How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind
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TLDR
Minimal theory of mind (MTM) as mentioned in this paper is a theory that allows a person to track others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs, including false beliefs, within limits.Abstract:
What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need for other, less obvious possibilities. Our aim is to meet this need by describing the construction of a minimal theory of mind. Minimal theory of mind is rich enough to explain systematic success on tasks held to be acid tests for theory of mind cognition including many false belief tasks. Yet minimal theory of mind does not require representing propositional attitudes, or any other kind of representation, as such. Minimal theory of mind may be what enables those with limited cognitive resources or little conceptual sophistication, such as infants, chimpanzees, scrub-jays and human adults under load, to track others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Submentalizing: I Am Not Really Reading Your Mind.
TL;DR: This article takes a close look at the strongest evidence of implicit mentalizing in adults, which suggests that people automatically represent what others see, intend, and believe, and suggests that the same domain-general processes can provide a fast and efficient alternative tomentalizing in everyday life.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Structure of Social Cognition: In(ter)dependence of Sociocognitive Processes
TL;DR: The aim of this review is to outline briefly what is known about the structure of social cognition and to suggest how further progress can be made to delineate the in(ter)dependence of core sociocognitive processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early False-Belief Understanding
Rose M. Scott,Renée Baillargeon +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that processing difficulties, rather than limitations in false-belief understanding, account for young children's failure at traditional tasks and thus forms an integral part of social cognition from early in life.
Journal ArticleDOI
Psychological Reasoning in Infancy
TL;DR: This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret theAgent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent.
Journal ArticleDOI
How children come to understand false beliefs: A shared intentionality account
TL;DR: It is argued that young children do not just come to imagine what is in other minds on their own; rather, they come to this understanding through certain types of social and communicative interactions with others that require them to compare their respective perspectives.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind
David Premack,Guy Woodruff +1 more
TL;DR: This paper showed an adult chimpanzee a series of videotaped scenes of a human actor struggling with a variety of problems, some of which were simple, such as bananas vertically or horizontally out of reach, behind a box, and so forth; others were more complex, involving an actor unable to extricate himself from a locked cage, shivering because of a malfunctioning heater, or unable to play a phonograph because it was unplugged.
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Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information
TL;DR: Marr's posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter the field of visual perception as discussed by the authors, where the process of vision constructs a set of representations, starting from a description of the input image and culminating with three-dimensional objects in the surrounding environment, a central theme and one that has had farreaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is the notion of different levels of analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.
Heinz Wimmer,Josef Perner +1 more
TL;DR: A travelling salesman found himself spending the night at home with his wife when one of his trips was unexpectedly cancelled, and he leapt out from the bed, ran across the room and jumped out the window.
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The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
TL;DR: Tomasello as discussed by the authors argued that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes p[lace within it, are based in a cluster of unique human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny.
Journal ArticleDOI
Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief.
TL;DR: A meta-analysis found that when organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers, and is consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.
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Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.
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