•  18
    Principles of belief acquisition. How we read other minds
    with M. T. Pascarelli, D. Quarona, G. Barchiesi, G. Riva, and C. Sinigaglia
    Consciousness and Cognition 117 (C): 103625. 2024.
  •  11
    A view from mindreading on fast-and-slow thinking
    with Jason Low and John Michael
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    De Neys's incisive critique of empirical and theoretical research on the exclusivity feature underscores the depth of the challenge of explaining the interplay of fast and slow processes. We argue that a closer look at research on mindreading reveals abundant evidence for the exclusivity feature – as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives that could inform research on fast and slow thinking.
  •  1
    Seeing Causings and Hearing Gestures
    In Katherine Hawley & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), The Admissible Contents of Experience, Wiley. 2011.
    Can humans see causal interactions? Evidence on the visual perception of causal interactions, from Michotte to contemporary work, is best interpreted as showing that we can see some causal interactions in the same sense as that in which we can hear speech. Causal perception, like speech perception, is a form of categorical perception.
  •  108
    Children’s Selective Learning from Others
    with Erika Nurmsoo and Elizabeth Robinson
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (4): 551-561. 2010.
    Psychological research into children’s sensitivity to testimony has primarily focused on their ability to judge the likely reliability of speakers. However, verbal testimony is only one means by which children learn from others. We review recent research exploring children’s early social referencing and imitation, as well as their sensitivity to speakers’ knowledge, beliefs, and biases, to argue that children treat information and informants with reasonable scepticism. As children’s understandin…Read more
  •  22
    Are there signature limits in early theory of mind?
    with Ella Fizke, Lea van de Loo, Eva Reindl, and Hannes Rakoczy
    Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 162 209-224. 2017.
    Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking s…Read more
  •  207
    Joint Action and Development
    Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246): 23-47. 2012.
    Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different kind of joint action, an account compatible…Read more
  •  188
    How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind
    with Ian A. Apperly
    Mind and Language 28 (5): 606-637. 2013.
    What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need for other, less obvious possibilities. Our aim is …Read more
  •  98
    Editorial: Joint Action: What Is Shared? (review)
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (2): 137-146. 2011.
    Editorial: Joint Action: What Is Shared? Content Type Journal Article Pages 137-146 DOI 10.1007/s13164-011-0062-3 Authors Stephen A. Butterfill, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Natalie Sebanz, Centre for Cognition, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, & Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158 Journal Volume Volume 2 Journal Issue Volume 2, Number 2
  •  4
    Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations …Read more
  •  4
    People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor represent…Read more
  •  8
    Anyone who has ever walked, cooked or crafted with a friend is in a position to know that acting jointly is not just acting side-by-side. But what distinguishes acting jointly from acting in parallel yet merely individually? Four decades of philosophical research have yielded broad consensus on a strategy for answering this question. This strategy is \emph{mechanistically committed}; that is, it hinges on invoking states of the agents who are acting jointly (often dubbed ‘shared’, ‘we-’ or ‘coll…Read more
  •  19
    Intuitions about joint commitment
    Philosophical Psychology. forthcoming.
    ABSTRACT In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling naïve participants’ intuitions about expe…Read more
  •  28
    Many of the things we do are, or could be, done with others. Mundane examples favoured by philosophers include painting a house together (Bratman 1992), lifting.
  •  28
    Motor representation in acting together
    Synthese 200 (2): 1-16. 2022.
    People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor represent…Read more
  •  8
    Visibly constraining an agent modulates observers' automatic false-belief tracking
    with Jason Low and Katheryn Edwards
    Scientific Reports. forthcoming.
    Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations …Read more
  •  14
    Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable— where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks— for motor representations to account for someone's belief-lik…Read more
  •  451
    Joint action goals reduce visuomotor interference effects from a partner’s incongruent actions
    with Sam Clarke, Luke McEllin, Anna Francová, Marcell Székely, and John Michael
    Scientific Reports 9 (1). 2019.
    Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements need not be represen…Read more
  •  22
    Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to be limited by their abilities to represent the obs…Read more
  •  13
    Tracking and representing others’ mental states
    In Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Routledge. pp. 269-279. 2017.
    Few things matter more than the mental states of those nearby. Their ignorance defines limits on cooperation and presents opportunities to exploit in competition. What others feel, see and know can also provide information about events otherwise beyond your ken. It’s no surprise, then, that abilities to track others’ mental states are widespread. Many animals, including scrub jays, ravens, goats, dogs, ring-tailed lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees, reliably vary their actions in ways that are appr…Read more
  •  29
    Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World, written by M. Gilbert
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (4): 475-478. 2017.
  •  21
    Drawn together: When motor representations ground joint actions
    with Francesco Della Gatta, Francesca Garbarini, Marco Rabuffetti, Luca Viganò, and Corrado Sinigaglia
    Cognition 165 (C): 53-60. 2017.
    What enables individuals to act together? Recent discoveries suggest that a variety of mechanisms are involved. But something fundamental is yet to be investigated. In joint action, agents represent a collective goal, or so it is often assumed. But how, if at all, are collective goals represented in joint action and how do such representations impact performance? To investigate this question we adapted a bimanual paradigm, the circle-line drawing paradigm, to contrast two agents acting in parall…Read more
  •  10
    Two Kinds of Purposive Action
    European Journal of Philosophy 9 (2): 141-165. 2001.
    It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained by impersonal facts, such as facts about how thin…Read more
  •  363
    Tool use and causal cognition: An introduction
    In Teresa McCormack, Christoph Hoerl & Stephen Andrew Butterfill (eds.), Tool Use and Causal Cognition, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-17. 2011.
    This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance of studies of aspects of tool use in understanding causal cognition. It argues that tool use studies reveal the most basic type or causal understanding being put to use, in a way that studies that focus on learning statistical relationships between cause and effect or studies of perceptual causation do not. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
  •  813
    Interacting mindreaders
    Philosophical Studies 165 (3): 841-863. 2013.
    Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader’s target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence …Read more
  •  82
    Modules are widely held to play a central role in explaining mental development and in accounts of the mind generally. But there is much disagreement about what modules are, which shows that we do not adequately understand modularity. This paper outlines a Fodoresque approach to understanding one type of modularity. It suggests that we can distinguish modular from nonmodular cognition by reference to the kinds of process involved, and that modular cognition differs from nonmodular forms of cogni…Read more
  •  127
    Seeing causings and hearing gestures
    Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 405-428. 2009.
    Can humans see causal interactions? Evidence on the visual perception of causal interactions, from Michotte to contemporary work, is best interpreted as showing that we can see some causal interactions in the same sense as that in which we can hear speech. Causal perception, like speech perception, is a form of categorical perception.