Michael John, Christensen Wayne
Department of Cognitive Science.
Psychol Rev. 2016 Mar;123(2):219-27. doi: 10.1037/rev0000016. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
The 2-systems theory developed by Apperly and Butterfill (2009; Butterfill & Apperly, 2013) is an influential approach to explaining the success of infants and young children on implicit false-belief tasks. There is extensive empirical and theoretical work examining many aspects of this theory, but little attention has been paid to the way in which it characterizes goal attribution. We argue here that this aspect of the theory is inadequate. Butterfill and Apperly's characterization of goal attribution is designed to show how goals could be ascribed by infants without representing them as related to other psychological states, and the minimal mindreading system is supposed to operate without employing flexible semantic-executive cognitive processes. But research on infant goal attribution reveals that infants exhibit a high degree of situational awareness that is strongly suggestive of flexible semantic-executive cognitive processing, and infants appear moreover to be sensitive to interrelations between goals, preferences, and beliefs. Further, close attention to the structure of implicit mindreading tasks--for which the theory was specifically designed--indicates that flexible goal attribution is required to succeed. We conclude by suggesting 2 approaches to resolving these problems.
阿珀利和巴特菲尔（2009年；巴特菲尔和阿珀利，2013年）提出的双系统理论，是解释婴幼儿在隐性错误信念任务中取得成功的一种有影响力的方法。有大量的实证和理论研究探讨了该理论的诸多方面，但很少有人关注其对目标归因的描述方式。我们在此认为，该理论的这一方面存在不足。巴特菲尔和阿珀利对目标归因的描述旨在表明婴儿如何在不将目标表征为与其他心理状态相关的情况下归因目标，并且最小心理理论系统被认为在不运用灵活的语义执行认知过程的情况下运行。但对婴儿目标归因的研究表明，婴儿表现出高度的情境意识，这强烈暗示了灵活的语义执行认知加工，而且婴儿似乎对目标、偏好和信念之间的相互关系很敏感。此外，仔细研究该理论专门设计的隐性心理理论任务的结构表明，要取得成功需要灵活的目标归因。我们最后提出两种解决这些问题的方法。
