Does the Neurotypical Human Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?

The notion of theory of mind, now commonly called ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, was originally put forward in animal psychology (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Shortly after, it was used as a foundational concept in the first ‘cognitive’ version of the social theory of autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Happé & Frith, 2020). The concept is now used across various areas of cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, including psychometrics, developmental psychology, and more (e.g., Apperly, 2012; Saxe, 2010; Schaafsma et al., 2015; Wellman & Liu, 2004). As time has gone on, subtly (and not-so-subtly) different conceptions of theory of mind have proliferated across different research areas. …