can revise their tendency to prefer to learn from a previously accurate informant over an inaccurate one when presented with evidence regarding each informant's current knowledge state. Experiment 2 investigated how broadly a person's history of accuracy influences children's subsequent inferences, and showed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) use information about an individual's past accuracy to predict her knowledge in other related domains as well as her propensity for prosocial or antisocial behaviour. Overall, children's performance in these experiments suggests that both 4- and 5-year-olds interpret others' history of accuracy as indicative of knowledge; however, 4-year-olds make a more restricted attribution of knowledge while 5-year-olds make a more stable, trait-like attribution. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research on theory of mind and more broadly on children's social and cognitive development.

The following thesis is concerned with the way we think of particular objects. More specifically, it is concerned with de re thoughts and beliefs, which are parasitic upon the objects they are about. In ascribing and expressing de re thoughts and beliefs, we employ de re expressions, such as demonstratives and names. There is a pervasive view in the philosophy of language, known as the direct-reference view, that claims that these expressions contribute to thoughts nothing over and above objects themselves. I argue that not only is this view of de re expressions untenable upon reflection on its repercussions for cognitive significance and judgement, but also that the considerations that motivate its genesis rest on a mistaken understanding of the alternative, viz a Fregean understanding of thought that employs a notion of sense. In the first chapter, I present logical difficulties that face accounts of de re belief and a quasi-Fregean response to them. In the second chapter, I focus on two exhaustive interpretations of the cognitive significance of de re expressions on the direct-reference view, and I argue that both interpretations are untenable either because they cannot account for propositional unity, or because they isolate experience from judgement. In the third chapter, I present a holistic interpretation of sense, and argue that it is neither faced by critiques presented by proponents of direct-reference, nor by the difficulties I articulate in the first two chapters. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-21 10:53:33.232

This essay is on ‘Phenomenal Consciousness’. By introducing the ‘hard problem’ of phenomenal consciousness, I will focus on Chalmers’ efforts on developing a theory of consciousness, which he believes is a project toward finding a solution to the hard problem. As a result of focusing on the hard problem, this paper deals with the questions such as “how and why cognitive functioning is accompanied by conscious experience”, “how the physical systems or the physical brain processes give rise to conscious experience”, “why these processes do not take place ‘in the dark’ without any accompanying states of experience”, “what is the relation between the physical, the psychological and the phenomenal” and finally “what is the phenomenal experience or phenomenal feel”. There are two main streams trying to find a solution to (or dissolve) these kinds of questions about consciousness: the reductive doctrines (materialists) and the nonreductive doctrines. Before exploring Chalmers’ answer to these questions, which is by his nonreductive theory of consciousness, I will explore some of the most important reductive (materialist) theories by focusing on Chalmers’ arguments against them and I will indicate his main objection to materialist theories by pointing out what he thinks is missing in these theories. This issue will be followed by the part in which I will argue that what makes Chalmers’ arguments against materialists views applicable, actually applies to his own theory of consciousness as well. I will argue that what is missing in all theories of consciousness, (including Chalmers’) which could play a significant role in a theory of consciousness, is a ‘first person point of view’ and an ‘ability to have a first person point of view’, by which I mean an ability for a being to have a first person (subjective) access to the results of his own physical cognitive information processing system. As a result, I will argue that phenomenal consciousness is actually an epistemic phenomenon which is the result of being in a sort of epistemic relation to one’s own cognitive system. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-09 00:24:44.795

A new name for an old problem, the “hard problem of consciousness” is perhaps the most controversial issue in the contemporary philosophy of mind. The problem, posed by non-reductivists like Chalmers, is: how do the phenomenal qualities of our conscious experience stand in relation to a physical world that seems logically compatible with their absence? But there is no agreement over what precisely this question is asking about (viz., “phenomenal qualities”), or whether the apparently non-physical explanandum is a real one. At the root of the intractability is the particular way that we have come to think about the question, presupposing i) that the conscious explanandum is an ontological one and thus ii) that the sense in which it exists (as an inner entity) should be straightforward. These assumptions are overturned in the following account in which I argue that the qualitative contents of our experience are in the world, not the ontological mind. I argue that neither the non-reductivist nor the eliminitivist, on analysis, need disagree about this. In Chapter Two, I argue that what the non-reductivist really wants to preserve are the qualities of the world that are invisible to an ontological picture made in terms of scientific unobservables, or trans-experiential physical structures and processes. The eliminitivist, on the other hand, is merely interested in denying the ontologization of these qualities as properties of the ontological mind. On this interpretation, non-reductivists and eliminitivists can be seen to mutually support a solution to the traditional mind-body problem in the form of the non-reductive, non-ontological account of consciousness that I will offer in this thesis: non-reductive, because the properties of our experience are not illegitimately denied (or reduced), and non-ontological because they are not thereby hypostatized (or ontologized). Rather, they are left in the “neutral” public realm where—from a Wittgensteinian perspective—the meanings of the problematic terms of mind-body discourse are fixed. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-29 15:55:54.312

When children role play, they do things such as change their tone of voice or take on the character’s emotions or needs. These behaviours make it appear as though children adopt the mental perspective of the character they are pretending to be, which has led some researchers to argue that children “think-as-if” they are the character while role playing (e.g., Harris, 2000). However, it is questionable whether these sorts of behaviours can really be taken as strong evidence that children are “thinking-as-if”; children might simply be imitating the distinctive behavioural characteristics of the character they are pretending to be – or “behaving-as-if”. In two studies, I attempted to obtain better evidence that children “think-as-if” while role playing. To do this, I developed a novel paradigm called the Pretend Self-recognition (PSR) task that examines how children refer to photographs of themselves while they are pretending to be someone else. I reasoned that if children were truly “thinking-as-if”, they might see the photograph of themselves as a third person would, and thus refer to the photograph of themselves using their own proper name. In contrast, if children were simply "behaving-as-if", they might continue to refer to the photograph with the personal pronoun “me”. In Study 1, approximately half of 4-year-old children labeled their own photograph from the perspective of the character they were pretending to be, and thus showed evidence of "thinking-as-if". This finding was replicated when children were given the PSR task at two time points along with measures of theory of mind, executive functioning, pretense understanding, and narrative absorption. Results showed that PSR performance was stable across testing period, but was not related to any of the other constructs that were also measured. Taken together, the findings reported in this dissertation show that the PSR task is a reliable measure of perspective taking in role play, though the source of individual differences in the measure remains a target for future research. The lack of relation between individual differences might suggest that PSR performance is orthogonal to the other constructs and is something in its own right. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-15 17:02:11.029