Abstract
Humans seem to readily track their conspecifics’ mental states, such as their goals and beliefs from early infancy. However, the underlying cognitive architecture that enables such powerful abilities remains unclear. Here I will propose that a basic representational structure, the belief file, could provide the foundation for efficiently encoding, and updating information about, others’ beliefs in online social interactions. I will discuss the representational possibilities offered by the belief file and the ways in which the repertoire of mental state reasoning is shaped by the characteristics of its constituents. A series of questions will be outlined concerning the representational skeleton of the belief file, sketching a possible structure that supports the rapid encoding and re-identification of belief related information (e.g., variables for the agent, as the belief holder and for the belief-content). After analyzing the possible limitations of the belief attribution system, I will examine some of its characteristics that might enable a flexibility that is often neglected. I will suggest that operations involving belief files are not impeded by the absence of precise first-person information regarding their contents. In fact, the system permits manipulations with “empty” belief files, allowing humans to ascribe beliefs to conspecifics based on little or no direct information regarding the content of the mental state. Such an analysis aims to advance our understanding of how spontaneous belief attribution may be performed, and to provide an insight into the possible mechanisms that allow humans to successfully navigate the social world.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Here I will use the term belief files exclusively to refer to belief representations attributed to other people. In parallel, I will use the notion ‘first-person (or regular) representations’ to refer to one’s own representations about the environment.
This does not entail that we cannot entertain the proposition “No one believes there is a marble in the box”, however, such computations might be outside the scope of belief tracking.
Recanati (2012) has argued that that there can be so-called ‘unloaded’ attributed files that are not linked to the subject’s first-person files, such as for example in the case of attributing a belief to someone about Santa Claus in the case that the attributer does not believe in Santa Claus. However, one could argue that the observer should still have some kind of first-person mental file of Santa, based on which one can for instance answer the question whether Santa has a red coat – even apart from belief attribution.
References
Apperly, I.A., and S. Butterfill. 2009. Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review 116: 4.
Apperly, I.A., D. Samson, C. Chiavarino, and G.W. Humphreys. 2004. Frontal and temporo-parietal lobe contributions to theory of mind: Neuropsychological evidence from a false-belief task with reduced language and executive demands. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16: 1773–1784.
Baron-Cohen, C., A.M. Leslie, and U. Frith. 1985. Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’? Cognition 21: 37–46.
Bloom, P., and T.P. German. 2000. Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind. Cognition 77: B25–B31.
Butterfill, S., and I.A. Apperly. 2013. How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind & Language 28: 606–637.
Buttleman, D., M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello. 2009. Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition 112: 337–342.
Call, J., and M. Tomasello. 1999. A nonverbal false belief task: The performance of children and great apes. Child Development 70: 381–395.
Carey, S., and F. Xu. 2001. Infants’ knowledge of objects: Beyond object files and object tracking. Cognition 80: 179–213.
Carruthers, P. 2013. Mindreading in infancy. Mind & Language 28: 141–172.
de Bruin, L.C., and A. Newen. 2012. An association account of false-belief understanding. Cognition 123: 240–259.
Fodor, J. 1992. A theory of the child’s theory of mind. Cognition 44: 283–296.
Fodor, J.A. 2008. LOT 2: The language of thought revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
He, Z., M. Bolz, and R. Baillargeon. 2012. 2.5-year-olds succeed at a verbal anticipatory looking false-belief task. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 30: 14–29.
Helming, K.A., B. Strickland and P. Jacob. 2015. Making sense of early false-belief understanding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Kahneman, D., and A. Treisman. 1984. Changing views of attention and automaticity. In Varieties of attention, ed. R. Parasuraman and D. Davies, 29–61. New York: Academic.
Kampis, D., E.Parise, G. Csibra and A.M. Kovács (under review). EEG evidence for similar mechanisms to represent others’ and own object representations in 8-month-old infants.
Kaufman, J., G. Csibra, and M.H. Johnson. 2003. Representing occluded objects in the human infant brain. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 270(Suppl 2): S140–S143.
Kaufman, J., G. Csibra, and M.H. Johnson. 2005. Oscillatory activity in the infant brain reflects object maintenance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(42): 15271–15274.
Knudsen, B., and U. Liszkowski. 2012. 18-Month-Olds predict specific action mistakes through attribution of false belief, not ignorance, and intervene accordingly. Infancy 17: 672–691.
Kovács, Á. M. (under review). Decomposing theory of mind: Belief files and further functional sub-components.
Kovács, Á.M., E. Téglás, and A.D. Endress. 2010. The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science 330: 1830–1834.
Kovács, Á.M., S. Kuehn, G. Gergely, G. Csibra, and M. Brass. 2014. Are all beliefs equal? Implicit belief attributions recruiting core brain regions of theory of mind. PLoS ONE 9: e106558. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106558.
Leslie, A.M. 1987. Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review 94: 412–426.
Leslie, A.M. 1988. Some implications of pretense for mechanisms underlying the child’s theory of mind. In Developing theories of mind, ed. J. Astington, P. Harris, and D. Olson, 19–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leslie, A.M., F. Xu, P. Tremoulet, and B. Scholl. 1998. Indexing and the object concept: Developing ‘what’ and ‘where’ systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2: 10–18.
Onishi, K.H., and R. Baillargeon. 2005. Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science 308: 255–258.
Perner, J., and J. Roessler. 2012. From infants’ to children’s appreciation of belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16: 519–525.
Perner, J., and T. Ruffman. 2005. Infant’s insight into the mind: How deep? Science 308: 214–216.
Perner, J., B. Rendl, and A. Garnham. 2007. Objects of desire, thought, and reality: Problems of anchoring discourse referents in development. Mind & Language 22: 475–513.
Premack, D. G., & Woodruff, G. 1978. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral & Brain Sciences 1: 515–526. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00076512.
Pylyshyn, Z.W. 2001. Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision. Cognition 80: 127–158.
Rakoczy, H. 2012. Do infants have a theory of mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology 30: 59–74.
Recanati, F. 2012. Mental files. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rubio Fernandez, P. 2013. Perspective tracking in progress: Do not disturb. Cognition 129: 264–272.
Saxe, R., and N. Kanwisher. 2003. People thinking about thinking people. The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. NeuroImage 19: 1835–1842.
Schneider, D., A.P. Bayliss, S.I. Becker, and P.E. Dux. 2012. Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others’ mental states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141: 433–438.
Scholl, B.J., and A. Leslie. 1999. Explaining the infant’s object concept: Beyond the perception/cognition dichotomy. In What is cognitive science? ed. E. Lepore and Z. Pylyshyn, 26–73. Oxford: Blackwell.
Scholl, B.J., and A.M. Leslie. 2001. Minds, modules, and metaanalysis. Child Development 72: 696–701.
Scholl, B.J., and Z.W. Pylyshyn. 1999. Tracking multiple objects through occlusion: Clues to visual objecthood. Cognitive Psychology 38: 259–280.
Senju, A., V. Southgate, S. White, and U. Frith. 2009. Mindblind eyes: An absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome. Science 325: 883–885.
Southgate, V., A. Senju, and G. Csibra. 2007. Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science 18: 587–192.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Surian, L., S. Caldi, and D. Sperber. 2007. Attribution of beliefs to 13-month-old infants. Psychological Science 18: 580–586.
Wellman, H.M., D. Cross, and J. Watson. 2001. Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development 72: 655–684.
Wimmer, H., and J. Perner. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and the containing function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13: 103–128.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC starting grant (284236-REPCOLLAB).We thank E. Téglás, O. Mascaro, J. Michael, A. Major, G. Bródy, D. Kampis, M. Freundlieb, R. Shamsudheen, the CDC members and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kovács, Á.M. Belief Files in Theory of Mind Reasoning. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 509–527 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0236-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0236-5