Questa tesi di dottorato si divide in tre capitoli. I primi due capitoli riguardano il panorama teorico affrontato e il terzo rappresenta il cuore della ricerca. / This PhD dissertation is divided into three chapters, the first two concerning the theoretical panorama investigated and the third centred on the presentation of the research.

Lo scopo della presente tesi consiste nell’esplorare la possibile connessione tra la Teoria della Mente (ToM) e due dimensioni implicate nel processo decisionale: l’abilità di resistere ai bias che intervengono durante la valutazione della decisione e la capacità di scegliere quando è implicata la dimensione temporale, entrambe considerate in una prospettiva evolutiva. Il primo capitolo definisce una panoramica in merito alla ToM; il secondo fornisce un’ampia descrizione in merito ai bias legati alla decisione: hindsight bias e outcome bias; mentre il terzo si focalizza sulle scelte basate sulla dimensione temporale. Il quarto e il quinto capitolo presentano due contributi relativi a come questi temi si sviluppano e come sono connessi. Entrambe le ricerche si focalizzano su bambini di scuola primaria, una fascia d’età che solo recentemente è stata oggetto d’indagine in letteratura. Nel primo studio, l’attenzione si è diretta verso la ToM e il possibile legame con i bias della decisione; nel secondo studio, l’abilità di mindreading è presa in considerazione quando i bambini devono prendere decisioni che richiedono la capacità di gestire la dimensione temporale del presente e del futuro. I risultati evidenziano il ruolo chiave della mentalizzazione nel processo decisionale. / The aim of this thesis is to explore the possible connection between Theory of Mind (ToM) and two dimensions implicated in the decisional process: the ability to resist to the biases that occur during the evaluation of a decision and the ability to decide when a temporal dimension is involved, both considered in a developmental perspective. The first chapter presents an overview on ToM; the second one provides a wide description of the most investigated decision evaluation biases: hindsight bias and outcome bias; whereas the third one focuses on the choices based on the temporal dimension. The fourth and the fifth chapters show two empirical contributes on how these themes develop and how they are connected. The focus is on primary school-age children, an age range that only recently has been explored. Specifically, in the first study the attention has been directed towards ToM and its possible link with hindsight and outcome biases. In the second study, the mindreading ability is analyzed when children have to take decisions that require the ability to manage the temporal dimension of the present and of the future. The results of both researches highlight the crucial role of mentalizing in the decision-making process.

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) are marked by social-communicative difficulties and unusually fixed or repetitive interests, activities, and behaviors (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). In this thesis, I review empirically and conceptually based philosophic proposals that maintain the social-communicative difficulties exhibited by persons on the autism spectrum result from a lack of capacity to understand other persons as minded. I will argue that the social-communicative difficulties that characterize ASCs may instead result from a lack of ability to access other minds, and that this lack of ability is due to a contingent lack of external resources.

Mentaliseringsförmåga innebär förmågan att ta en annan persons perspektiv, att förstå hur någon annan tänker och känner. Det innebär även att förstå de egna tankarna och reaktionerna relaterat till andra personers tankar och känslor. Det är viktigt med en välfungerande mentaliseringsförmåga för att kunna samverka med andra individer och sin omgivning på ett pragmatiskt och ändamålsenligt sätt. Det finns flera olika förmågor som kan vara viktiga för mentaliseringsförmågan, i vilken grad de påverkar är dock fortfarande oklart. Syftet med detta arbete var att undersöka mentaliseringsförmågan och dess samvariation med andra kognitiva förmågor hos barn i åldrarna 6-7 år. I föreliggande studie användes tio test för att undersöka vilka kognitiva förmågor som samverkade med mentaliseringsförmågan. De förmågor som testades var visuellt och auditivt arbetsminne, korttidsminne, språkförståelse och ickeverbal intelligens. Testgruppen bestod av 25 typiskt utvecklade barn i åldrarna 6:0–8:0 år med svenska som modersmål. Resultatet av testerna visade att ickeverbal intelligens, korttidsminne och språkförståelse korrelerade med barnens mentaliseringsförmåga. Vad gällde arbetsminnet verkade det främst som att en arbetsminneskapacitet upp till en viss nivå gynnade mentaliseringsförmågan, kapacitet över denna nivå verkade inte ha någon betydelse för prestationen. Det upptäcktes ingen enskild faktor som var viktigare än de andra för mentaliseringsförmågan, utan att samverkan av dessa förmågor är viktig. / Theory of mind, or mentalization ability, is the ability to understand how another individual thinks, acts and feels. It is important to develop a mentalization ability in order to interact with other people and the surrounding social environment in a pragmatic way. There are several abilities that might play an important role in the developmental process of Theory of mind. It is still uncertain to which degree these abilities effect the mentalization ability. The purpose with this study was to investigate the mentalization ability and its relationship with other cognitive abilities in children aged 6-7 years. In this study, ten different tests were used to analyze which abilities correlated with Theory of mind. The abilities that were tested were visual- and auditory working memory, short-term memory, non-verbal intelligence and language understanding. The participating test group consisted of 25 typically developed children aged 6:0-8:0 with Swedish as mother tongue. The results from the tests showed that the mentalization ability correlated with nonverbal intelligence, short-term memory and language understanding. It appears that a certain level of working memory is important, but that an exceptionally good working memory will not improve the mentalization ability further. The result showed that no single ability were more important than the others for the mentalization ability.

In this study, the development of a second-order false belief task is investigated by considering the impact of the acquisition of Turkish evidential markers, namely &ndash / DI (direct evidence) and &ndash / mIs (inference or hearsay). A neutral version of the tasks served as a control form. 21 kindergarten children (aged 4-5 years), 47 primary school children (aged 6- 12 years) and 10 adults participated in the study. Our results revealed that there is no effect of acquisition of evidentials on false belief understanding. Together with the other studies, there is a facilitative effect of &ndash / DI (direct evidence) in understanding of stories/narratives in general rather than false belief understanding for the children at the age of 4 to 6/7. In addition to the second-order false belief tasks (FBT_2), a simple working memory task (WST), a complex working memory task (LST), a perspective taking task (PTT) and a double- embedded relative clause task (REL_2) were used in order to investigate the developmental trend of these tasks and their possible relationship with second-order false belief understanding. Also, to the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a REL_2 task has been devised in a Turkish study. The general developmental trend was found for all tasks. Even if some significant correlations were found for FBT_2 score predicted from other tasks, analyses showed that only the contribution of age was significant. Since all of these domains are not related to second-order false belief reasoning but develop at the same time, it is not incompatible with the serial bottleneck hypothesis. In sum, the findings are matching with the modularity view that ToM is a faculty of the human mind at their own pace that does not share intrinsic content with other faculties such as language and working memory (Leslie et al., 2004). However, it develops together with those other faculties and they may constrain the expression of child

This study was conducted to investigate the processes underlying the relation between executive functioning and false belief knowledge. We explored the hypothesis that children with advanced executive functioning skills are better equipped to capitalize on the experiences that are necessary to learn how to reason about others’ mental states. To examine this possibility, we recruited 3.5-year-old children with age-appropriate variability in executive functioning skills to participate in a training study designed to promote their performance on false belief tasks. We found that individual differences in executive functioning task scores strongly and consistently predicted the extent to which children benefited from false-belief training. Importantly, the relation between executive functioning and false belief improvement remained significant after controlling for age, initial performance on mental state reasoning tasks, language skills, and executive functioning improvement across the testing period. Thus, our results support the hypothesis that executive functioning skills influence the extent to which children are able to capitalize on relevant experience to better predict and understand others’ false-belief-based behaviour. This claim is discussed with respect to possible alternative explanations for our findings, and ensuing implications for understanding the interplay between neuromaturational factors and experience. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-28 14:43:16.88

This thesis consists of four independent papers. The first two papers use experimental methods to study pro-social behaviors. The other two use theoretical methods to investigate questions about belief formation. The first paper “Communication: Content or Relationship?” investigates the effect on communication on generosity in a dictator game. In the basic experiment (the control), subjects in one room are dictators and subjects in another room are recipients. The subjects are anonymous to each other throughout the whole experiment. Each dictator gets to allocate a sum of 100 SEK between herself and an unknown recipient in the other room. In the first treatment we allow each recipient to send a free-form message to his dictator counterpart, before the dictator makes her allocation decision. In order to separate the effect of the content of the communication, from the relationship-building effect of communication, we carry out a third treatment, where we take the messages from the previous treatment and give each of them to a dictator in this new treatment. The dictators are informed that the recipients who wrote the messages are not the recipients they will have the opportunity to send money to. We find that this still increases donation compared to the baseline but not as much as in the other treatment. This suggests that both the impersonal content of the communication and the relationship effect matters for donations. The second paper, “Limbic justice – Amygdala Drives Rejection in the Ultimatum Game”, is about the neurological basis for the tendency to punish norm violators in the Ultimatum Game. In the Ultimatum Game, a proposer proposes a way to divide a fixed sum of money. The responder accepts or rejects the proposal. If the proposal is accepted the proposed split is realized and if the proposal is rejected both subjects gets zero. Subjects were randomly allocated to receive either the benzodiazepine oxazepam or a placebo substance, and then played the Ultimatum Game in the responder role, while lying in and fMRI camera. Rejection rate is significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Moreover a mygdala was relatively more activated in the placebo group than in the oxazepam group for unfair offers. This is mirrored by differences in activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and right ACC. Our findings suggest that the automatic and emotional response to unfairness, or norm violations, are driven by amygdala and that balancing of such automatic behavioral responses is associated with parts of the prefrontal cortex. The conflict of motives is monitored by the ACC. In order to decide what strategy to choose, a player needs to form beliefs about what other players will do. This requires the player to have a model of how other people form beliefs – what psychologists call a theory of mind. In the third paper “Evolution of Theories of Mind” I study the evolution of players’ models of how other players think. When people play a game for the first time, their behavior is often well predicted by the level-k, and related models. According to this model, people think in a limited number of steps, when they form beliefs about other peoples' behavior. Moreover, people differ with respect to how they form beliefs. The heterogeneity is represented by a set of cognitive types {0,1,2,...}, such that type 0 randomizes uniformly and type k&gt;0 plays a k times iterated best response to this. Empirically one finds that most experimental subjects behave as if they are of type 1 or 2, and individuals of type 3 and above are very rare. When people play the same game more than once, they may use their experience to predict how others will behave. Fictitious play is a prominent model of learning, according to which all individuals believe that the future will be like the past, and best respond to the average of past play. I define a model of heterogeneous fictitious play, according to which there is a hierarchy of types {1,2,...}, such that type k plays a k time iterated best response to the average of past play. The level-k and fictitious play models, implicitly assume that players lack specific information about the cognitive types of their opponents. I extend these models to allow for the possibility that types are partially observed. I study evolution of types in a number of games separately. In contrast to most of the literature on evolution and learning, I also study the evolution of types across different games. I show that an evolutionary process, based on payoffs earned in different games, both with and without partial observability, can lead to a polymorphic population where relatively unsophisticated types survive, often resulting in initial behavior that does not correspond to a Nash equilibrium. Two important mechanisms behind these results are the following: (i) There are games, such as the Hawk-Dove game, where there is an advantage of not thinking and behaving like others, since choosing the same action as the opponent yields an inefficient outcome. This mechanism is at work even if types are not observed. (ii) If types are partially observed then there are Social dilemmas where lower types may have a commitment advantage; lower types may be able to commit to strategies that result in more efficient payoffs. The importance of categorical reasoning in human cognition is well-established in psychology and cognitive science, and one of the most important functions of categorization is to facilitate prediction. Prediction on the basis of categorical reasoning is relevant when one has to predict the value of a variable on the basis of one's previous experience with similar situations, but where the past experience does not include any situation that was identical to the present situation in all relevant aspects. In such situations one can classify the situation as belonging to some category, and use the past experiences in that category to make a prediction about the current situation. In the fourth paper, “Optimal Categorization”, I provide a model of categorizations that are optimal in the sense that they minimize prediction error. From an evolutionary perspective we would expect humans to have developed categories that generate predictions which induce behavior that maximize fitness, and it seems reasonable to assume that fitness is generally increasing in how accurate the predictions are. In the model a subject starts out with a categorization that she has learnt or inherited early in life. The categorization divides the space of objects into categories. In the beginning of each period, the subject observes a two-dimensional object in one dimension, and wants to predict the object’s value in the other dimension. She has a data base of objects that were observed in both dimensions in the past. The subject determines what category the new object belongs to on the basis of observation of its first dimension. She predicts that its value in the second dimension will be equal to the average value among the past observations in the corresponding category. At the end of each period the second dimension is observed, and the observation is stored in the data base. The main result is that the optimal number of categories is determined by a trade-off between (a) decreasing the size of categories in order to enhance category homogeneity, and (b) increasing the size of categories in order to enhance category sample size. In other words, the advantage of fine grained categorizations is that objects in a category are similar to each other. The advantage of coarse categorizations is that a prediction about a category is based on a large number of observations, thereby reducing the risk of over-fitting. Comparative statics reveal how the optimal categorization depends on the number of observations as well as on the frequency of objects with different properties. The set-up does not presume the existence of an objectively true categorization “out there”. The optimal categorization is a framework we impose on our environment in order to predict it. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2010. Sammanfattning jämte 4 uppsatser.</p>

Since a deficit in empathy is not only characteristic among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but categorically used in defining ASD, it is of utmost importance to explore educational avenues to build prosocial skills among this group. This study sought to explore the primary research question: What impact does the implementation of an empathy-focused video modeling intervention have on frequency of empathic behaviour among adolescents with ASD? The secondary research questions examined were: In what ways does employing a video modeling simulation intervention using the Model Me Kids Friendship program impact the ability of adolescents with ASD to demonstrate empathic behaviour? How do adolescents with ASD express or speak about their empathic behaviour following participation in a simulation intervention using Model Me Kids Friendship? How do the Educational Resource Facilitators (teaching assistants) perceive the same individuals’ empathic behaviour following participation in a simulation intervention using Model Me Kids Friendship (MMF)? This mixed methods study explores 1 particular video modeling simulation program as a focused approach to building empathic behaviour among adolescents with ASD. The theoretical framework presented blends theory of mind, simulation theory, and psychological theories of empathic behaviour including the inherent motor, cognitive, and emotional components. Individuals with ASD may not learn empathic behaviours solely through observation as typically developing children do, but findings suggest that through video simulation, practice may, in fact, lead to increased empathic behaviour. The quantitative findings were not significant but did show increase in motor empathy behaviour ratings among intervention group participants. Support for video modeling as a vehicle to teach empathic behaviour was provided by qualitative data collected over the course of 4 months contextualizing specific examples of empathic behaviour exhibited by participating teens with ASD. There is a link made between high levels of systematizing among teens on the spectrum (the drive to analyze and build a system) and video modeling as a means to foster empathic behaviour, thereby supporting an increased use of video simulation strategies to teach social skills among this group.

Hypercomputation, which is the general concept embracing all machinery capable of carrying out more tasks than Turing Machines and beyond the Turing Limit, has implications for various fields including mathematics, physics, computer science and philosophy. Regarding its philosophical aspects, it is necessary to reveal the position of hypercomputation relative to the classical computational theory of mind in order to clarify and broaden the scope of hypercomputation so that it encompasses some phenomena which are regarded as problematic because of their property of being uncomputable. This thesis points to a relation between hypercomputation and the agent-causation theory of free will by exploring that theory&#039 / s alleged infinite-regress feature, which has been regarded by some authors as problematic and used against the agent causation theory. In order to cope with this problem, we propose a certain hypercomputer, viz. the reverse Zeus machine. The reverse Zeus machine can help to understand the infinite-regress aspect of agent causation better than accelerating Turing machines (or ordinary Zeus machines). Accelerating Turing machines are abstract machines which perform temporal patterning in an accelerating manner by executing each step in half the time required for the previous step. This allows them to compute infinitely many operations in finite time. Although reverse Zeus machines have the same working principle as accelerating Turing machines, we show that agent causation can be represented by reverse Zeus machines better than by the classical Zeus machines.

This essay aims to provide an overview of some key theories and frameworks regarding moral cognition and its neural correlates, in order to examine the possibilities of enhancement of moral cognition. Moral cognition arises from the functional integration of several distinct brain regions and networks. These neural systems correspond to different socioaffective abilities, such as empathy and compassion, as well as sociocognitive abilities, such as theory of mind. Due to this neural distinction, these moral abilities, behaviors, and emotions can be targeted and trained separately. Recent research suggests that training sociocognitive and socioaffective abilities increases cortical thickness in corresponding brain regions and networks, hence providing support for adult neural plasticity in relation to moral cognition. Increased cortical thickness also corresponds to enhanced performance in socioaffective and sociocognitive abilities. Training compassion and empathy induce enhanced abilities to pick up emotional cues, as well as strengthen the motivation to alleviate others’ distress. Practicing theory of mind allows for a better understanding of the perspective of others, which has been indicated to reduce biases between individuals or societal groups. Thus, enhanced moral cognition can contribute to an increase in consideration for those affected by our choices and behavior, which may yield more compassionate, just, and safe societies.