20. Theory of Mind & Mentalizing

[@mitocw]

* NOTE: Lecture 17: MEG Decoding and RSA (video not recorded) * NOTE: Lecture 19: Language II (class canceled-video not recorded) View the complete course: ocw.mit.edu/9-13S19 KZbin Playlist: kzbin.info/aero/PLUl4u3cNGP60IKRN_pFptIBxeiMc0MCJP

[@savantofillusions]

My savant brain is devouring Nancy’s videos. I can feel a strong determination in my left eye. Like, my savant brain is actually straining to bridge something. I know that seems too good. But if you are familiar with Temple Grandin, you may know she saw doors in her psyche. I see bridges not doors as a savant symbol. I know there’s a bigger notion in the future I can attach to it. My dreams also become very explanatory to me after some time and then remembering them. I k ow precisely what they meant.

[@rahulthakare2301]

.l

[@savantofillusions]

Nardi, Bernardo & Capecci, Ilaria & Fabri, Mara & Polonara, Gabriele & Mascioli, Giulia & Cavola, Gian & Nicolo, Marzia & Laurenzi, Sabrina & Rocchetti, David & Brandoni, Marco & Rocchetti, Gianfranco & Salvolini, Ugo & Manzoni, Tull & Bellantuono, Cesario. (2008). fMRI investigation of emotional activations during visual processing of others or own facial expressions in subjects with an inward or outward personality. Rivista di Psichiatria. 43. 233-241. Introduction. Due to patterns of reciprocity based on steady and coherent behaviours, or on articulate and changing behaviours, attachment relationships produce personal meaning organizations respectively centred on inward or outward focus. In inward organizations, emotions are more distinct and reciprocity is more based on physical distance; in outward organizations, emotions are more blurred and reciprocity is more based on a semantic sight of relations. Method. We studied in 10 healthy subjects the amygdala and other nervous system structures activations when the subject perceives emotional expressions by seeing an unknown face and his/her own face. Results and conclusions. An unknown face produces higher activation on the subjects than their own face; the anger mostly activates the right amygdala, while the joy activates both the amygdalas or the left one (it produces a semantic decoding). Outward subjects, with respect to the inward ones, respond to the anger with a less intense and univocal pattern, activate more cortical areas, not always respond to their own facial expressions and respond to joy with an higher involvement of the left verbal hemisphere.

[@savantofillusions]

What about my own facial expressions while making them? I struggled with this to the point I thought I was smiling when I was frowning and basically lost all control of what my face communicated. Now, I wonder if I have to relax my face to draw an illusion whether sideways or dual purpose upside down/right side up like the last one. I am keeping it right side up but it has hidden upside down features. But what does my face do?

[@UncleKennysPlace]

@@savantofillusions Ha. I've been told that my smile is a _grimace._ Can't fix it, 'cuz it looks OK to me.

[@noah1502]

people really take for granted just how much theory of mind affects us, even if we dont know it, even if we are trying to NOT let it affect us, it greatly affects us.

[@BBeu-i6t]

I just wanted to say thank you Nancy and MIT! I’m on the spectrum, and thanks to your classes I love your courses and agree that understanding how neuroscience is something I don’t think I could ever exhaust my passion curiosity and understanding , I started out when young, a couple years old coming up with my own adaptive archetype for learning and understanding as a kid, since it was so confusing for me I metacoged myself to thinking of things as a socio situational objectively cognitive construct fluidly, I found combining iterative logic within my inferences, on the fly. I just realized I was making inferences based on my own experiences or perceptions. I realized how biased I could be, and I wanted to increase accuracy’s without judgement or my own perspective bias as much as possible. Its not perfect, I do make mistakes and often times I straight up ask what people mean if I’m confused. I’m was network engineer before burnout, so If in doubt and socio importance is high, I use OSPF, open shortest path first. Between MIT, and Standford, and U Washington’s ocw it has been soo enlightening. I’m a self learner so I really appreciate all your dedication and compassion. I unfortunately/fortunately got diagnosed really late and am recovering from burnout. If you have any suggestions for finding a mentor for the field, for trying to being functional and contributing on where to start, my interests are EVbio, neuroscience , behavior bio, mbio, and cbiop, data science. I’m 43 about to be 44 so I thought maybe research. Anyhow thanks again and thanks for being so genuine in your teaching style

[@ExploitedShells]

Chilling in bed before sleep, spent well!

[@flamurbedrolli802]

Minute 39:40 untill 39:54 . When you think what others are thinking , is like when you thinking what you are thinking . This means people prefer to metacognize for others and not for theirselves , so the brain is in the state of trying to predict .

[@HenryCasillas]

💗🧠

[@dankbene]

You could also take it as, we only can think about others in the way that we think about ourselves, meaning that our brain is always trying to project onto others what it recognizes internally.

[@raven4090]

@@dankbene That seems to be the way it is.

[@johnwealth-li4db]

Thank you for this course. I follow it religiously because i am writing book on how thought patterns shape our circumstances. I have no degree in psychology but i write from an experience point of view

[@joegriffith1683]

Nice to see Kanwisher's secret English accent trying to break free at 25:06

[@ladylilithparker]

1:03:23 to 1:04:10 In Dr. Kanwisher's explanation of the criteria for separating subjects into the "ASD" or "NT" categories, there's a fundamental flaw. In working with adult ASD subjects, behavioral markers like eye contact and conversational skill can be heavily influenced by "masking," to the point where an ASD subject can appear entirely NT, rendering those markers effectively useless. (Masking is essentially acting -- many autistic people consciously study NT behavior with the intent of learning how to replicate it in order to pass for NT, which can reduce or remove roadblocks that might otherwise impair their ability to hold a job, secure housing, maintain social relationships, and so on. As a learned skill, it can be practiced and refined to a level of mastery that renders it undetectable to casual observation, as in an hour-long interview.)

[@Chris.4345]

That is a valid observation, but not a fundamental flaw. These things are known and are part of the reason why participants are given a battery of tests, and many criteria are considered, as she said.

[@ladylilithparker]

@@Chris.4345 As an autistic person, I'm intimately familiar with the "battery of tests" typically given. There is a reason why misdiagnosis and under-diagnosis are so common -- the tests are designed for juvenile males who lack masking skills, and focus primarily on behavioral tells that an adult may no longer display. If your primary means of separating subjects into groups relies on a flawed method, the resulting data is too muddy to be useful. Dr. Kanwisher talks about this in reference to group analysis (where overlaying multiple subjects' results reduces the already-low resolution of FMRI scans) and diffusion imaging (where head movement can alter the results to the point of false positives/negatives), but not here, which I find curious.

[@beenaplumber8379]

@@ladylilithparker I am also autistic, and I found the scenarios and tasks very frustrating. Did you? Since they involve tasks and scenarios, they have to be written as stories, which, if not carefully written, can be understood in numerous ways. (I read things literally.) If faced with the scenarios and questions covered in this lecture, my primary concern would be trying to understand what they're really asking, not on whether an accident absolves someone of moral responsibility. What is clear to me is that accidental harm per se is not morally wrong, while intentional harm is. That scenario was not clear to me, and Prof. Kanwisher's interpretations of these studies never considered that possibility, or the tendency of many of us on the spectrum to be overly-literal compared to NT's. Do you think that's how anybody is interpreting the data? Did you struggle with any of this?

[@SkepticalTeacher]

Yes, I mask effectively. I heard someone saying something about eye contact that was true for me: if I'm talking, I can fake good eye contact; but if the other person is talking, that's when I don't know where to look! Lol

[@SkepticalTeacher]

They need to develop tests that you can't mask for, even if you know what they are up to, like the ADHD attention tests. It is known that autism creates a problem with the integration of sound and action, and that the window is 300 milliseconds for neurotypicals, but 600 milliseconds for autistic people (this study controlled for ADHD as well, by the way). Why can't they do an objective test like that? This is why I, as a woman, sought an ADHD diagnosis, but haven't bothered for autism.

[@seasnowcai]

This is another very interesting topic! Regarding the experiment of moral reasoning for ASDs, I can think of another potential confounding factor: what if the high functioning ASDs have a high standard of critical thinking due to their own high IQ and choose not to believe the “excuse” of false beliefs, in other words, how could anyone believe what the label shows without a safe test in a chemical field? I am curious whether these same tests have been tried on people of different IQ levels (or if there is a specific measure for critical thinking, even better). I am not sure how critical thinking is correlated with theory of mind though. I am also wondering how theory of mind is related to sympathy. There are just so many interesting questions! Thank you Nancy for your fascinating lectures!

[@coltonboxell1960]

I remember being shown how to write a RAID backup once, and there was a bit that needed to be flipped before the sectors associated with boot could be copied in a bootable fashion (time evolution operator). Also I think humans are cool because they can form together to conceptualize tasks or topics of discussion. There was a cognitive game occurring between the students and the lecturer. The rules had been set in a previous video when the societal triangle was written, but today it was played between one player to the right and one player to the left. I quiet liked the player to the left because their thoughts seemed very colorful to me, but the other player had a good grasp too. I really quiet enjoyed the referee's interjection too, and even though all 3 failed at displaying all their knowledge it was surely very human and real!

[@_catra]

when my sister went to school at the age of 6, i was almost 4. so she came from school one day and took my hair and asked me if it hurt. it didn't hurt, then my sister said i had a wig. it was a kid's joke. but i didn't understand why if it didn't hurt, it was a wig, and if it hurt, it was real hair. I asked my sister about it, but she didn't answer me, just told me I was asking stupid questions. I remember thinking about it for 2 days and suddenly I found the answer. I thought I was a slow thinker because it took me such a long time to figure it out, but maybe it was because I wasn't 5 years old yet?

[@bloodypommelstudios7144]

57:53 "What if you asked someone with autism the same questions but applied to themselves" Anecdotally yes I feel tremendous guilt if an error harms another person. I make it a point to apologize, accept responsibility and make a huge effort not to repeat the same mistake in future. It seems obvious that this is the correct thing to do. I would ascribe zero blame to the example with sugar written on the pot but other examples from the study include things like someone building an igloo and it collapsing on their friend which it seems I would judge more harshly than NTs because the failure was almost certainly due to incompetence in building/testing. To me it seems like people with neurotypical disorder constantly fail to take responsibility and don't learn from mistakes because due to their hyperactive rTPJ they think a harmful action being an accident absolves them of all negligence. Another explanation is this is the standard we're held to growing up. NTs lacking theory of mind towards autistic people often read in to our comments, facial expressions and body language things which weren't meant and don't accept "I didn't mean to come across that way" as an excuse. The type of autistics in that study go to great effort to learn these social rules in order to "highly function" and this could partially explain why they hold others to the same standard. Another possibility is HFAs are more likely to empathize with victim than the person who caused the accidental harm than NTs.

[@alexandrugheorghe5610]

35:00 I mostly live in the visceral

[@StevenWernerCS]

FP is a True Belief task, there is nothing false about the Photo (Perner & Leekam, 2008; Iao et al., 2011)

[@charlesbrightman4237]

Current Analysis: Long Term: (Short Version): * Species stay on this Earth: They all eventually die and go extinct. * Species leave this Earth: They all eventually die and go extinct. (No exceptions at this time).

[@charlesbrightman4237]

Currently: Nature is our greatest ally in so far as Nature gives us life and a place to live it, AND Nature is also our greatest enemy that is going to take it all away. (OSICA)

[@charlesbrightman4237]

Currently, the one singular ultimate answer to ALL questions in existence, including questions never even asked is: "It Does Not Ultimately Matter", or in today's vernacular "IDNUM". (OSICA)

[@jordanweimer788]

For the TED talk example: is it worth questioning whether a child is merely deferring to an older person asking a leading question? They might not be processing the question and instead listening to it as a directive.

[@SubvertTheState]

Theyve replicated it in other ways. Theyve asked "Now where does Sally look for the ball?" And the 3 year old fails to account for sally not seeing the ball get moved and says that she looks where it is hidden.

[@williamjayaraj2244]

Thank you very much.

[@AndyPayne42]

The kid may not be trying to be helpful. They may desire a predictable result and anticipate a conclusion. When that conclusion is not met they feel discomfort so they control the environment by "helping"

[@hamzaladjroud73]

I could not agree more. "Helping" is just our interpretation of the kid's behaviour, but the truth of the matter is tha he was just trying to alleviate the discomfort resulting from the man's incompetence.

[@amitnilajkar6272]

thank you, i cant thank more as at one point in my life i use to wonder how is it to study at MIT and got very depressed as i wasnt able to connect. Thank you thank you.

[@seasnowcai]

Another question that bothers me is why to test moral reasoning. Why not just testing other person’s intentions/desires directly? For example, ask the following question instead: how likely do you think that Grace was intended to poison her friend? From here to moral judgment, we also need to assume the subjects have similar moral standards. Since the experiment itself was not about moral psychology but about thinking of other persons’ thoughts (or intentions/desires - I guess I still don’t fully understand their differences, because I remember Nancy mentioned of ruling out intentions/desires? My personal understanding is that thinking and intentions/desires together may affect beliefs.), a direct test would make things more clear. In behavioral economics, we have the same difficulty when beliefs are involved: it is almost impossible to measure beliefs as they are usually unobservable.

[@Filip-ci3ng]

I’m a little bit surprised that children’s behaviour is interpreted here as reading the other person’s intention. It could simply be that the kid is familiar with a similar process (saw many times someone putting stuff in closet etc.) and when a step from a process is missing they’re able to fill in the gap. That’s much simpler than simulating internally the others theory of mind, yet it would work.

[@wolfbenson]

Good point! The only reason we might assume intent is because of the eye contact after the action. But a very good point you're making here !

[@avivastudios2311]

The kid does understand intention tho. They understand that if someone is coming for a closet with books they probably want to put their books into it. They're not just opening it because of the missing step. They're doing it cause they can see a problem and so they fix it.

[@charlesbrightman4237]

Funny thing about absolute truth reality: It still is and always will be absolute truth reality. (Whether people know that truth or not and/or whether they believe that truth to be true or not).

[@charlesbrightman4237]

"The best way to deal with absolute truth reality is to deal with absolute truth reality. And if one is not dealing with absolute truth reality, then one is not dealing with absolute truth reality. Find and deal with absolute truth reality." (OSICA)

[@charlesbrightman4237]

Absolute truth is NOT a popularity contest. There were times in human history where only a single human being knew more of the real truth that was discovered than any other human in history.

[@charlesbrightman4237]

And note also: Denying future reality will not make future reality any less real. People just won't be prepared for it is all.

[@raven4090]

@@charlesbrightman4237 That's the absolute truth.

[@MarinaGoelenok23]

Thank you so much 🤩🎊

[@mdreyaz5256]

hello dear

[@alofftus8696]

Where can we access: "Lecture 23: Deep Networks (2021) (video and notes for this lecture will be added soon)"?

[@patbrans8707]

In the case where a subject is asked to judge Grace's intentions I'm just wondering if it makes a difference whether the story is presented 1) in writing, 2) orally, or 3) acted out. It seems the three different ways of presenting the case would invoke different parts of the brain for interpretation. When you read something and then develop an image of what you read versus hearing somebody tell you (and you develop an image) versus seeing it. Has this experiment been run with different modes of presentation?

[@coltonboxell1960]

I felt like I understood how I would behave in the situation, and I acted it out.

[@alexandrugheorghe5610]

42:45 my rtpj fails to lighten up as I don't think about another person's thoughts - can this be due to developmental trauma?

[@savantofillusions]

Babies love teaching adults

[@2choosewisely2]

i think that was a clever move of copy and paste @1:09.

[@mdreyaz5256]

hello dear

[@RickarooCarew]

thanks for the videos of the kids... first thing in the morning smiles over here at my house... ;;~}

[@RickarooCarew]

so... if I do things that make things better for my family and neighbors... positive reinforcement... brings duration doing things with negative results for family and neighbors... negative reinforcement... is.. necessarily... self limiting... I learned that from my friend Ms Google

[@cashbuyer4221]

I wonder how people with high dark triad features react to emotional empathy/reasoning vs cognitive reasoning

[@ergobenchlab-linhazugi2320]

Maybe another term can be used to rTPJ readings considering daydream

[@wolfbenson]

Another reason that has been suggested for why autism people get the answer wrong when asked, "Where will she look for the ball? is not a cognitive problem, but a language problem. Is the question understood? Pronoun problems also, which "she" does the questioner mean?

[@raven4090]

I'm autistic, and I find it insulting that people think an autistic would not know Sally would look in her basket. She wasn't in the room, so obviously, she would look where she had left it.

[@beenaplumber8379]

You all really need to collaborate with colleagues who are on the spectrum. (As a former neuroscientist with ASD, I can certainly attest that we are out there.) You have added numerous confounds just by the way you design your tasks and word your scenarios. If I performed these tasks in your machine, I would likely look the same as others with ASD, and my responses to your questions might also look the same, but your given explanations would, in my case, be completely off-the-mark. (Remember, we tend to be very literal.) I would feel frustrated trying to answer the simplest questions, given the ambiguities in the scenarios. I would be primarily concerned with trying to understand what the words in the scenario the way they were intended to be understood, and I'd be suspicious about why they weren't clearer. Was I being expected to read between the lines? (That's a chaotic place for someone with ASD to be, and your dependent variables will reflect that chaos.) For example, whether an action is intentional or accidental is not a binary question when multiple factors are involved. The container was "left out" by kitchen staff, suggesting it might have been unintentionally out of place, or not intended for just anyone to use. Was Grace taking something that didn't belong to her when she poisoned her friend? (The law sees it this way too. Manslaughter is NOT unintentional, despite the assertion by Prof. Kanwisher. It requires an intentional act that is reckless or negligent or something.) NT people might filter out these details, but that's how I thought about the moral reasoning scenario. Grace always acted with intention. She intended to pick up the container and pour its contents into her friend's coffee. That is all intentional. But should she have left the container alone regardless of its labeling? (That choice to act was always intentional.) The given scenario is not clear on that component. I am quite clear on the moral distinction between accidental and intentional harm, but your scenario doesn't ask a clearly parsimonious question of an autistic person. I'm sure you know that those of us with ASD tend to take things literally, and perhaps give more weight to minor details. Your scenarios do not reflect that understanding. If you want to measure a response to a binary condition, you had better make sure it's actually binary to your study population. Earlier there was the story of Andrew, who was described as gangly and awkward, with bad skin, and like most teenagers, he had a bad taste in clothes. (The writer of the scenario seems to be putting him down, and that affects my impression of Andrew more than his external appearance.) All of these engage my thinking about Andrew's internal experience, not merely his external appearance. He has a skin condition. What's that like as a teenager? (I remember my experience. Is Andrew struggling like I did?) Gangly and awkward are nonspecific characterizations, which I would interpret as negative, and having *bad* taste is *explicitly judgemental.* How does all this affect him? Those of us on the spectrum are often judged as oddballs, and we live with that. This presentation of Andrew is too charged and judgemental to elicit clearly external thoughts in my mind about Andrew. I didn't form an image of his. I felt sorry for him. You have discovered ways to sort people into ASD & NT, but you haven't been able to describe ASD very well because of shortcomings like these. Maybe this is why autism studies tend to be so irreproducible? You know how easy it is to mine data for significance, especially in fMRI research. But adding a task, if not carefully constructed, can multiply the noise in the data, or worse, skew it in a way that reflects something that's not there. *Save yourselves the headaches. Collaborate with colleagues who are on the spectrum.*

[@SkepticalTeacher]

I agree. I have ADHD, and I know I also have autism. In terms of theory of mind... it's not that I don't know it if I think about it, it's just that it might not occur to me to think about it, particularly in the moment. But I am aware other people have different experiences to me. It's a lot more subtle than they think...

[@beenaplumber8379]

@@SkepticalTeacher I'm very glad to hear from you, and my brain is totally resonating with what you just said about theory of mind (and its little sibling, empathy). Those of us on the spectrum are assumed to have little understanding of the internal experiences of others and therefore little empathy. I have read discussions about these topics that compare us to psychopaths without a conscience. That's the level of subtlety some people achieve in their discussions of people they can't possibly understand, but fortunately, that's a very extreme and uncommon example. You said what I feel. If I think about it, I get it, but I don't always perceive the cues that tell most people they should think about it. When I see that someone is in pain, I hurt! But to have that empathy requires a perception of the other person's emotional state. We are not always wired with that perception at birth like most people are. That's a common feature of autism. We're not always great with nonverbal cues, including emotional expression. But that is very different from saying we don't feel it when someone is hurting. If anything, I think it might be more on-point to say we don't always recognize that someone is hurting. Or happy, or annoyed by us. My therapist (an autism specialist) told me she got a lengthy email from a client that began, "I'm sorry, but I didn't have enough time to write a shorter message." I'm kinda like that here on KZbin. It was just nice to hear someone else put into words an experience so much like mine. Thank you! :-)

[@mrknarf4438]

If I were to see a container labelled "sugar" in close proximity to a coffee machine, I would infer it's supposed to be freely taken by anyone and related to the coffee machine, as many such places have similar containers lying around and it's not often people just have "sugar" containers. I'd expect there to be a sign telling people NOT to take the sugar if that were the case. Which is why I considered her action completely moral.

[@beenaplumber8379]

@@mrknarf4438 You're thinking like a more neurotypical person. This is not a simple scenario. It is first a verbal problem. You read the phrase "left out," and you understand only that it means it was a sugar container located near the coffee machine. Most neurotypical people would probably move on with that understanding and not think twice. But her goal was not to study neurotypical people. That means everything! "Left out," as I said, can have several meanings, including intention (or absence thereof) or a mistake, and I think it's an odd choice to use such ambiguous phraseology when the study population is people with ASD, who tend to view words in a hyper-literal way. That phrase leapt out at me in a way I can't make real to you. "Left out" says that *someone left it out,* not that it was simply located near the coffee machine. "Left out" implies the action of a person, but it does not imply that person's intent (that it be shared, that it was forgotten, that it was part of a trap). This goes through my head in about a second when I read something like that, and my prime question becomes "What are they really asking here?" I have ASD, and when I read an ambiguous phrase, I consider its possible meanings, and I would likely be even more careful (and stressed) about getting the meaning right if I were being studied in a lab. I would wonder what the fMRI techs were seeing as I tried to work out the word puzzle that was never meant to be a word puzzle. Do you see the problem? All the confounding voxels that were activated because my mind was engaged in an unintended task? And the difference between me and neurotypical subjects therefore means I have an odd sense of justice? Things like that happen when neurotypical scientists study neurodivergent populations without looking for help in their study designs. We wind up looking morally screwed up sometimes, and the data don't support that conclusion because of the careless study design. But it's our reputation as fair and decent humans that suffers, not their reputation as scientists of questionable competence. My point is that the study has to be tailored to the specific population being studied. The whole thing could be avoided by just working with someone who understands the perspective of the study population. To do otherwise is sadly and unnecessarily ignorant, and it explains her frustration with studying autism. She just didn't understand what she was doing because she apparently never consulted someone who would know that before a scenario is used, it first has to be translated from words into meaning, and that's a critical step for people with ASD.

[@raven4090]

@@mrknarf4438 Same here. Because that's logical.

[@jennifercremo8676]

@7:56 why didn't they switch to moving it on the "ground if he just kept dropping it? the sound?

[@guenzburghdcl7637]

Humans are profoundly social the Wonderfull lecturer says, this is mostly true but removed from the underlying cause/drive therefore it cannot account for unsocial behaviours which contradict this statement …. Its ok I guess for an introductory course to laymen :) but there is much more to this, and of profound importance in understanding human beings in society.

[@srimuharyati2387]

2 more to go

[@niharika14]

I have a question - what is framing of the photo? Are both the basket and box, in this case, visible and the kid has to pick "where the ball is"? Or is it just a close up of the ball, wherever it might be, and the kid simply points to it in the photograph?

[@okabae7927]

She reminds me so much of Brit Marling

[@ynwei]

Is rTPJ the same location as Wernicke's Area, but opposite side?

[@azeemnawaz5531]

Nice

[@kristoferjohansson9020]

Hi from Sweden🤓

[@gp10020]

i have a bit of an online crush with this prof ... :}

[@2choosewisely2]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/j5XHh2Oeh6aLm7c 🤠

[@avi82625]

I wonder if when people on the autism spectrum aquire the theory of mind abilities later in life, it involves the rtbj or a different reageon

[@dankbene]

The part with the 18-month olds inferring the researcher's intention is FALSE. They are not inferring his intent, because his intent is to study the children. They infer what THEIR intention would be in that situation, things they understand at their level. They look at the actions, they assume what they would do in that situation, and then they try to help. The action of wanting to help is interesting, but we cannot know if their parents raised them to be helpful or if they naturally want to be helpful.

[@avivastudios2311]

Oh, okay. So you're saying that they only understand what they would do and not what other people would try to do?

[@godofallgodswithnoothernam920]

🧐👍🏾

[@alexandrugheorghe5610]

11:12 or smack you in the head with it

[@mikemccarthy1638]

We lose cuz OCW hasn’t controlled the (low) volume of the questioners…

[@FarnhamJ07]

I mean, it sucks that the questions are hard to hear, but what do you expect them to do? They clearly boosted the volume as much as they could... It'd take adding another microphone, a mixer, wasting class time passing around said mic, more editing &c. to make it any better. Methinks it's a pretty small loss given the huge win of access to lectures from a top university, for free, in the comfort of your own home.

[@mr.c2485]

Evolution should have stopped at the dog. They are loyal, dependable, offer companionship with no strings attached, are happy to see you, etc. people…..not so much.

[@MrFlyingPanda]

The white board is giving ptsd🤪

[@jesslyn4919]

❤️💋

[@scientious]

3:00 Well, no, understanding other people (general socialization) is not the primary driver of brain evolution. It was actually more of a side-effect, but I understand why people would think that was the cause. In other words, it's logical but not correct. 15:00 Is social understanding just a type of general understanding? Excellent question. 23:00 Okay, so far you've shown a result but not how it could relate to the question. For example, kids show similar development in understanding left hand/right hand for another person and that isn't related to belief. 24:00 A brilliant task? That was less than brilliant. I don't think that is the proof you need. 30:00 I'm underwhelmed by these proofs. This needs a better control task. Oh well, you tried.

[@Jimmy0123459876]

I love how you can be so smug and condescending at the same time. I'm sure you've published vast work in the field of cognitive science that details exactly why the professor is wrong, since you are obviously superior.

[@scientious]

@@Jimmy0123459876 > I love how you can be so smug and condescending at the same time. I was actually neither. Her lecture was consistent with the information she has available. But, that information happens to be incorrect. It's a simple correction. > I'm sure you've published vast work in the field of cognitive science that details exactly why the professor is wrong If that were the case then I wouldn't need to do a critique because she would already be aware of it and would have adjusted her lecture.

[@centerfornaturallanguage9871]

What is the primary driver ?

[@scientious]

@@centerfornaturallanguage9871 Given your incorrect ideas concerning the Immersed Experiencer Framework (IEF), I have some doubts that you will understand it. Chimpanzees are obviously K limited. If you want more chimpanzees then they need to reproduce faster. For general socialization to be the primary driver, it would have to be shown that this adaptation was directly related to more successful reproduction. Unfortunately, there are troops of baboons that are much larger but are in fact less intelligent than chimpanzees. So, then you argue that it's about social comprehension rather than just group size. Okay, we have that with hyenas but they too are not as intelligent. Also, bonobos are clearly more sociably peaceful than chimpanzees but they do not have a higher reproductive rate. This hypothesis simply does not work.

[@craig4283]

@@scientious What is the primary driver ?

[@meinungabundance7696]

"Greatest feats of humanity (art,science) are products of groups of people working together". I disagree totally. Neither Picasso or Van Gogh or other painters worked together. The same is true for writers. Have you ever seen writers working in a group?

[@person1420]

The writers probably read books written by other people. It's not like they never read a single book and knew how to write.

[@deshbhaktnationalist694]

Don’t suicide as it’s wrong. Contact a psychiatrist to know how and why suicide is wrong as they are trained to explain you well.

[@VeronikaVerhulst]

Vegan kids for the future.

[@mdreyaz5256]

hello dear

[@macotobar]

I didn't feel surprised that there were no difference in neurotypical and autistic people in the moral permissive experiment. The reason of the results, I think, it's because what you were evaluating were cognitive skills. Even predicting other people's thoughts I think is a cognitive skill. And we all know that autistic people usually have even better cognitive skills than neurotypical people. So, the autistic problem I think must be afforded in a completely different mental sphere, the emotional one. I think it's not that autistic people can't estimate what other people think. I rather think autistic people just don't care about other people. I think that they can't have empathy, they can't feel what other people feel, they can't put themselves in other's boots. The verbal responses of autistic people in the experiment gave count on that. I think the moral matter of the fictitious situation is maybe irrelevant for autistic people. I would rather spect from an autistic person to find the fiticious situation funny than moral concerning. That's my opinion.

[@macotobar]

On the other hand, autistic people's results indicate that RTPJ is clearly involved in other's thoughts cognition, but has nothing to do with the moral value given to them.

[@raven4090]

If you don't think autistic people don't care about other people and can't put themselves in other people's shoes, you know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about us.