Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding

Research and theory on social cognitive development across the life span over the past 30 years has concentrated on an understanding of beliefs, desires, and intentions, referred to as “theory of mind.” This chapter describes the developmental course, beginning in infancy, of social-cognitive skills in relation to general cognitive processes, such as executive functions, atypical social cognitive development, research in primatology and neuroscience, notably mirror neurons. It contrasts the current individualistic claims with what we feel are more valid relational metatheoretical assumptions. We contend that social understanding (which we prefer to “theory of mind”) should be understood as embedded in interpersonal engagement, joint attention, culture, family interaction, and language. These processes facilitate increasing sophistication in social understanding.


Keywords:

social understanding;
theory of mind;
infancy;
executive function;
language;
relational metatheory;
mirror neurons;
neuroscience

The Development of Social Understanding

The precise nature of the relationship between language and thought is an intriguing and challenging area of inquiry for scientists across many disciplines. In the realm of neuropsychology, research has investigated the inter-dependence of language and thought by testing individuals with compromised language abilities and observing whether performance in other cognitive domains is diminished. One group of such individuals is patients with aphasia who have an impairment in speech and language arising from a brain injury, such as a stroke. Our previous research has shown that the degree of language impairment in these individuals is strongly associated with the degree of impairment on complex reasoning tasks, such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) and Raven’s Matrices. In the current study, we present new data from a large group of individuals with aphasia that show a dissociation in performance between putatively non-verbal tasks on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) that require differing degrees of reasoning (Picture Completion vs. Picture Arrangement tasks). We also present an update and replication of our previous findings with the WCST showing that individuals with the most profound core language deficits (i.e., impaired comprehension and disordered language output) are particularly impaired on problem-solving tasks. In the second part of the paper, we present findings from a neurologically-intact individual known as “Chelsea” who was not exposed to language due to an unaddressed hearing loss that was present since birth. At the age of 32, she was fitted with hearing aids and exposed to spoken and signed language for the first time, but she was only able to acquire a limited language capacity. Chelsea was tested on a series of standardized neuropsychological measures, including reasoning and problem-solving tasks. She was able to perform well on a number of visuospatial tasks but was disproportionately impaired on tasks that required reasoning, such as Raven’s Matrices and the WAIS Picture Arrangement task. Together, these findings suggest that language supports complex reasoning, possibly due to the facilitative role of verbal working memory and inner speech in higher mental processes.

/pdf/impaired-reasoning-and-problem-solving-in-individuals-with-2sti1x6fnu.pdf

Impaired reasoning and problem-solving in individuals with language impairment due to aphasia or language delay

Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: (1) the standard evolutionary psychology model (Carruthers), (2) the individualist empiricist model (Wellman, Gopnik), (3) the cultural empiricist model (Heyes), and (4) the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model (4) by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit.

/pdf/the-origins-of-mindreading-how-interpretive-socio-cognitive-11liixbiur.pdf

The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground

Revisiting Marx and problematizing Vygotsky: a transformative approach to language and speech internalization

How talking and thinking or language and thought relate to one another has been discussed through generations in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. This is once again re-emerging as an important issue in social development with new evidence that language acquisition tends to be correlated with social cognitive development. The specific part played by language, and the function of social interaction more generally, have emerged as factors of central importance in current research on social cognitive development, or children's so-called "theory of mind" (Astington & Baird, 2005; Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, 2006; Symons, 2004). Here we review approaches to the relations between language and thought, and discuss our position on the role of language in social cognitive development. We should be clear, however, that the relations described between language and thought depend on one’s view of these phenomena. Even to discuss such links appears to presuppose that the two are separable and monolithic entities that can interact. From our perspective, language and thought are overall umbrella terms that include different aspects of human activity. Asking questions, making requests, persuading, apologizing and joking are diverse examples of what makes up language. Similarly, although thought may include imagining the smell of roses, remembering to buy a bouquet for one’s spouse and then calculating the cost, or attempting to figure out why a particular rose bush is not doing well in one’s garden, these diverse activities seem to have little in common. We view language as activity, and when we consider talking and thinking in relation to the other terms we require in this chapter—social understanding, social interaction and mind—any sharp lines between them begin to blur, especially when we consider developmental relations. That is, early forms of interaction in which infants’ attention is coordinated with others’, referred to as joint attention, are the foundation on which the later use of words is based. These forms of interaction represent what is essential about language and yet they can also be considered social skills. In turn, they allow for further development of language and social understanding (Carpendale & Lewis, 2006). The background to this chapter is our position that the view of the mind assumed in the “theory of mind” tradition according to which “mental states” such as beliefs, desires and intentions underlie and cause outer physical behaviour is deeply problematic for a number of reasons. Given this view of the mind the question raised in the “theory of mind” tradition is how do children come to understand their own and others’ minds? Several types of solutions have been proposed. The dominant account is that children must infer what is going on in others’ minds and form and test theories about how the mind works. An alternative suggestion is that such ways of thinking about social matters may have evolved phylogenetically rather than developing in an individual ontogenetic manner. Alternatively, children may introspect on their own minds and reason by analogy about others’ minds. These positions appear mutually exclusive, but various combinations of weaker versions have been proposed. However, in spite of their apparent differences there are a number of similarities. They all assume that social understanding is based on a core cognitive strategy, whereas we

Talking and thinking: The role of speech in social understanding

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Talking and thinking: The role of speech in social understanding