Abstract
A complete understanding of the cognitive systems underwriting theory of mind (ToM) abilities requires articulating how mental state representations are generated and processed in everyday situations. Individuals rarely announce their intentions prior to acting, and actions are often consistent with multiple mental states. In order for ToM to operate effectively in such situations, mental state representations should be generated in response to certain actions, even when those actions occur in the presence of mental state content derived from other aspects of the situation. Results from three experiments with preschool children and adults demonstrate that mental state information is indeed generated based on an approach action cue in situations that contain competing mental state information. Further, the frequency with which participants produced or endorsed explanations that include mental states about an approached object decreased when the competing mental state information about a different object was made explicit. This set of experiments provides some of the first steps toward identifying the observable action cues that are used to generate mental state representations in everyday situations and offers insight into how both young children and adults processes multiple mental state representations.
Highlights
One of the most complicated and interesting problems human beings face in their day-to-day lives is making sense of what others around them are doing
For the desirestatement-absent version there was no significant age difference between children who mentioned the distracter object (M = 4.11 years, SD = .68 years) and those who did not (M = 4.39 years, SD = .65 years; t(38) = 21.21, p = .23). These results suggests that (i) preschoolers are capable of using the approach action cue to generate mental state representations about the distracter object in the presence of competing mental state information, and (ii) explicitly stating the competing mental state information about the target object made it marginally less likely that distracter object mental state representations generated based on the approach action cue would enter into preschoolers’ explanations of the character’s search action
What types of explanations do adults produce? In order to identify explanations with mental state content, adults’ explanations were coded by two independent raters into the same three categories used in Experiment 1: Desire, Belief, and Other. These mental state explanations were divided by whether they referred to the target or distracter object for subsequent analyses
Summary
One of the most complicated and interesting problems human beings face in their day-to-day lives is making sense of what others around them are doing. We effortlessly interpret their behavior in terms of a finite set of conceptual entities – mental states like desires and beliefs. This ability to interpret, predict, and explain the actions of others in terms of underlying mental states is theory of mind (ToM); a set of cognitive capacities that has been studied over the past three decades from many different perspectives, including comparative psychology [1,2], cognitive development, [3,4,5,6,7], and cognitive neuroscience [8,9,10,11,12]. Much has been learned about ToM, but despite the extensive attention this topic has received, we have just begun to scratch the surface
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