6 Dec
2016
6 Dec
'16
4:14 p.m.
The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
MINDREADERS IN THE CRIB:
COGNITIVE MECHANISMS OF REPRESENTING OTHERS' MENTAL STATES IN HUMAN INFANTS
by Dóra Kampis
SUPERVISOR: ÁGNES M. KOVÁCS
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: GERGELY CSIBRA
A crucial part of human cognition is to understand that people are guided not just by
external factors, but also by their mental states. This capacity, termed "Theory of
Mind", has been of great interest in the past four decades to researchers from a
variety of fields. A pressing question is how the ability to form metarepresentations of
others' mental states develops, and whether it is present in human infants. The
present work investigated the cognitive mechanisms that may enable young infants to
represent other people's mental representations. One set of experiments explored the
neuro-cognitive bases of infants' ability to encode the world from another
person's perspective; and found common neural activation when infants sustained a
representation from their own perspective, and when they could attribute such
representations to someone else. A second set of studies investigated infants'
abilities to ascribe to others beliefs based on correct or mistaken individuation of
objects using spatiotemporal or feature/kind information; and found that infants can
represent others' beliefs involving multiple objects, and object identity. Finally, a
third line of experiments probed the flexibility of infants' mental state attributions
by testing how infants can integrate new information into their already existing
representations. Together, these studies point to the possibility of an early developing,
flexible, and powerful apparatus suitable to handle multiple concurrent representations;
which may be the core of a mature mindreading ability in adulthood.
The defense will take place
at room 101,
V. Budapest, Október 6 street 7, 1st floor
on Monday, January 9, at 9:00 a.m.
With kind regards,
Györgyné Finta (Réka)
Department Coordinator
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Central European University
Department of Cognitive Science
H-1051 Budapest
Oktober 6 utca 7.
tel: (36-1) 887-5138
fax: (36-1) 887-5010
http://www.ceu.edu
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu
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