How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind

TLDR

Theoretical work has long assumed that representing others’ perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs directly is necessary to track their mental states. This paper proposes a minimal theory of mind, motivated by recent developmental, cognitive, and comparative findings that suggest alternative, less resource-intensive mechanisms for tracking others’ mental states. The minimal theory of mind successfully accounts for performance on false-belief tasks while avoiding explicit propositional attitude representations, suggesting it underlies mental-state tracking in infants, chimpanzees, scrub‑jays, and cognitively loaded adults.

Abstract

Abstract What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need for other, less obvious possibilities. Our aim is to meet this need by describing the construction of a minimal theory of mind. Minimal theory of mind is rich enough to explain systematic success on tasks held to be acid tests for theory of mind cognition including many false belief tasks. Yet minimal theory of mind does not require representing propositional attitudes, or any other kind of representation, as such. Minimal theory of mind may be what enables those with limited cognitive resources or little conceptual sophistication, such as infants, chimpanzees, scrub‐jays and human adults under load, to track others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs.