Theory of Mind

11 Key excerpts on "Theory of Mind"

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  Contemporary Perspectives on Research in Theory of Mind in Early Childhood Education

  • Olivia Saracho(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Contemporary Perspectives on Research in Theory of Mind in Early Childhood Education, pages 25–44 Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 25 CHAPTER 2 Theory of Mind Theoretical Foundations Olivia N. Saracho Theory of Mind refers to the individuals’ ability to interpret and anticipate the other individuals’ thinking, feeling, and behavior based on the inter- pretation of the situation (Schlinger, 2009). Individuals have the capacity to interpret and describe the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others based on the information that they have available (Hiatt & Trafton, 2010). In ad- dition, Theory of Mind reveals the individuals’ ability to interpret the other individuals’ behavior in relation to their mental states and characteristics (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). In other words, the individuals’ ability to read the minds of others, that is, having the capacity to predict what oth- ers might do and to describe what they have done (Ribeiro, 2003). Baron- Cohen (1995) refers to Theory of Mind as having a mindreading ability. The major purpose for understanding the mind is that it is essential to human interaction. This body of social knowledge is called Theory of Mind for two reasons. First, mental states are a theoretical paradigm: their existence cannot be confirmed, therefore philosophers like Stich (1983) are able to dispute their existence. According to Premack and Woodruff 26  O. N. SARACHO (1978), there is a theory about minds and mental states that are attributed to others. Wellman (1990) believes that knowledge about minds assumes the structure of a theory, because it makes precise ontological distinctions, provides a causal-explanatory structure, and describes its paradigm in rela- tion to other paradigms in the theory (Lillard, 1998).

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  A Companion to Experimental Philosophy

  • Justin Sytsma, Wesley Buckwalter, Justin Sytsma, Wesley Buckwalter(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  19 A Unified versus Componential View of Understanding Minds LILY TSOI 19.1 Introduction If we had direct access to the contents of people’s minds, the world would be free of miscommunication, insincere flattery, and deception (just to name a few). But (un)fortunately, we do not have this ability—we need to, instead, engage in Theory of Mind for explaining, understanding, and predicting people’s actions. Theory of Mind (ToM) is the capacity to infer the (unobservable) contents of people’s minds, including mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions. ToM is critical for effective social interaction and evaluation, whether we engage in it for mundane reasons (e.g., figuring out whether your friends like your cooking) or for life-threatening reasons (e.g., figuring out what your kidnapper intends to do to you). Because ToM plays such a crucial role in our everyday lives, there is considerable interest in studying this capacity. Philosophers often describe this capacity using the term “folk psychology” or “commonsense psychology”; other phrases used by philosophers and psychologists include “mindreading” and “mentalizing” (for clarification on how these terms are used, see Ravenscroft 2010). However, I will hereafter refer to this capacity as “Theory of Mind,” which is the term most commonly used in empirical research. How we engage in ToM is a topic of intense debate in philosophy of mind (for a review, see Stich and Nichols 2003). While I won’t be contributing directly to this debate, I will describe one popular view known as theory-theory, a view upon which a lot of empirical research is based. Supporters of this view argue that ToM is driven by a commonsense or folk theory of the mental world. Specifically, people infer mental states – which are not directly observable – and use those states to predict behavior. This system of inferences is regarded as a theory

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  Theory of Mind in the Pacific

  Reasoning Across Cultures

  • Jürg Wassmann, Birgit Träuble, Joachim Funke(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  B IRGIT T RÄUBLE , A NDREA B ENDER and C HRISTOPH K ONIECZNY 1 Human Social Cognition – The Theory of Mind Research The attribution of mental states such as desires or beliefs is a milestone of human sociality. It is one of the abilities that we share, if at all, with only very few non-human species (e.g., Hare et al. 2000; Plotnik et al. 2006; Tschudin 2006; Bugnyar 2007; for a contrary position see Povinelli and Vonk 2003), and the extent to which we possess this ability is uniquely human. It is also regarded as the fundamental prerequisite for human culture (Tomasello 1999; Tomasello et al. 2005; Call 2009). Attributing mental states to others constitutes the core of each ethnopsychology (Lillard 1998), and the question of how a basic set of assumptions eventually gives rise to such a large variety of ethno-psychological theories is one of the most interesting challenges to both psychologists and anthropologists (Bender and Beller 2013). Yet, these lines of research are rarely related to each other, and particularly in psychology, the focus – for most of the time – remained on the core competencies. This introduction will therefore begin with a brief description of what constitutes the basic competencies related to a “Theory of Mind” and in which scientific context it has been explored. It will proceed by contrasting different theoretical accounts of how a Theory of Mind develops, and by discussing to what extent each of these accounts allow for cultural impact on the development process. General findings from studies conducted in Western cultures will then be presented, and the potential for an impact of culture will be discussed in the light of empirical evidence for cultural variation. This will also broaden the focus to adult theories of mind in the context of ethnopsychologies, and to how these may affect children developing awareness for mental states in others.

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  Introducing Cognitive Development

  • Laura Taylor(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7Theory of Mind

  What is a “Theory of Mind”?

  AS ADULT HUMANS we are continually striving to explain and predict the behaviour of other people. When doing this we often refer to what is, or what might be, going on in their mind; their mental state. For example, if you witnessed someone banging on a door, looking through the letterbox and repeatedly shouting someone’s name, you would assume that they had reason to believe that someone was behind the door and that their behaviour would result in that person answering it. You might, however, know differently and that no one was at home.

  Before we can make inferences of the sort described above, we obviously need to recognise that other people have minds that interpret incoming information in an active way. We need to recognise that people’s beliefs are based on the information that they receive and that this can be inaccurate or incomplete. This understanding is known as metarepresentational awareness; that is the understanding that the mind is a representational entity and that the information represented therein is not necessarily an accurate reflection of reality.

  Although we passively receive some information from the external environment, we actively interpret much of the information that our senses receive. Things such as our emotional state and past experiences affect the way that we interpret incoming information. Similarly, our minds often fill in details that are not directly available to us. Just think of all the conversations you have had with friends about television programmes, films, or books. It is highly doubtful that you all agreed on the intention of the writer, director, author, or any of the characters that they had created. This is because you would have all interpreted the material being discussed in different ways.

  The fact that we often hold inaccurate beliefs testifies to the interpretative nature of representation. If we didn’t interpret incoming information we could never hold an inaccurate belief and therefore people exposed to the same information could never disagree about its meaning. This is obviously not the case and it’s not a bad thing. Imagine how boring life would be if everyone saw things in the same way!

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  The Psychology of Human Social Development

  From Infancy to Adolescence

  • Sandie Taylor, Lance Workman(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 , Ainsworth outlined different caregiver–infant interaction types, of which the secure attachment mode was the best for ensuring infant survival. Moreover, this secure attachment type was based on a positive working model resulting from interpretations of the caregiver’s responses to the infant’s display of behaviour. Therefore, it would seem, infants are capable of understanding the intentions of their caregiver, suggesting they have developed a ToM, albeit a limited one.

  p.144

  Understanding people’s different mental states is not as simple a feat as it would appear. Theory of Mind involves a complex mental calculation that children appear to grasp more and more as the brain develops. This is strongly linked with the development of mirror neurons in the brain, which we will return to later in this chapter. First, we need to explore what is meant by ToM and the emotional and cognitive forms it takes.

  WHAT IS Theory of Mind?

  British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (2001) defined Theory of Mind (ToM) as,

  being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief, having a Theory of Mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds.

  (p. 176)

  This definition appears straightforward enough but what ToM entails is actually quite complex. The underlying complexity of cognitive ability required to successfully perform ToM tasking is phenomenal. By considering a simple example of a ToM-related task, the extent to which a full understanding of a statement is required (including the translation of another person’s held belief) will become apparent. Consider the following example: ‘Kangaroos are large rodents’ – clearly a factually incorrect statement and easily judged as so. This becomes somewhat more complicated, however, when it becomes part of another person’s belief system such as: ‘Mary believes that kangaroos are large rodents’. Whether this is a true statement is difficult to ascertain for several reasons. First, it depends on who Mary is and, second, the statement has two components – the propositional content (kangaroos are large rodents) and an attitude towards the content (Mary believes it to be true). This means that the statement can be true despite the content being false. Moreover, as pointed out by Whiten and Byrne (1988), we are aware that other people can maintain different beliefs and feelings to the ones we hold and so can use these to manipulate or deceive us. Therefore, an additional level of interpretation is required where judgements about genuine incorrectness or intentional deceit are necessary. Telling the truth is a case of stating what is known, unlike lying, which takes account of the other person’s mental state. Whiten and Byrne referred to the manipulation of others involving deceit as Machiavellian intelligence (a term they attribute to Cambridge philosopher Nick Humphrey (1976)). Interestingly, tests for ToM were initially developed to determine whether non-human primates have the ability to ‘mind read’ (Premack and Woodruff 1978 – see Box 5.1

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  Making Sense

  What It Means to Understand

  • David R. Olson(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

   Understanding and Children’s Theory of Mind In Chapters 8 and 9, I summarized my account of what it means to understand and the domains to which the concept applies. Understanding is the ability to meet the truth and intersubjective criteria for correct ascription of understanding to oneself or others. Understanding, that is, learning the sense of the word “understand” with its identity criteria is sufficient for ascribing understanding. In this chapter, I examine this account in the light of several related or contrasting accounts of mental states, including understanding, and the role of language in their formation. A philosophical tradition going back to Descartes assumed that human beings have an indubitable consciousness of their own minds but that knowledge of other minds was at best inferred. What they failed to see was that the consciousness, the felt experience that could not be doubted, was not the same as introspection. William James, as mentioned in Chapter 4, was guilty of this conflation. Introspection is enabled by mental concepts used in ascribing mental states to others. Put simply, introspection is self-ascription; one cannot introspect without linguistic concepts of mind. As Montgomery (2005, p. 120) pointed out in regard to children’s acquisition of Theory of Mind, “introspective knowledge [plays a much smaller role] in mental con- cept formation than is sometimes claimed.” Montgomery’s concern has been ignored by those influenced by Simulation Theory.   Goldman and Shanton (2010) offer an account of what they call mind reading. Mind reading extends the tradition in philosophy that treated mind reading as a problem of other’s minds. They advance a “Simulation Theory” according to which third-person mind reading  involves the projection of one’s own mental states onto third-person targets.

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  The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome

  • Tony Attwood(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Jessica Kingsley Publishers

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 Theory of Mind

  How odd is his voice, how odd his manner of speaking and his way of moving. It is no surprise, therefore, that this boy also lacks understanding of other people’s expressions and cannot react to them appropriately.

  –Hans Asperger ([1944] 1991)

  The psychological term Theory of Mind (ToM) means the ability to recognize and understand thoughts, beliefs, desires and intentions of other people in order to make sense of their behaviour and predict what they are going to do next. It has also been described as ‘mind reading’ or ‘mind blindness’ (Baron-Cohen 1995) or, colloquially, a difficulty in ‘putting oneself in another person’s shoes’. A synonymous term is empathy (Gillberg 2002). The child or adult with Asperger’s syndrome does not recognize or understand the cues that indicate the thoughts or feelings of the other person at a level expected for someone of that age.

  The diagnostic assessment should include an examination of the child or adult’s maturity in ToM skills and we have a range of tests that can be used with children, adolescents and adults (Attwood 2004d). There are stories with comprehension questions that can be used, at different age levels, to assess the ability to determine what someone in the story would be thinking or feeling. The ‘Strange Stories’ have been developed by Francesca Happé for children from 4 to 12 years (Happé 1994) and the ‘Stories from Everyday Life’ by Nils Kaland and colleagues for adolescents (Kaland et al.

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  Baboon Metaphysics

  The Evolution of a Social Mind

  • Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  14 6 Theory of Mind We cannot perceive the thought of another person at all, we can only infer it from his behavior. CH A R L E S DA R W I N , 18 4 0 : O L D A N D U S EL E S S N OT E S In October 1960, during the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s pub-lisher on the charge that Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatter-ley’s Lover, was obscene, several clergymen testified for the defense. One, Canon Milford, introduced a subtle distinc-tion. He argued that if, during the scenes in question, a reader of Lady Chatterley identified with one of the two lovers, that would not be indecent; however, if a reader assumed the perspective of a third party, observing the lovers from behind a tree, that would indeed be obscene. Years later, reflecting on this opinion, the writer Anthony Powell (1983) concluded that Canon Milford’s distinction was an important one, recognizing as it did the “important division of the human race between voyeurs and exhibi-tionists.” Theory of Mind and the intentional stance Regardless of whether we are exhibitionists or voyeurs, our thoughts and conversations are rife with inferences about other individuals’ emotions, motives, and beliefs. Depend-ing on these inferences, we may view another person’s be-havior as deliberate, accidental, ignorant, or devious, and we may, in turn, attempt to influence or alter his beliefs E I G H T T H EO RY O F M I N D 147 by telling him what we know to be true—or by lying. The ability to at-tribute mental states like knowledge and ignorance to both oneself and others is to have what Premack and Woodruff (1978) termed a “Theory of Mind.” A Theory of Mind is a theory because, unlike behavior, mental states are not observable, although they can be used to make predic-tions about behavior. Mental states are always about some other thing, be it a physical ob-ject, another person, or another mental state. Whenever a person thinks, believes, wants, or likes something, he is in what philosophers call an “intentional state” 1 (Dennett 1987b).

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  Rethinking Commonsense Psychology

  A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation

  • Matthew Ratcliffe(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  All manner of behaviours are brought together under a common framework, which is employed to predict and explain what people do. This framework is clearly conceptual, at least in part, given the explicit inclusion of concepts such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’ and ‘intention’. Mental states are generally taken to be unobservable causes of behaviour. Furthermore, beliefs and desires often feature in counter- factual claims. For example, if I had not desired to study philosophy, I would have studied medicine instead. 7 An alternative to the ‘Theory of Mind’ account of folk psychology emerged in 1986, in the guise of ‘simulation theory’. 8 While ‘Theory of Mind’ or, as it is sometimes known, the ‘theory theory’, emphasises pos- session and deployment of a body of conceptual knowledge concerning mental states and their interrelations, variants of simulation theory emphasise the role of practical skills, of knowing how to do something, rather than knowing that something is the case. The basic idea is fairly simple; under the assumption that my own cognitive processes are suf- ficiently similar to those of other people, I can, given the right inputs, use the outputs of those processes to predict what they will do. I can do Commonsense Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation 9 so without resorting to a theoretical knowledge of how the relevant cog- nitive processes work, as the assumption that I am like them in certain relevant respects takes the place of a Theory of Mind. As Heal puts it: I can harness all my complex theoretical knowledge about the world and my ability to imagine to yield an insight into other people without any further elaborate theorizing about them. Only one simple assumption is needed: that they are like me in being thinkers, that they possess the same fundamental cognitive capacities and propen- sities that I do. (1995a, p. 47) She suggests that this procedure is particularly useful when it comes to predicting what others will do.

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  The Student's Guide to Social Neuroscience

  • Jamie Ward(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The overarching question of the chapter is how do we understand the mental states of others? Mental states consist of knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires. The process of making this inference has more generally been referred to as mentalizing. The term is gener- ally used in a theory-neutral way, insofar as it is used by researchers from a wide spectrum of views. It could be contrasted with the term theory- of-mind, which has essentially the same meaning but has tended to be adopted by those advocating a particular position, namely the notion that there is a special mechanism for inferring mental states. According to some researchers, this theory-of-mind mechanism cannot be reduced to general cognitive functions such as language and reasoning, or those involved in imitating. These arguments lie at the heart of the social neuroscience enterprise in that they raise important and divisive issues about the nature of the mental and neural mechanisms that support social behavior and the extent to which they are related to other aspects of cognition. 6 KEY TERMS Mental states Knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires. Mentalizing The process of inferring or attributing mental states to others. DOI: 10.4324/9781003057697-6 204 UNDERSTANDING OTHERS Figure 6.1 It just takes one yawn to start off other yawns. How does this kind of simple contagion mechanism relate to empathy and theory-of-mind? WHAT IS SIMULATION THEORY? Simulation theory is not strictly a single theory but a collection of theories proposed by various individuals (e.g. Gallese, 2001; Goldman, 2006; Hurley, Clark, & Kiverstein, 2008; Preston & de Waal, 2002). However, common to them all is the basic assumption that we understand other people’s behavior by recreating the mental processes on ourselves that, if carried out, would reproduce their behavior. That is, we use our own recreated (or simulated) mental states to understand, and empathically share, the mental state of others.

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  Culture and Cognition

  Evolutionary Perspectives

  • Bradley Franks(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  One misplaced charge is that Theory of Mind research presupposes a Cartesian split between mind and behaviour or mind and body or mind and world. It is evident that recent developments in modu-larity, for example, have attempted to move beyond such splits – evolution-ary psychology is, as noted in Chapter 2, externalist (that is, non-Cartesian) about mental content. However, it has been argued here that it simply does not go far enough in integrating mind and world or mind and body – that is, the naturalistic stance should lead us to an extended, embodied view of mind. Leudar, Costall and Francis (2004: 573) trace the core Theory of Mind idea of ‘theory theory’, that ‘we are all supposed to invoke “mental states” to “explain” and “predict” behaviour, and these are theoretical entities which are not publicly observable but are inferred from that very behaviour’, to such Cartesian foundations. They offer a contrasting view in which Theory of Mind activity involves the direct observation of others’ mental states via perceptual affordances. There is, as we will see below, some merit in their critique that the ‘theory theory’ presupposes a solely inferential basis to Theory of Mind capacities (see also Gallese, 2007, for a caution against assuming a simple correspondence between the theoretical terms we use to discuss mental-state thinking and how people actually carry this out); but the argument will be that we should situate Theory of Mind activity in an evolutionary framework, and that doing so leads us to believe that at least some of our Theory of Mind activity is representational – that is, on-line sensitivity to affordances needs to be sup-plemented both by implicit (or explicit-1; see page 183) representations in indication relations, as well as full blown representations arising from off-line error-driven activities of the kind discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.

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