Biomedical subjects

Ian A Apperly

Publications and source records attributed to Ian A Apperly.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Exploring the functional and anatomical bases of mirror-image and anatomical imitation: the role of the frontal lobes.

Humans are the most imitative species on earth, but how imitation is accomplished and which areas of the brain are directly involved in different kinds of imitation is still under debate. One view is that imitation entails representing observed behaviours as a set of hierarchically organised goals, which subsequently drive the construction of an action pattern [Bekkering, H., Wohlschläger, A., & Gattis, M. (2000). Imitation of gestures in children is goal-directed. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 153-164; Wohlschläger, A., Gattis, M., & Bekkering, H. (2003). Action generation and action perception in imitation: An instance of the ideomotor principle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 358, 501-515]. On this view, when working memory resources are limited, only the goals at the top-end of the hierarchy will be accurately reproduced. In the present study, neurologically intact participants and patients with frontal and non-frontal lesions were asked to make imitative responses that were either mirror-image (e.g., the observer's right side corresponding to the model's left side) or anatomically (e.g., the observer's right side corresponding to the model's right side) matching. Experiment 1 confirmed that individuals with brain damage, though globally impaired compared with neurologically intact controls, nevertheless followed the same goal hierarchy. However, there was a selective deficit in performing anatomical imitation for the frontal group. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the problem for frontal patients stemmed from an impaired ability to remember and reproduce incompatible stimulus-response mappings, which is fundamental for the selection of the appropriate frame of reference during anatomical imitation.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Testing the domain-specificity of a theory of mind deficit in brain-injured patients: evidence for consistent performance on non-verbal, "reality-unknown" false belief and false photograph tasks.

To test the domain-specificity of "theory of mind" abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning () and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems with existing false photograph methods. A strikingly similar pattern of performance was shown across the false belief and false photograph tests. Patients who were selectively impaired on false belief tasks were also impaired on false photograph tasks; patients spared on false belief tasks also showed preserved performance with false photographs. In some cases the impairment on false belief and false photograph tasks coincided with good performance on control tasks matched for executive demands. We discuss whether the patients have a domain-specific deficit in reasoning about representations common to both false belief and false photograph tasks.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Is belief reasoning automatic?

Understanding the operating characteristics of theory of mind is essential for understanding how beliefs, desires, and other mental states are inferred, and for understanding the role such inferences could play in other cognitive processes. We present the first investigation of the automaticity of belief reasoning. In an incidental false-belief task, adult subjects responded more slowly to unexpected questions concerning another person's belief about an object's location than to questions concerning the object's real location. Results in other conditions showed that responses to belief questions were not necessarily slower than responses to reality questions, as subjects showed no difference in response times to belief and reality questions when they were instructed to track the person's beliefs about the object's location. The results suggest that adults do not ascribe beliefs to agents automatically.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Domain-specificity and theory of mind: evaluating neuropsychological evidence.

Humans' unique aptitude for reasoning about mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), can help explain the unique character of human communication and social interaction. ToM has been studied extensively in children, but there is no clear account of the cognitive basis of ToM in adults. Evidence from functional imaging and neuropsychology is beginning to address this surprising gap in our understanding, and this evidence is often thought to favour a domain-specific or modular architecture for ToM. We present a systematic approach to this issue for the paradigmatic case of belief reasoning, and argue that neuropsychological data provide no clear evidence for domain-specificity or modularity. Progress in understanding ToM requires new tasks that isolate potentially distinct components of this complex ability.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Seeing it my way: a case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective.

Little is known about the functional and neural architecture of social reasoning, one major obstacle being that we crucially lack the relevant tools to test potentially different social reasoning components. In the case of belief reasoning, previous studies have tried to separate the processes involved in belief reasoning per se from those involved in the processing of the high incidental demands such as the working memory demands of typical belief tasks. In this study, we developed new belief tasks in order to disentangle, for the first time, two perspective taking components involved in belief reasoning: (i) the ability to inhibit one's own perspective (self-perspective inhibition); and (ii) the ability to infer someone else's perspective as such (other-perspective taking). The two tasks had similar demands in other-perspective taking as they both required the participant to infer that a character has a false belief about an object's location. However, the tasks varied in the self-perspective inhibition demands. In the task with the lowest self-perspective inhibition demands, at the time the participant had to infer the character's false belief, he or she had no idea what the new object's location was. In contrast, in the task with the highest self-perspective inhibition demands, at the time the participant had to infer the character's false belief, he or she knew where the object was actually located (and this knowledge had thus to be inhibited). The two tasks were presented to a stroke patient, WBA, with right prefrontal and temporal damage. WBA performed well in the low-inhibition false-belief task but showed striking difficulty in the task placing high self-perspective inhibition demands, showing a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective. WBA also made egocentric errors in other social and visual perspective taking tasks, indicating a difficulty with belief attribution extending to the attribution of emotions, desires and visual experiences to other people. The case of WBA, together with the recent report of three patients impaired in belief reasoning even when self-perspective inhibition demands were reduced, provide the first neuropsychological evidence that the inhibition of one's own point of view and the ability to infer someone else's point of view rely on distinct neural and functional processes.

Frontal Lobe↗

PubMed2004

Left temporoparietal junction is necessary for representing someone else's belief.

A standard view in the neuroscience literature is that the frontal lobes sustain our ability to process others' mental states such as beliefs, intentions and desires (this ability is often referred to as having 'theory of mind'). Here we report evidence from brain-damaged patients showing that, in addition to involvement of the frontal lobes, the left temporoparietal junction is necessary for reasoning about the beliefs of others.

Aged↗

PubMed2004

Frontal and temporo-parietal lobe contributions to theory of mind: neuropsychological evidence from a false-belief task with reduced language and executive demands.

A model of the functional and anatomical basis of belief reasoning is essential for understanding the relationship between belief reasoning and other cognitive processes in both normal development and pathology. Studies of brain-damaged patients can give valuable insights into the nature of belief processing but pose unique methodological problems. The current study addresses these problems by using a nonlinguistic belief-reasoning task with substantially reduced executive demands. A case series of 12 brain-damaged patients is presented. The belief-reasoning errors of four patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex appeared to arise from these patients' executive function problems. The belief-reasoning errors of three patients with damage to the temporo-parietal junction could not easily be accounted for in this way, raising the possibility that this brain region has a necessary role in representing beliefs, rather than handling the executive demands of belief-reasoning tasks. We discuss the importance of gaining empirical evidence about the scope of ''theory of mind'' impairments, and the important role for neuropsychological studies in this project.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Three- to four-year-olds' recognition that symbols have a stable meaning: pictures are understood before written words.

In 4 experiments 120 three- to four-year-old nonreaders were asked the identity of a symbolic representation as it appeared with different objects. Consistent with Bialystok (2000), many children judged the identity of written words to vary according to the object with which they appeared but few made such errors with recognizable pictures. Children also made few errors when the symbols were unrecognizable pictures. In Experiments 2 to 4 this pattern of responses was preserved in conditions that made it unlikely or impossible for children to answer correctly by taking the symbol to refer to one of the objects with which it appeared. Instead, correct answers required children to appreciate that the symbol had a generic, abstract meaning.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Children's thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities.

Two experiments explored whether children's correct answers to counterfactual and future hypothetical questions were based on an understanding of possibilities. Children played a game in which a toy mouse could run down either 1 of 2 slides. Children found it difficult to mark physically both possible outcomes, compared to reporting a single hypothetical future event, "What if next time he goes the other way ..." (Experiment 1: 3-4-year-olds and 4-5-year-olds), or a single counterfactual event, "What if he had gone the other way ...?" (Experiment 2: 3-4-year-olds and 5-6-year-olds). An open counterfactual question, "Could he have gone anywhere else?," which required thinking about the counterfactual as an alternative possibility, was also relatively difficult.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Children's sensitivity to their own relative ignorance: handling of possibilities under epistemic and physical uncertainty.

Children more frequently specified possibilities correctly when uncertainty resided in the physical world (physical uncertainty) than in their own perspective of ignorance (epistemic uncertainty). In Experiment 1 (N=61), 4- to 6-year-olds marked both doors from which a block might emerge when the outcome was undetermined, but a single door when they knew the block was hidden behind one door. In Experiments 2 (N=30; 5- to 6-year-olds) and 3 (N=80; 5- to 8-year-olds), children placed food in both possible locations when an imaginary pet was yet to occupy one, but in a single location when the pet was already hidden in one. The results have implications for interpretive theory of mind and "curse of knowledge."

Attitude↗