Nonverbal components of Theory of Mind in typical and atypical development

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Abstract

To successfully navigate the human social world one needs to realize that behavior is guided by mental states such as goals and beliefs. Humans are highly proficient in using mental states to explain and predict their conspecific’s behavior, which enables adjusting one’s own behavior in online social interactions. Whereas according to recent studies even young infants seem to integrate others’ beliefs into their own behavior, it is unclear what processes contribute to such competencies and how they may develop. Here we analyze a set of possible nonverbal components of theory of mind that may be involved in taking into account others’ mental states, and discuss findings from typical and atypical development. To track an agent’s belief one needs to (i) pay attention to agents that might be potential belief holders, and identify their focus of attention and their potential belief contents; (ii) keep track of their different experiences and their consequent beliefs, and (iii) to make behavioral predictions based on such beliefs. If an individual fails to predict an agent’s behavior depending on the agent’s beliefs, this may be due to a problem at any stage in the above processes. An analysis of the possible nonverbal processes contributing to belief tracking and their functioning in typical and atypical development aims to provide new insights into the possible mechanisms that make human social interactions uniquely rich.

Section snippets

Identifying potential mental state holders and mental state contents

Theory of Mind traditionally refers to the capacity to ascribe mental states to others with certain contents (e.g. Sally believes her toy is in box A). To form such representations, it is essential to identify (1) who might be a potential mental state holder, and (2) what are the potential mental state contents. Not surprisingly, the potential mental state holders are social agents, and thus a fast identification and special attention to agents also implies special attention to mental state

Representing others’ visual perspective and mental states

So far we have focused on processes that may be involved in detecting aspects of one’s social and physical environment necessary for forming representations about other agents’ mental states. Crucially, whereas the abilities to identify potential mental state holders (agents) and potential mental state contents (e.g. objects or events) are needed to represent certain objects or events as the content of the agent’s mental state and as attributed to the agent, the latter are consequences of a

Mental state representations and their role in social interactions

The ability to represent others’ mental states has various functions from understanding to solving coordination/cooperation problems of varying complexity, and learning to navigate in the social world (Tomasello, 2008). The benefits of being able to ascribe mental states would be restricted if we could not utilize them when interacting with others (Liszkowski, 2013), although these interactions can also be seen as a trigger for belief computation and not only as their ‘output’ or implementation.

Concluding remarks

In the present paper we aimed to analyze specific processes that contribute to successful mentalization. We have focused on processes involved in: (1) identifying potential mental state-holders and mental state contents, (2) representing others’ mental states, (3) using such mental states in interactions; and discussed their functioning in typical and atypical development. We believe that success on the tasks discussed in the last section clearly implies that infants can attribute mental states

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC starting grant (284236-REPCOLLAB).

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