Elsevier

Brain Research

Volume 1079, Issue 1, 24 March 2006, Pages 66-75
Brain Research

Research Report
Mentalizing and Marr: An information processing approach to the study of social cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.113Get rights and content

Abstract

To interact successfully, individuals must not only recognize one another as intentional agents driven primarily by internal mental states, but also possess a system for making reliable and useful inferences about the nature of those beliefs, feelings, goals, and dispositions. The ability to make such mental state inferences (i.e., to mentalize or mindread) is the central accomplishment of human social cognition. The present article suggests that our understanding of how humans go about making mental state inferences will benefit from treating social cognition primarily as an information processing system that comprises a set of mechanisms for elaborating more basic social information into an understanding of another's mind. Following Marr's [Marr, D., 1982. Vision. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA] framework for the study of such information processing systems, I suggest that questions about social cognition might profitably be asked at three levels – computation, algorithm, and implementation – and outline a number of ways in which a description of social cognition at the middle level (i.e., the step-by-step processes that give rise to mental state inferences) can be informed by analysis at the other two.

Section snippets

Social cognition and Marr's information processing framework

In this article, I would like to suggest that the answers to these questions can be found in a consideration of social cognition, first and foremost, as an information processing system. An information processing system is one that, generally speaking, takes raw input and subjects it to a series of transformations that render the output more complex or more useful than the original information. For example, computers are classic information processing systems, taking certain kinds of input

Social cognition as unitary or manifold?

In Marr's view, the highest-level question to ask about an information processing system is what that system is for. What is the purpose of the system, what computational problem has it evolved (or is it designed) to solve? Even an initial answer to these questions first requires correctly identifying the computational level at which the system contributes to information processing. For example, although the purpose of vision is clearly to provide a representation of the physical environment

The implementation of social cognition

If Marr's first level of analysis can help frame the questions that researchers ask about the nature of social cognition, analysis at the third level – that of implementation – promises to provide empirical constraints on the answers at which researchers arrive. Although there is no doubt that human information processing is primarily implemented on a single piece of biological hardware – the brain – using our understanding of the “hardware” of social thought to constrain or inspire theories at

Conclusion

Despite its centrality to everyday life, social cognition remains one of the most poorly understood cognitive systems. Exactly how one person ever manages to gain access to another person's mind through mental state inference remains a deep and fascinating question in psychological science. Here, I have suggested that considering social cognition an information processing system – subject to the analysis strategies first laid out by David Marr (1982) – can help highlight the approaches that

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the many helpful comments provided by Hedy Kober, Kevin Ochsner, Yaacov Trope, and an anonymous reviewer.

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