Understanding Theory of Mind: Beliefs, Intents, and Mental States, Slides of Philosophy of mind

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Theory of Mind (ToM)

Read: Wikipedia article on Theory

of Mind

ToM: interpersonal

understanding of mental states

• Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states--beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.--to oneself and others.
• It enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of--and thus be used to explain and predict--others’ behavior.
• One must be able to conceive of the mind as a “generator of representations” and to understand that others’ mental representations of the world do not necessarily reflect reality and can be different from one’s own.
• It is a ‘theory’ of mind in that such representations are not “directly observable”.
• Many other human abilities--from skillful social interaction to language use--are said to involve a theory of mind.

Smarties (appearance-reality)

task

• Experimenters ask children what they believe to be the contents of a box that looks as though it holds a candy called “Smarties.”
• After the child guesses (usually) “Smarties”, each is shown that the box in fact contained pencils.
• The experimenter then re-closes the box and asks the child what she thinks another person, who has not been shown the true contents of the box, will think is inside.
• The child fails the task if she responds that another person will think that the box contains pencils.
• Gopnik & Astington (1988) found that children pass this test at age four or five years.

Matsui et al. 2006

• Matsui, Tomoko, Taeko Yamamoto, Peter McCagg. 2006. “On the role of language in children’s early understanding of others as epistemic beings.” Cognitive Development 21.158-173.

• Japanese epistemic modality:

• Certainty:
  • Particles: yo vs. kana
  • Verbs: shitteru (‘know’) vs. omou (‘think’)
• Evidentiality
  • Particles: yo vs. tte
  • Verbs: miru (‘see’) vs. kiku (‘hear that’)

• Corpus study: Tai, 1;5-3;

Procedure

• Child watches an animation of of a thief ambiguously

hiding four different objects in four separate

containers.

• “Let’s ask the rabbit and the frog where the car is.”
• Rabbit: “the one the car is in is in the red box dayo .”
• Frog: “the one the car is in is in the blue box kana .”
• “Which container is the car in”
• Child is “correct” if he or she picks the red box (adults

do this).

• Modality study:
  • Evidentiality contrasts were significantly more

difficult than certainty contrasts.

• Verb contrasts were significantly more difficult

than particle contrasts.

• Children also did Sally-Anne and Smarties tasks. - The comprehension of epistemic modality

conveyed by verbs ( know-think , see-hear )

significantly relates to whether or not children pass

the false-belief tasks.

• Comprehension of modality as conveyed through

particles has no significant relation with false-belief

understanding.

Discussion

• Early understanding of the particles provides important information about children’s understanding of other’s epistemic mental states in general.
• Passing false-belief tasks involves explicit representational theory of mind.
• It has been reported that children who fail false-belief tasks do show procedural, unconscious grasp of another’s mind.
• Japanese 3-year old’s understanding of other’s knowledge states may similarly be of an implicit kind, though the concept of implicit understanding itself requires further clarification.
• A consistent, working understanding of knowledge states precedes fully representational understandings of (false) beliefs.
• The early working understanding of others as epistemic beings is deeply situated in frequent, continuous, and largely verbal

interaction.