ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity

“, Leslie & Keeble, 1987 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007) or naive psychology (e.g., Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009; Csibra, Gergely, Bíró, Koós, & Brockbank, 1999; Leslie, 1994; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007).”

“This has been theorized to be among the first elements present in children’s reasoning about human behavior, preceding an understanding of beliefs and other cognitive processes (Poulin-Dubois and Schultz, 1988; Premack, 1990; Wellman, 1992; Leslie, 1993).”

“Both modular accounts (e.g., Leslie, 1994) and simulation accounts (e.g., Harris, 1992) claim that preschool children equally understand beliefs and desires; it is false belief that is peculiarly and distinctively difficult.”

“that allow humans to correctly attribute beliefs, goals, perceptions, feelings, and desires to the self and to others (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994).”

“In the light of its apparent evolutionary advantages, it is plausible that mentalising is performed by an innately determined cognitive mechanism (Leslie, 1987, 1994; Leslie & Roth, 1993).”

“Another class of stimulus properties that differentiate agents from physical objects is their involvement in "causation at a distance" (Leslie, 1994; Mandler, 1992): their behavior can be affected by”

“, Fodor , 1992 ; Leslie , 1994a ; Leslie , German , & Polizzi , 2005 ; Luo & Baillargeon , 2007 ; Onishi & Baillargeon , 2005 ; Scott & Baillargeon , 2008 ; Surian et al .”

“According to Leslie (1987, 1994), the maturation of a modular theory-of-mind mechanism, ToMM2 (see the “Theories of Development” section), permits the 18- to 24-month-old to engage in pretend play and to understand as pretense the pretend actions of others.”

“…1995; Leslie, 1994; Scholl & Leslie, 1999); spatial orientation (Hermer & Spelke, 1996); number (Dehaene & Cohen, 1995); intuitive mechanics (Leslie, 1994; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson , 1992); fear, disgust, jealousy, and other emotion systems (Buss, 1992; O ¨ hman & Mineka,…”

“Plausible candidates for such conceptual modules might include a naïve physics system (Baillargeon 1995; Leslie 1994; Spelke 1994; Spelke et al. 1995), a naïve psychology or “mind-reading” system (Baron-Cohen 1995; Carey 1985; Leslie 1994), a folk-biology system (Atran 1990; 1998; 2002), an…”

“…to which objects ®rst have to be perceptually categorised as persons (Meltzoff, 1995; Meltzoff & Moore, 1995), animates (Mandler, 1992), or agents (Premack, 1990; Mandler, 1992; Baron- Cohen, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Gergely et al., 1995) before their behaviour can be interpreted in terms of goals.”

“And, as usual, there are various proposals to the effect that this beliefdesire psychology is an innate component of the human mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994; Fodor, 1992).”

“10 As far as we know, no prior research has posited a moral responsibility module, but there has been considerable enthusiasm for the more general idea that many basic cognitive capacities are driven by modules (Fodor 1983; Leslie 1994), and a number of authors have suggested that certain aspects of moral judgment mig…”

“As Leslie (1994b) has put it: If one takes a 'child-as-scientist' view and pictures the child as an ordinary everyday scientist, working hard to contribute additional phenomena to an existing theoretical framework, then of course one addresses the nature of that original framework [i. e. 'early…”

“…and universal age-related changes in children’s concepts of mind, and so development was seen as essentially a maturational process, with children’s social environments having no more than a triggering role (Leslie, 1994) (but see Astington (1996) and Dunn (1996) for early exceptions to this view).”

“Evidence for ToMM usually places its onset at about 3 years of age (Leslie, 1987, 1994a).”

“By 3- or 4- years of age, children’s ‘naive psychology’ is such that they can competently explain others’ behavior in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires (e.g. Gopnik and Astington, 1988; Bartsch and Wellman, 1989; Leslie, 1994).”

“Leslie (1987, 1994) has argued that the ability to understand pretense and the ability to understand false belief and other mental states are mediated by a common, early-maturing theory-ofmind module.”

“This developmental deviance in ToM may have its earlier roots in the faulty development of earlier perceptual, cognitive, and social-emotional modules that are required for the development of ToM as suggested by researchers adhering to modularity theories (Baron-Cohen, 1994, 1995; Baron-Cohen & Ring, 1994; Leslie, 199…”

“These include the theory of mind system (e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995, Leslie et al. 2004, Onishi & Baillargeon 2005, Saxe & Powell 2006), intuitive physics (e.g., Spelke 1990, Leslie 1994), and folk biology (Medin & Atran 1999, Barrett 2005, Mahon & Caramazza 2009).”

“According to Leslie (1984, 1988, 1994, 1995), infants are born with a three-part theory of Agency, each of which activates the other, whereby different brain mechanisms process, in turn, the mechanical, intentional, and cognitive properties of agents.”

“Both of these feed a shared attention module which in turn feed a Theory of Mind module that represents intentional knowledge or " epistemic mental states " of other agents.”

“Understanding (intentional) agency and non-agentive (causal) events are two fundamental aspects of human cognition (Baron-Cohen, 1997; Leslie, 1994; Premack, 1995; Tomasello, 1999).”

“…like adults, perceive mechanical causality directly when the spatiotemporal conditions for Michotte's launching events are met (Michotte 1963, Leslie 1988, Oakes 1994), and it is exactly this sort of contact causality that is inferred in the hidden events of the Ball studies cited above…”

“Premack (1990) explicitly hypothesized that human infants would attribute goals only to self-propelled objects, and this idea was built into Leslie’s tripartite theory of agency (Leslie, 1994).”

“…suggests that there are separate inference systems for reasoning about objects (Baillargeon, 1986; Spelke, 1990), physical causality (Brown, 1990; Leslie, 1994; Leslie & Keeble, 1987; Talmy, 1988), number (Gallistel & Gelman, 1992; Wynn, 1992, 1995), the biological world (Atran, 1990; Gutheil et…”

“…other researchers, we assume that infants are born with a psychological-reasoning system that provides them with a shallow causal framework for interpreting the intentional actions of agents (e.g., Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Johnson, 2005; Leslie, 1994; Premack & Premack, 1995; Surian et al., 2007).”

“In this kind of second-person interaction two-year-olds are even capable of recognizing pretend behavior, for example, the mother pretending the banana is a telephone (Leslie 1994).”

“In contrast, modularity theorists such as Leslie (1994) argue that young children are not acquiring a theory about mental representations at all.”

“This automatic process — associated with the Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) — attributes to the agent relevant beliefs and desires (Leslie, 1987b, 1991, 1994a; for a recent review, see Leslie, 2000b).”

“However, as a number of authors have pointed out, to understand ''he wants a sandwich'' requires understanding the implicit propositional object in ''he wants that he eat a sandwich'' (e.g., Leslie, 1994; Nichols & Stich, 2003).”

“Admittedly, some believed that mindreading competence is present much earlier (within a few months of birth), but that this is masked by the processing demands of the tasks used by experimenters (Leslie, 1994; Leslie and Polizzi, 1998).”

“Similarly, aspects of children’s understanding of social functioning has been hypothesized to be modular in nature (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994).”

“…fact, several theorists proposed various versions of the idea that this precocious ability reflects the first step towards the development of a fully-fledged " theory of mind " (attention-goal psychology: Baron-Cohen, 1993; teleological stance: Csibra & Gergely, 1998a; ToMM system 1: Leslie, 1994).”

“Such studies highlight the potential importance of autism for asking questions about the core architecture of human cognition (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, Morton, & Leslie, 1991; Leslie, 1994).”

“Is it available early, perhaps even in late infancy, as is the physical stance and the intentional stance (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1995; Leslie, 1994 )? Or is it available only later, as is the case for some framework theories such as vitalist biology (Carey, 1985; Inagaki & Hatano, 1996;…”

“…theoretical option that have been invoked in order to explain a wide range of cognitive phenomena, including our grammatical competence (Pinker, 1994) our ability to reason about the behavior of physical objects (Carey and Spelke, 1994) and our folk psychological capacities (Leslie, 1994).”

“This initial evidence, paired with the results reviewed in the preceding section and additional findings on infants’ expectations about self-propelled objects and animals (e.g., Baillargeon et al. 2009; Leslie 1994; Luo et al. 2009; Newman et al. 2008; Setoh et al. 2013), suggests three conclusions.”

“These are signature properties of any core representational system (see Carey and Spelke, 1994, 1996; Leslie, 1994; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber and Jacobson, 1992, for characterizations of core knowledge).”

“According to some theorists, specialized developmental mechanisms that are in place at birth (Baron-Cohen, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Premack, 1990) allow infants to interpret actions as goal directed very early in life.”

“Such a core representational problem might manifest as a result of direct disruption to mechanisms that produce mental state representations (Leslie, 1987, 1994b, 2000; Leslie, & Roth, 1993) and/or as a result of disrupted input to such mechanisms on account of social-attention problems earlier in…”

“Although some developmentalists have proposed that young infants also have concepts of causality (Leslie, 1994 ) or energy (Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009 ), the extant data can more simply be explained solely in terms of conceptualizing motion of objects through space (see Mandler, 2012 , for…”

“It is possible, therefore, that causal knowledge is accurate not because of general mechanisms designed to infer causal structure from evidence but because of specialized core systems that evolved for information-processing tasks particular to each domain (Leslie, 1994).”

“To reason correctly about such states, children must be able to hold in mind two distinct versions of the setting: one that corresponds to reality (as they construe it), and one that is decoupled from reality and corresponds to the agent’s representation (e.g., Leslie, 1994a).”

“Part of this knowledge can be characterized as core knowledge in that children learn it without instruction, it provides a basis for further development, and it is based on domain specialized learning mechanisms (modules) about ecologically important entities and events (Carey, 1996; Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 2000).”

“On this view, certain cognitive abilities are indeed implemented by modular central systems, for example, our theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994).”

“…p er so na l u se o f t he in di vi du al u se r a nd is n ot to b e di ss em in at ed b ro ad ly . mind-reading abilities (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, 1991; Happé & Frith, 1995; Leekam & Perner, 1990; Leslie, 1991, 1994; Swettenham, Baron-Cohen, Gomez, & Walsh, 1996; but see Frith & Happé, 1995).”