Attachment--and loss.

ION, GENERAL CONCEPTIONS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, MENTAL INDIVIDUALITY. It would be very difficult for any one with even much more knowledge than I possess, to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of these high mental powers. This difficulty arises from the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal; and again, the fact that writers differ to a great extent in the meaning which they attribute to the above terms, causes a further difficulty. If one may judge from various articles which have been published lately, the greatest stress seems to be laid on the supposed entire absence in animals of the power of abstraction, or of forming general concepts. But when a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract; for when he gets nearer his whole manner suddenly changes, if the other dog be a friend. A recent writer remarks, that in all such cases it is a pure assumption to assert that the mental act is not essentially of the same nature in the animal as in man. If either refers what he perceives with his senses to a mental concept, then so do both. (44. Mr. Hookham, in a letter to Prof. Max Muller, in the 'Birmingham News,' May, 1873.) When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi, hi, where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up into any neighbouring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted? It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth. But how can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in the chase? And this would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Buchner (45. 'Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,' French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked, how little can the hardworked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence. It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and selfconsciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; but who can say at what age this occurs in our young children? We see at least that such powers

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ase1887/22/257/22_257_458/_pdf

The descent of man and selection in relation to sex

From an evolutionary perspective, morality is a form of cooperation Cooperation requires individuals either to suppress their own selfinterest or to equate it with that of others We review recent research on the origins of human morality, both phylogenetic (research with apes) and ontogenetic (research with children) For both time frames we propose a two-step sequence: first a second-personal morality in which individuals are sympathetic or fair to particular others, and second an agent-neutral morality in which individuals follow and enforce group-wide social norms Human morality arose evolutionarily as a set of skills and motives for cooperating with others, and the ontogeny of these skills and motives unfolds in part naturally and in part as a result of sociocultural contexts and interactions

/pdf/origins-of-human-cooperation-and-morality-3binohqdz5.pdf

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate "how" question or as an ultimate "why" question. The "how" question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The "why" question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants' distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant's rights on the resources to be distributed.

/pdf/a-mutualistic-approach-to-morality-the-evolution-of-fairness-2llxnirh7q.pdf

A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice

Although adults generally prefer helpful behaviors and those who perform them, there are situations (in particular, when the target of an action is disliked) in which overt antisocial acts are seen as appropriate, and those who perform them are viewed positively. The current studies explore the developmental origins of this capacity for selective social evaluation. We find that although 5-mo-old infants uniformly prefer individuals who act positively toward others regardless of the status of the target, 8-mo-old infants selectively prefer characters who act positively toward prosocial individuals and characters who act negatively toward antisocial individuals. Additionally, young toddlers direct positive behaviors toward prosocial others and negative behaviors toward antisocial others. These findings constitute evidence that the nuanced social judgments and actions readily observable in human adults have their foundations in early developing cognitive mechanisms.

/pdf/how-infants-and-toddlers-react-to-antisocial-others-x7s0sucd78.pdf

How infants and toddlers react to antisocial others

The problem of how to distribute available resources among members of a group is a central aspect of social life. Adults react negatively to inequitable distributions and several studies have reported negative reactions to inequity also in non-human primates and dogs. We report two experiments on infants' reactions to equal and unequal distributions. In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provide, for the first time, converging evidence suggesting that infants aged 12 to 18 months (mean age 16 months) attend to the outcomes of distributive actions to evaluate agents' actions and to reason about agents' dispositions. The results provide support for recent theoretical proposals on the developmental roots of social evaluation skills and a sense of fairness.

The developmental roots of fairness: infants’ reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources

Prior research on implicit mind-reading skills has focussed on how infants anticipate other persons' actions. This study investigated whether 11- and 17-month-olds spontaneously attribute false beliefs (FB) even to a simple animated geometric shape. Infants were shown a triangle chasing a disk through a tunnel. Using an eye-tracker, we found that 17-month-olds in a change-of-location true belief (TB) task anticipated that the triangle would search for the disk in the correct place while in a FB test they anticipated that it would search for it in the wrong, belief congruent place. These results suggest that 17-month-olds' psychological-reasoning system is applied to the actions of unfamiliar agents and it is employed to anticipate agents' actions even in the absence of any morphological features that are typical of natural agents. These findings provide support for theoretical accounts that emphasize continuity in the development of theory of mind core concepts and belief reasoning skills.

Where will the triangle look for it? Attributing false beliefs to a geometric shape at 17 months.

Primary objective: Previous studies on patients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and diffuse brain damages have reported selective deficits in mental states reasoning or ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM). The goal of the current study is to investigate the fundamental role of the prefrontal cortex in two ToM components: inferential reasoning and social perception.Research design: Selective cognitive impairments following a TBI provide crucial evidence for assessing competing models of specific aspects of the cognitive system.Method and procedure: This study compared the performance of patients with predominantly focal lesions in the ventromedial (n = 11) or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (n = 7) with matched controls (n = 20). All subjects performed two ToM tasks: the Eyes Test and the Faux-pas Test.Results: It was found that both groups of patients performed equally poorly on the Eyes Test, but only patients with predominantly lesions in the ventromedial cortex performed poorly on the Faux-pas test. The group ef...

Theory of Mind in patients with ventromedial or dorsolateral prefrontal lesions following traumatic brain injury.

Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) knowledge that a person’s search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object’s location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we compared the performance of 17- to 26-month-olds on anticipatory looking in ToM tasks. The infants were either hearing or were deaf from hearing families and thus delayed in communicative experience gained from access to language and conversational input. Hearing infants significantly outperformed their deaf counterparts in anticipating the search actions of a cartoon character that held a false belief about a target-object location. By contrast, the performance of the two groups in a true belief condition did not differ significantly. These findings suggest for the first time that access to language and conversational input contributes to early ToM reasoning.

/pdf/belief-attribution-in-deaf-and-hearing-infants-2swewoxdkv.pdf

Belief attribution in deaf and hearing infants

Background 
Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3–6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite).


Principal Findings 
In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out.


Conclusions 
As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating children's developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.

/pdf/bilingualism-accentuates-children-s-conversational-29xale11h0.pdf

Alessandra Geraci

Papers

The developmental roots of fairness: infants’ reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources

Where will the triangle look for it? Attributing false beliefs to a geometric shape at 17 months.

Theory of Mind in patients with ventromedial or dorsolateral prefrontal lesions following traumatic brain injury.

Belief attribution in deaf and hearing infants

Bilingualism accentuates children's conversational understanding.