Belief Representation in Great Apes

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants' encoding of object kind

Human infants may exhibit an altercentric bias, where the perspective of others biases their own cognition. This bias may serve a crucial learning function in early ontogeny. This work tested the two main predictions of an altercentric bias in 14-month-old infants: (i) conceptual information should also be encoded altercentrically, and (ii) the other's perspective may completely override infants' own processing. We probed if infants detect a semantic mismatch if hidden objects are labelled incorrectly from their own, or another person's perspective. Experiment 1 found a reduced electrophysiological mismatch response (the 'N400' event-related potential) when labeling was congruent from the other's perspective compared to incongruent, though it was always incongruent for the infant. Experiment 2 found no effect of (in)congruency from the infants' perspective when labeling was always congruent from the other's. These findings demonstrate a strong altercentric bias that prioritizes encoding conceptual information from others' perspective during early development.

Lessons from the historical dynamics of environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon

Here, we analyze critical changes in environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2020. Based on a dataset of law enforcement indicators, we discuss how these changes explain recent Amazon deforestation dynamics. Our analysis also covers changes in the legal prosecution process and documents a militarization of enforcement between 2018 and 2022. From 2004 to 2018, 43.6 thousand land-use embargoes and 84.3 thousand fines were issued, targeting 3.3 million ha of land, and totaling USD 9.3 billion in penalties. Nevertheless, enforcement relaxed and became spatially more limited, signaling an increasing lack of commitment by the State to enforcing the law. The number of embargoes and asset confiscations dropped by 59% and 55% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. These changes were accompanied by a marked increase in enforcement expenditure, suggesting a massive efficiency loss. More importantly, the creation of so-called conciliation hearings and the centralization of legal processes in 2019 reduced the number of actual judgments and fines collected by 85% and decreased the ratio between lawsuits resulting in paid fines over filed ones from 17 to 5%. As Brazil gears up to crack-down on illegal deforestation once again, our assessment suggests urgent entry points for policy action.

Profiles of animal consciousness: A species-sensitive, two-tier account to quality and distribution

The science of animal consciousness investigates (i) which animal species are conscious (the distribution question) and (ii) how conscious experience differs in detail between species (the quality question). We propose a framework which clearly distinguishes both questions and tackles both of them. This two-tier account distinguishes consciousness along ten dimensions and suggests cognitive capacities which serve as distinct operationalizations for each dimension. The two-tier account achieves three valuable aims: First, it separates strong and weak indicators of the presence of consciousness. Second, these indicators include not only different specific contents but also differences in the way particular contents are processed (by processes of learning, reasoning or abstraction). Third, evidence of consciousness from each dimension can be combined to derive the distinctive multi-dimensional consciousness profile of various species. Thus, the two-tier account shows how the kind of conscious experience of different species can be systematically compared.

Beliefs: A challenge in neuropsychological disorders

INTRODUCTION

Beliefs have recently been defined as the neural product of perception of objects and events in the external world and of an affirmative internal affective state reflecting personal meaning. It is, however, undetermined in which way diseases of the brain affect these integrative processes.

METHODS

Here, the formation and updating of abnormal beliefs in cerebral disorders are described.

RESULTS

It will be shown that well-defined neuropsychological syndromes resulting from brain lesions also interfere with the neural processes that enable the formation, up-dating and communication of beliefs. Similarly, in neuropsychiatric disorders abnormal and delusional beliefs appear to be caused by altered perception and/or misattribution of aversive meaning.

CONCLUSION

Given the importance of beliefs for ordinary social behaviour, abnormal beliefs are a challenge in neuropsychological disorders.

Knowledge before Belief

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one doesn't even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that non-human primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibit a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind-one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.