Meta-representation

A fairly old (1997) paper by Suddendorf and Fletcher-Flinn, Theory of Mind and the Origins of Divergent Thinking (here) has an interesting study showing that TOM is related to creativity. Here is the abstract:

The development of a `theory of mind’ may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one’s own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty children between the ages of three and four were given false-belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the meta-representational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution.

They point out that TOM is important for social understanding and also for understanding and utilizing one’s own mind. The key seems to be the capacity to represent in the mind various presentations.

Because the creativity tasks did not involve any obvious kind of mental attribution, 

this finding points to another factor underlying both measures. The prime candidates, 

since the relationship holds even when intelligence and age are partialled out, is 

improved metarepresentational capacity and the ability to disengage from the 

immediate present. Understanding false beliefs in others requires the individual to 

dissociate from the immediate situation and to form a representation of the other’s 

representation. Similarly, one may argue that the creativity task requires the 

children to dissociate from the immediate situation and to represent one’s own 

knowledge, scanning it for items with a particular feature. This theoretical argument

 is consistent with the informal observation that during the testing procedure 

younger children tended to look for answers in their immediate environment, while 

older children gazed at the ceiling, apparently looking “inside” for appropriate 

responses. The data support the hypothesis that a general, rather than a 

specifically social, representational improvement takes place between age 3 and 4.   

The ability to juggle two variations of our model of the world at the same time seems to be important 

to our social life and our general intelligence/creativity. I think it would be important to metaphorical 

or analog thinking too. So when I understand electrical current by reference the flow of a liquid, 

for example, I have to hold the wire and the river in my mind at the same time and compare them. 

This entry was posted on 09/03/2009 at 09:15 am and is filed under mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.