Theory of Mind

Some philosophy for a change. If you’ve not heard of Dennett, he is one of the most influential philosophers of cognitive science and has some interesting views on consciousness, free will and many other things (evolution, religion). He is also known for this ‘intentional stance’ idea which helps clarify what it means to think about the private mental states of others.

Fast forward 30 years from Mind Design, and we see the intentional stance ideas startign to be formalized in computational Bayesian framework, capturing how one can invert behaviours to identify someone’s likely beliefs, values etc. Note also the connections with Development and Rationality topics.

This article presents a computational framework for modeling human action understanding using Bayesian inverse planning. The authors conducted psychophysical experiments to assess the accuracy of different inverse planning models in predicting human goal inferences. The results show evidence for a rational inference mechanism in human goal inference. The framework provides a formal approach to understanding rational action and goal inference in humans.

Here’s a more detailed example of this project modelling theory of mind style inferences as rational inverse planning. The food truck scenarios are proven popular and sprouted ‘spinoff’ projects in the decade since this paper.

The study aimed to understand how individuals perceive and interpret the behavior of others based on visual stimuli. The authors highlight the lack of experimental investigations in this area and emphasize the importance of studying the psychology of perception in relation to apparent behavior. The study involved showing participants a moving picture-film featuring geometric shapes moving in various directions and speeds. Participants were asked to describe the pictures and answer questions about them. The findings revealed that participants tended to interpret the movements as actions of animate beings, attributing personalities and motives to the shapes. The study demonstrates that humans have a tendency to perceive and attribute behavior to abstract shapes, suggesting a fundamental psychological process involved in perceiving others’ behavior.

This very old article is really most famous for its stimuli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E). One still tends to see this clip in the introduction to talks about social cognition (its not a bad idea to include it in your own presentation!). It is striking how irresistible it is to take ``the intentional stance’’ a la Dennett, and assign motivations and personality traits to these simple geometric shapes being moved around on an overhead projector.

This article explores whether autistic children lack a “theory of mind,” which refers to the ability to understand and predict the beliefs and behaviors of others. The study compares the performance of autistic children to that of normal children and children with Down’s syndrome using a puppet play paradigm. The research suggests that despite having a higher mental age than the comparison groups, autistic children fail to impute beliefs to others, indicating a deficit in meta-representational development specific to autism. This deficit contributes to the social impairment experienced by autistic children. The authors propose a new model of meta-representational development that suggests the capacity to form “second-order representations” is necessary for a theory of mind. Autistic children not only struggle with social ineptness but also exhibit a lack of pretend play.

Again this paper is most famous for its stimuli, the ‘Sally-Ann False Belief Task’ which probes whether someone is capable of Theory of Mind reasoning. Who is Simon Baron-Cohen’s famous cousin?