Mental Files in Perspective: Theory, Development, and Neural Foundations (Context & Content)

Intellectual development is primarily considered a domain specific enterprise.Children develop naïve physics, a folk psychology (theory of mind), a naïve biology, etc.But understanding perspective is a general, overarching phenomenon that cuts across such domains in development and in the brain.This has important theoretical consequences. For instance, our folk psychology cannot consist of a uniform "theory of mind" for explaining behaviour.Parts of the theory that are sensitive to perspective differences have to be separated from those that are not.A central concern is how perspective is represented in the mind.The answer comes from mental files theory. A mental file represents or refers to an object. It presents the object under a particular mode of presentation-perspective.Coreferential files refer to the same object and present the object under different perspectives.Files, thus, give us a concrete way to capture perspectives with the tools for basic object cognition.This book intr