What is “theory of mind”? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences

Abstract

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.

Keywords:

• Theory of mind
• False belief
• Cognitive

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Charles Fernyhough and Kevin Riggs for their comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes

¹ This may at first seem incorrect, for does it not make sense to suppose that children who acquire the concept of belief earlier will be just those children who are more socially competent? Although this intuition clearly does make sense, it does not work as an objection because it essentially confounds the conceptual and the social individual differences accounts. The distinctive claim of conceptual accounts is that false-belief tasks diagnose the presence or absence of a concept of belief, and this entails that once you pass such tasks you accrue whatever benefits follow from merely possessing a belief concept. It may, of course, be the case that children who are more socially competent acquire a concept of belief earlier than less socially competent children, and if this is true, then scores on false-belief tasks may very well predict later social competence. But the predictive work in this case is done by the underlying social competence, not the concept of belief.

² Nonetheless it may be that at least some egocentric phenomena seen in children are due to immature concepts.