*APOLOGIES! THE INVITATION EMAIL SENT EARLIER WAS WITH THE WRONG DATE. THE SEMINAR MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE ON JANUARY 21TH. PLEASE TAKE NOTE.
Please distribute to others who may be interested...* You are hereby invited to the 10th weekly seminar in our seventh interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition<http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108>(ECCO). *Time*: Friday, January 21th, 14:00-16:00 p.m (note: this year (2011), all seminars take place on Fridays, 14-16 pm, unless announced otherwise) *Place*: Top floor, Center Leo Apostel, Krijgskundestraat 33, B-1160 Brussels (This is just outside the main VUB campus, see map and directions<http://tinyurl.com/379uyyr> ) Note: this is not the usual room for ECCO seminars! Free entrance: everybody welcome. ------------------------------ * Children’s Understanding of Others’ Minds: Results Achieved and Challenges Ahead* *Marco Fenici (University of Sienna Italy) * *Abstract:* In the Eighties, by employing the false belief test experimental paradigm, researchers showed that children become able to explicitly predict one’s behaviour based on the attribution of beliefs and desires to her only around age four. This was considered evidence that, at age four, children acquire a theory about the functioning of others’ minds—i.e., a “theory of mind”. Since then, several proposals correlating theory of mind acquisition to cognitive development have been advanced. By focusing the empirical literature, I will propose that the ability to attribute mental states to others to predict their behaviour depends on the acquisition of several cognitive competences provided by both modular and non-modular psychological processes. In particular, language and syntax acquisition play a pivotal role. Children master the fundamental dynamics underlying the attribution of mental states to others by starting understanding parental conversation about people’s reasons to act. *Web Reference**s* · Wikipedia, at the entry “theory of mind”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind · Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, at the entry “Folk Psychology as a Theory”: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ · An updated discussion about the relation between theory of mind acquisition and different indices of linguistic competence is the paper by Karen Milligan, Janet Wilde Astington, and Lisa Ain Dack (2007), *Language and Theory of Mind: Meta-Analysis of the Relation Between Language Ability and False-belief Understanding*: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01018.x/abstract *Short biography: * Marco Fenici graduated in logics at the University of Florence in 2005 with a dissertation about epistemic logics and the problem of logical omniscience. Since 2006, he is a student at the Doctoral School of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena. His research concerns theoretical and empirical issues about children’s acquisition of the concept of belief. He is also interested in the epistemology of psychology. On this topic, he edited *Psychology and Psychologies: which Epistemology?*, special issue of *Humana.Mente*, (n. 11, October 2009). He has been visiting student at the Technische Universitaet (Dresden), at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (Rome), at the New Bulgarian University (Sofia), and at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). *Affiliation: *Doctoral School of Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena *Home Page: *http://unisi.academia.edu/MarcoFenici ------------------------------ *Upcoming Seminars* No Upcoming Seminars till the next session. Invitations for the next seminars will be distributed in due time. * * More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108
