- University of Southern California
- Assistant Professor
- Templeton Fellow (2015-2016)
- "Towards a Transformative Account of Human Cognition"
Henrike Moll is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California who studies the early social-cognitive abilities of human infants and young children. Most of her research deals with joint attention and the origins of perspective-taking. She tries to supplement her experimental investigations with philosophical inquiries.
She is co-author of more than thirty articles, which were published in high-profile journals like Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and Developmental Science, among others. Some of her writings have appeared in journals of philosophy such as Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie and Grazer Philosophische Studien.
Throughout her post-doctoral studies, the Volkswagen Foundation funded Professor Moll’s work with the prestigious Dilthey Fellowship. In 2011, she was awarded the Young Mind and Brain Prize from the University of Turin. In the same year, she was elected a member of the Young Academy, a German science academy for junior scholars. She was also elected an external faculty member of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-University. In 2017, she received the competitive Midcareer Grant by the Spencer Foundation.
Publications
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2.5-Year-Olds Express Suspense When Others Approach Reality with False Expectations
Child Development, 2016
The study investigated if 2.5-year-olds are susceptible to suspense and express tension when others’ false expec- tations are about to be disappointed. In two experiments (N = 32 each), children showed more tension when a protagonist approached a box with a false belief about its content than when she was ignorant. In Experiment 2, children also expressed more tension when the protagonist’s belief was false than when it was true. The findings reveal that toddlers affectively anticipate the “rude awakening” of an agent who is about to discover unexpected reality. They thus not only understand false beliefs per se but also grasp the affective implications of being mis- taken. The results are discussed with recourse to current theories about early understanding of false beliefs.
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“Not See, Not Hear, Not Speak”: Preschoolers Think They Cannot Perceive or Address Others Without Reciprocity
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2017
A curious phenomenon in early social-cognitive development has been identified: Preschoolers deny that they can see others who cannot also see them (Russell, Gee, & Bullard, 2012). The exclusive focus on vision has suggested that this effect is limited to gaze, but children’s negations might reflect a broader phenomenon that extends to vocal communication. In Experiment 1 (N = 24), 3- to 4-year-olds were asked if they could see an agent whose eyes were covered, hear an agent whose ears were covered, and speak to an agent whose mouth was covered. In all cases, negative responses were more frequent than in a control condition in which the facial area was unoccluded. Experiment 2 (N = 24) provided evidence that children’s negations did not result from a misunderstanding of the questions. The findings suggest that young children apply a principle of reciprocal relatedness that is not limited to gaze.
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On the Transformative Character of Collective Intentionality and the Uniqueness of the Human
Philosophical Psychology, 2017
Current debates on collective intentionality focus on the cognitive capacities, attitudes, and mental states that enable individuals to take part in joint actions. It is typically assumed that collective intentionality is a capacity which is added to other, pre-existing, capacities of an individual and is exercised in cooperative activities like carrying a table or painting a house together. We call this the additive account because it portrays collective intentionality as a capacity that an individual possesses in addition to her capacity for individual intentionality. We offer an alternative view according to which the primary entity to which collective intentionality has to be ascribed is not the human individual, but a “form of life.” As a feature of a form of life, collective intentionality is something more than the specific capacity exercised by an individual when she cooperates with others. Collective intentionality transforms all the capacities of the bearers of this specific form of life. We thus call our proposal the transformative account of collective intentionality.
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Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking
Journal of Social Ontology, 2016
Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens’ cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt the idea that what changed first over evolutionary time was hominin behavior, which then in turn brought about changes in cognition. In the second half of the commentary I aim to show that the author oscillates between an additive and a transformative account of human shared intentionality. I argue that shared intentionality shapes cognition in its entirety and therefore precludes the possibility that humans have the same, individual intentionality (as shown in, e.g. their instrumental reasoning) as other apes.
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The Transformative Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis: Evidence from Young Children’s Problem-Solving
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2018
This study examined 4-year-olds’ problem-solving under different social conditions. Children had to use water in order to extract a buoyant object from a narrow tube. When faced with the problem ‘cold’ without cues, nearly all children were unsuccessful (Experiment 1). But when a solution-suggesting video was pedagogically delivered prior to the task, most children (69% in Experiment 1, 75% in Experiment 2) succeeded. Showing children the same video in a non-pedagogical manner did not lift their performance above baseline (Experiment 1) and was less effective than framing it pedagogically (Experiments 1 and 2). The findings support ideas central to natural pedagogy (Csibra and Gergely Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 148–153, 2009). They also challenge the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis, according to which only humans’ social, but not their physical, cognition differs qualitatively from that of great apes. A more radical, transformative variant of the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis is suggested according to which humans’ physical cognition is shaped by their social nature and must therefore be recognized as equally distinctive as their social cognition.