Theory of mind, the attribution of mental states to others is one form of social cognition. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of another, much simpler, form of social cognition, which I call vicarious representation. Vicarious representation is the attribution of other-centered properties to objects. This mental capacity is different from, and much simpler than, theory of mind as it does not imply the understanding (or representation) of the mental (or even perceptual) states of another agents. (...) I argue that the most convincing experiments that are supposed to show that non-human primates have theory of mind in fact demonstrate that they are capable of vicarious representation. The same is true for the experiments about the theory of mind of infants under 12 months. (shrink)

The attempts to make moral and evolution compatible have assimilated moral capacity either with complex self-control in favour of one’s own goals or with spontaneous altruism. Those attempts face an easy problem, since those two senses of moral are adaptively advantageous resources. But let us focus on the decisions made in favour of another person which the subject, when making them, feels are contrary to his own goals: Could a base for this capacity arise in evolution, however poor and weak? (...) I propose that such base, while it is not an adaptive advantage but quite the opposite, arises from the convergence between two abilities which in their respective origins were adaptively very advantageous: the advanced mode of ‘theory-of-mind’ (ToM) and inner speech. (shrink)

Research on the development of Theory of Mind has often focused predominantly on belief attribution, but recently moves have been made to include also other mental states. This includes especially factive mental states like knowledge, where factive Theory of Mind may turn out to be more basic than non-factive Theory of Mind. I argue that children’s early pretend play also carries important implications for Theory of Mind research. Although pretend play does not directly provide evidence of Theory of Mind in (...) young children, it provides evidence of an early ability to handle inconsistent representations, although this ability to access these inconsistent representations may be contingent on external support. Dealing with inconsistent representations is arguably an important component of non-factive Theory of Mind and underlies belief attribution. This carries important implications for debates in Theory of Mind, especially concerning the relationship between factive and non-factive Theory of Mind. I also consider to what extent the findings from pretend play can be extended to support and illuminate the findings from the implicit false belief task. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

Recent studies have identified two important findings on infants’ capability of taking others’ perspectives and the difficulty of ignoring perspectives irrelevant to the acquired perspective. Unfortunately, there is insufficient consensus on the interpretation of these phenomena. Two important features of perspective-taking, embodiment and aging, should be considered to reach a more appropriate hypothesis. In this paper, the mechanism of perspective-taking can be redefined through the well-known process of self–other distinction, which is inherent to humans, without resorting to either the assumption (...) of controversial systems or an excessive reduction to executive functions. Therefore, it is hypothesized that the implicit mentalizing observed in infancy comes from the loosening phenomenon and lasts lifelong and that the self-representation separated from one’s own body by the detachment function is sent to other perspectives for explicit perspective-taking. This hypothesis can not only explain both the robustness of perspective-taking in the older adults and the appearance of egocentric/altercentric bias in adults but also is consistent with the findings in brain science and neuropathology. Finally, some issues to be considered are presented to improve the validity of this hypothesis. (shrink)

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature theory of mind implies the understanding that mental states are person-specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as (...) person-specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent—they did not perceive beliefs as person-specific. These findings indicate that infants’ understanding of beliefs is not as sophisticated as the rich mentalistic view suggests. (shrink)