Professor Josef Perner

Affiliation 

University of Salzburg

Bio 

Josef Perner is Professor emeritus of Psychology at the University of Salzburg, member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, and founder of the Doctoral College "Imaging the Mind". He is a member of the British Academy and the German Leopoldina, with an honorary degree from the University of Basel and several academic prizes. He is best known for co-authoring with Heinz Wimmer the False Belief Task. His empirical work focuses on the development of perspective taking in relation to theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, identity, alternative naming, etc. His theoretical work centres on the nature of mental representation, the implicit-explicit distinction, and more recently on Teleology as a common-sense alternative to theory of mind and mental simulation. His current preoccupation is mental files theory as an explanation of why all the abilities he has studied relate to each other developmentally and in the brain.

Abstract

Mental Files in Perspective

A mental file is a representation of a particular object. After a short overview of their representational virtues in different fields of Cognitive Science I focus on our developmental research on perspective taking. Each file provides a perspective on its referent (what it represents, refers to). Multiple, coreferential files provide different perspectives on the referent. By using different labels for an object, different files are deployed which provide different perspectives. Similarly, another person's perspective, e.g., belief, can be captured by a coreferential file to be used vicariously for the other person's file. This requires understanding identity, i.e., that the referent of the two files is the same object. Children below the age of about 4 years have problems with this. It shows in their difficulty understanding false beliefs, processing identity statements, delayed recognition, and more. Moreover, these tasks are not only mastered at the same age they also cause activity in a common brain region, in the left inferior parietal lobe, as I will show.