The complexity of theory of mind

Abstract

A growing body of literature views theory of mind (ToM) as a complex activity involving related but different abilities (e.g., Harrington, Siegert, & McClure, 2005; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006; Tirassa, Bosco, & Colle, 2006). This reflects in the types of experimental tasks that have been proposed in recent years for the assessment of ToM in normal and abnormal populations, some ofwhich focus on the ability to understand visual or other perceptual cues as hints to another individual’smental states (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb 2001; Rutherford, Baron-Cohen, W Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, & Rutherford, 2007) and others on the comprehension of complex mental states as encapsulated in short stories or linguistic questions (e.g., Baron-Cohen, O’Riordan, Stone, Jones & Plaitsed, 1999; Happe, 1994; Pons & Harris, 2000). Let us discriminate two facets of labels like ToM or mindreading. One is the situated ability to understand and react to someone’s mental states (‘‘this thug is planning to assault me – I had better let him see that I carry a knife”); roughly, it is manifestations of this facet that are explored by the first type of experimental tasks mentioned above. Another is the retrospective reconsideration of one’s own or another individual’s ways or ability to cope with mentalistic social cognition (‘‘I always feel in danger when people conceal their thoughts”); again roughly, it is manifestations of this facet that are explored by the second type of tasks. Each facet may be further analyzed according to more detailed considerations like the distinction between an egocentric and an allocentric perspective or between the various types of epistemic, volitional and other mental states that humans may understand. Particularly in developmental psychology, the difference between on-line and retrospective aspects of ToM has also been compared to the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge or functioning of ToM (e.g., Clements & Perner, 1994); however, the latter distinction is often used intuitively, leaving many theoretical questions open (Dienes & Perner, 1999). To sum up, ToMmay be viewed as a sophisticated mental activity which allows to quickly form and handle local, situated ideas about oneself or the others in a specific moment as well as more general, less transient ideas about how one and the others tend to live and cope across any number of different and possibly hypothetical situations. Both facets of ToM have been a focus of research, but, to our knowledge, the conceptual and theoretical relations between them have never been worked out to any satisfactory level of detail and, as discussed above, the experimental paradigms with which they have been studied are quite different. The Th.o.m.a.s. interview (Bosco et al., 2009) is meant to investigate the retrospective facet of ToM, based on a theoretically-driven decomposition thereof that aims at bringing its diversity and complexity into light. There is no way of doing this without recurring to the interviewee’s deliberate introspection and discursive abilities. It is possible that, as Badgaiyan (2009) suggests, schizophrenia might affect differently the two facets of ToM. Yet, there is no reason to think that either one has a systematically more important causal role than the other in the mental life of a healthy or schizophrenic person. Instead, they influence each other: the retrospective ability has to build in part upon the reconsideration of previous episodes and situations in which the on-line interpretation of mental states has yielded some interesting lesson to learn; conversely, the on-line interpretation of the current situation has to be informed in part by the individual’s general worldview and biography as well as by the outcomes of and reflections upon situations met in the past. We believe that the retrospective facet of ToM plays a fundamental role and that it is crucial to our understanding of social cognition in schizophrenia and elsewhere. Another issue raised by Badgaiyan concerns the role that memory, language and IQ may play in ToM activities and in the relevant experimental tasks. Truly, certain such activities and tasks require an adequate level of non-ToM cognitive function-