People represent their own mental states more distinctly than others’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Miriam E. Weaverdyck ◽  
Judith Mildner ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Behavioral Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Cues

One can never know the internal workings of another person – one can only infer others’ mental states based on external cues. In contrast, each person has direct access to the contents of their own mind. Here we test the hypothesis that this privileged access shapes the way people represent internal mental experiences, such that they represent their own mental states more distinctly than the states of others. Across four studies, participants considered their own and others’ mental states; analyses measured the distinctiveness of mental state representations. Two neuroimaging studies used representational similarity analyses to demonstrate that the social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one’s own states versus others’. Two behavioral studies support these findings. Further, they demonstrate that people differentiate between states less as social distance increases. Together these results suggest that we represent our own mind with greater granularity than the minds of others.

Mental state dynamics explain the origin of mental state concepts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Milena Rmus ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Artificial Neural Network ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Artificial Neural ◽  
Ebb And Flow

People’s thoughts and feelings ebb and flow in predictable ways: surprise arises quickly, anticipation ramps up slowly, regret follows anger, love begets happiness, and so forth. Predicting these transitions between mental states can help people successfully navigate the social world. We hypothesize that the goal of predicting state dynamics shapes people’ mental state concepts. Across seven studies, when people observed more frequent transitions between a pair of novel mental states, they judged those states to be more conceptually similar to each other. In an eighth study, an artificial neural network trained to predict real human mental state dynamics spontaneously learned the same conceptual dimensions that people use to understand these states: the 3d Mind Model. Together these results suggest that mental state dynamics explain the origins of mental state concepts.

Mind, child’s theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Leslie
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Neurodevelopmental Disorder ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Preschool Period

Knowledge of other minds poses a variety of unusual problems due to the peculiarly private nature of mental states. Some current views, impressed by the contrast between the apparently direct access we have to our own mental states and the inaccessibility of others’ mental states, argue that we understand the mental states of others by imagining that they are our own by ‘simulation’. Other current views propose that we infer both our own mental states and the mental states of others by employing a set of conjectures arrived at through general inductive reasoning over experience: a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Experimental studies, by contrast, suggest that we possess an ‘instinct’ for comprehending the informational mental states of other minds. Children develop mental state concepts uniformly and rapidly in the preschool period when general reasoning powers are limited. For example, children can reason effectively about other people’s beliefs before they can reliably calculate that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In the empirical study of the ‘theory of mind’ instinct there have been three major discoveries so far: first, that normally developing 2-year-olds are able to recognize the informational state of pretending; second, that normally developing children can, by the age of 4 years, solve a variety of false belief problems; and lastly, that this instinct is specifically impaired in children with the neurodevelopmental disorder known as ‘autism’.

scholarly journals Adolescents are delayed at inferring complex social intentions in others, but not basic (false) beliefs: An eye-movement investigation

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (10) ◽  
pp. 1640-1659
Author(s):  
Irine Symeonidou ◽  
Iroise Dumontheil ◽  
Heather J Ferguson ◽  
Richard Breheny
Keyword(s):  
Middle Childhood ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Developmental Differences ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Functional Changes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adolescents And Adults ◽  
Gaze Bias ◽  
The Brain

Most developmental research on Theory of Mind (ToM)—our ability to infer the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others—has focused on the preschool years. This is unsurprising as it was previously thought that ToM skills are developed between the ages of 2 and 7 years. Over the last couple of decades however, studies have provided evidence for significant structural and functional changes in the brain areas involved in ToM (the “social brain”) not only during childhood but also during adolescence. Importantly, some of these findings suggest that the use of ToM shows a prolonged development through middle childhood and adolescence. Although evidence from previous studies suggests a protracted development of ToM, the factors that constrain performance during middle childhood and adolescence are only just beginning to be explored. In this article, we report two visual-world eye-tracking studies that focus on the timecourse of predictive inferences. We establish that when the complexity of ToM inferences are at a level which is comparable with standard change-of-location false-belief tasks, then adolescents and adults generate predictions for other agents’ behaviour in the same timecourse. However, when inferences are socially more complex, requiring inferences about higher order mental states, adolescents generate predictive gaze bias at a marked delay relative to adults. Importantly, our results demonstrate that these developmental differences go beyond differences in executive functions (inhibitory control or working memory) and point to distinct expectations between groups and greater uncertainty when predicting actions based on conflicting desires.

scholarly journals The social brain?

2007 ◽  
Vol 362 (1480) ◽  
pp. 671-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris D Frith
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lesion Studies ◽  
Emotional Value ◽  
Complex Trajectories ◽  
Considerable Support

The notion that there is a ‘social brain’ in humans specialized for social interactions has received considerable support from brain imaging and, to a lesser extent, from lesion studies. Specific roles for the various components of the social brain are beginning to emerge. For example, the amygdala attaches emotional value to faces, enabling us to recognize expressions such as fear and trustworthiness, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus predicts the end point of the complex trajectories created when agents act upon the world. It has proved more difficult to assign a role to medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistently activated when people think about mental states. I suggest that this region may have a special role in the second-order representations needed for communicative acts when we have to represent someone else's representation of our own mental state. These cognitive processes are not specifically social, since they can be applied in other domains. However, these cognitive processes have been driven to ever higher levels of sophistication by the complexities of social interaction.

Mother–child conversation and social understanding in Pakistan

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 496-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumbal Nawaz ◽  
Charlie Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Test Performance ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mental State Language ◽  
Mental State Terms ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
The Mind

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3–5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years old. Study 2 replicated this effect with 35 preschoolers, and also conducted home observations of mother–child interaction at two time points. It tested three competing explanations of the role of adult-conversation in the preschooler’s developing understanding of the mind: the quality of the caregiver’s references to mental states, the child’s grasp of mental state language in such conversations, and the connectedness of adult–child talk. These factors are usually highly correlated in Western cultures. In Pakistan, with a delay in the acquisition of social understanding skills, Study 2 showed that maternal and child references to mental states were rare (2% of maternal and 1% of child utterances). Analyses of the relationship between mother–child conversation and the children’s test performance suggested that the measures of social understanding were not predicted uniquely by the connectedness of talk within the dyad, or maternal use of mental state terms. However, the children’s concurrent (and to a lesser extent previous) use of mental state terms was related to their grasp of mental states. Thus, the data support previous analyses, which suggests that the child’s construction of mental state terms is more crucial in their grasp of the social world.

scholarly journals Subjetividad y privacidad

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (76-77) ◽  
pp. 185-203
Author(s):  
Guillermo Hurtado
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Unified Consciousness ◽  
Traditional Doctrine

The traditional doctrine of the privacy of the mental describes our mental lives as corridors without doors or windows. According to this view a mental state is private if: (1) one and only one person has direct access to that mental state, and (2) that person is the authority with respect to the content and character of such a mental state (i.e., has an incorregible and infallible knowledge of it). (2) has been rejected on the basis of externalist arguments concerning the nature of mental content. However, very few have put (1) into doubt. The purpose of this essay is to claim that (1) is not a necessary feature of our mental lives. Hence the traditional doctrine of the privacy of the mental must be rejected not only for being grounded on a false conception of mental content, but also for being grounded on a false conception of the nature of subjectivity. My argument is based on a Parfitian conception of persons and on a metaphysical distinction between persons and subjects of consciousness. I claim that if a momentary fusion of the streams of consciousness of two people is possible, the mental states that occur in that unified consciousness will be mental states of those two people —even if there is only one subject of consciousness involved. Hence, we can conclude that if two people can have the same mental state, they will also have the same direct access to that mental state. Finally, I suggest that the rejection of (1) —and hence of the view of mental life as a corridor— should be welcomed as liberating.

Exploring the Social Brain in Schizophrenia: Left Prefrontal Underactivation During Mental State Attribution

2000 ◽  
Vol 157 (12) ◽  
pp. 2040-2042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara A. Russell ◽  
Katya Rubia ◽  
Edward T. Bullmore ◽  
W. Soni ◽  
John Suckling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals The Social Brain Automatically Predicts Others' Future Mental States

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Thornton ◽  
Miriam E. Weaverdyck ◽  
Diana I. Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
The Social

People represent mental states in terms of rationality, social impact, and valence: Validating the 3d Mind Model

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Large Set ◽  
State Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Explanatory Account

Humans can experience a wide variety of different thoughts and feelings in the course of everyday life. To successfully navigate the social world, people need to perceive, understand, and predict others’ mental states. Previous research suggests that people use three dimensions to represent mental states: rationality, social impact, and valence. This 3d Mind Model allows people to efficiently “see” the state of another person’s mind by considering whether that state is rational or emotional, more or less socially impactful, and positive or negative. In the current investigation, we validate this model using neural, behavioral, and linguistic evidence. First, we examine the robustness of the 3d Mind Model by conducting a mega-analysis of four fMRI studies in which participants considered others’ mental states. We find evidence that rationality, social impact, and valence each contribute to explaining the neural representation of mental states. Second, we test whether the 3d Mind Model offers the optimal combination of dimensions for describing neural representations of mental state. Results reveal that the 3d Mind Model achieve the best performance among a large set of candidate dimensions. Indeed, it offers a highly explanatory account of mental state representation, explaining over 80% of reliable neural variance. Finally, we demonstrate that all three dimensions of the model likewise capture convergent behavioral and linguistic measures of mental state representation. Together, these findings provide strong support for the 3d Mind Model, indicating that is it is a robust and generalizable account of how people think about mental states.

Distinct Neural Systems Involved in Agency and Animacy Detection

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1911-1920 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ida Gobbini ◽  
Claudio Gentili ◽  
Emiliano Ricciardi ◽  
Claudia Bellucci ◽  
Pericle Salvini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mirror Neuron System ◽  
Temporal Cortex ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Systems ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
Evoked Activity ◽  
Human Faces

We designed an fMRI experiment comparing perception of human faces and robotic faces producing emotional expressions. The purpose of our experiment was to investigate engagement of different parts of the social brain by viewing these animate and inanimate agents. Both human and robotic face expressions evoked activity in face-responsive regions in the fusiform gyrus and STS and in the putative human mirror neuron system. These results suggest that these areas mediate perception of agency, independently of whether the agents are living or not. By contrast, the human faces evoked stronger activity than did robotic faces in the medial pFC and the anterior temporal cortex—areas associated with the representation of others' mental states (theory of mind), whereas robotic faces evoked stronger activity in areas associated with perception of objects and mechanical movements. Our data demonstrate that the representation of the distinction between animate and inanimate agents involves areas that participate in attribution of mental stance.

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