After every Discussion session, I will post some questions you can use as sstarting points for brief written contributions.

Below you find some working questions about the readings from Discussion 1.  If you didn’t contribute verbally to the Discussion or were absent, here’s an opportunity to make a belated "discussion contribution " (and not worry about points and grades).  Instead of answering the specific working questions you can also write about your own thoughts you had regarding the readings.  Either way, the length limit is 1 page per Theme. (Electronic submissions are preferred.)

Wellman et al., Kalish

1.       How convincing is the claim to you that children have “three core domains of thought?”  What kind of evidence would you need to see to be convinced?

2.       Wellman et al. distinguish three types of explanation.  What is their criterion for distinguishing them?  Both defend and critique their position.

3.       What are the similarities and differences between Wellman et al.'s approach and Kalish’s approach to explanations?

Attribution history/Malle

1.       Try to account for the appeal of the person/situation dichotomy in attribution research after Heider.  What is so tempting about it?

2.       What is the distinction between causes and reasons in people’s folk explanations of behavior and why does it exist?

3.       What would autistic individuals’ behavior explanations look like?

4.       Try to find, from real-life sources, one example of each of the following explanation modes: person attribution, situation attribution; reason explanation; cause explanation, causal history of reason explanation, enabling factor explanation

5.       Speculate about how the child acquires each of the four explanation modes postulated by Malle (causes, reasons, CHRs, enabling factors).

Baron-Cohen et al. (2001)

1.    Name some of the problems of the original test version and the changes employed

2.       What are the implications of the finding that parents of autistic children also show lower scores on the original test?

3.       What is the gender recognition control task for?

4.       Why the glossary of terms, and do you think this move did its job?

Baird, J. A., & Baldwin, D. A. (2001)

1.       Why is it interesting to study the perception of actions when one is interested in the inference of mental states?

2.       In the experiments reported, what is the logic of comparing “midpoints” and “endpoints”? 

3.       Relate the two “tiers” that the authors discuss to Povinelli’s (2001) proposal of two evolutionary systems of social cognition. 

Povinelli (2001)

1.       What is Povinelli’s interpretation of infant dishabituation experiments?

2.       What theory of mind capacities does Povinelli think chimpanzees have?  What evidence does he provide for his claim?

3.       What is the “reinterpretation hypothesis”?

4.       Design an experiment that would demonstrate convincingly a situation in which adults make genuine mental state inferences about another.  Secure this experiment against the skeptical critic who believes that even adults typically only read behavior and do not truly infer mental states.

Baldwin (2000)

1.   Explain how the discrepant labeling paradigm works and what it demonstrates.

2.      One might claim that infants check with the adult speaker just to locate sound.  What’s the argument against this position and for the position that infants check the adult speaker to determine his or her communicative intention?

3.      Given an example of the strategy of invoking and refuting a skeptical position  [alternative explanation game]

4.      At what age do children begin to actively interpret social clues?  Can we give a precise age?

Baldwin and Moses (2001)

1.      What do the authors mean by the infant’s “social stance”?

2.      In the Saylor, Sabbagh, & Baldwin study, what would one predict if the ambiguous gesture was given by a different person than was the whole-object gesture?

3.      What evidence is there to weaken the claim that mere salience of word labels dictates success of word learning?

Sperber & Wilson (2001)

1.      What are the authors’ arguments for rejecting theory of mind as a sufficient cognitive mechanism for language comprehension?

2.      A key concept in their model is relevance.  What processes do people recruit to determine what’s the relevant backgorund, context, assumption, etc. for a speaker’s utterance?