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

“1986; Leslie, 1988, 1994; Shepard, 1984; Spelke, 1988, 1990; Talmy, 1988).”

“This finding supports theoretical accounts that highlight the innate nature of early ToM development (e.g., BaronCohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994).”

“The experimental data shows that adolescents and adults with autism, even with IQs within normal range, have considerable difficulty passing false belief tasks—tasks that are routinely passed by normal 4-year-old subjects (Leslie and Frith [1988]).”

“A growing developmental literature now provides considerable insight into how knowledge of causation develops (Baillargeon, 2002; Cohen & Oakes, 1993; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Leslie, 1995).”

“Theories of how children develop a theory of mind exemplify this (Gopnik, 1993; Harris, 1995; Leslie, 1994a).”

“Teleological causality is causality that occurs in the pursuit of goals and can occur across distances and time (Carey, 1985; Keil, 1995; Leslie, 1994, 1995).”

“This idea has been incorporated into several theories of infant development (Mandler 1992; Baron-Cohen 1994; Carey & Spelke 1994; Leslie 1994) and was originally one of the hypotheses that inspired our studies (Gergely et al.”

“Many developmentalists agree that infants build mental representations of the physical events that they observe (e.g., Baillargeon, 1998; Leslie, 1994; Mandler, 1997; Spelke, 1994; Xu & Carey, 1996).”

“They also exhibit more cues that elicit perceptions of interacting with a fully fledged rational agent with its own mental states goals 31 , such as self-propelled motion 69 , less regular motion kinematics 73 , contingent reactivity at a distance 74 and optimal motion paths 75,76 .”

“Given the importance of anticipating agents’ behavior, it is not surprising that a strong cue to the presence of mind is the appearance of self-propelled movement ( Leslie, 1994; Premack, 1990).”

“In the present context, proximate mechanisms should be conceived as evolved devices that underpin infants’ emerging ability to reason about agents and actions (Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Leslie, 1994).”

“…domains of cognition that are clearly evident by ages 4 or 5, and which may be innately differentiated (on folkbiology see Atran 1987, Keil 1989, Gelman & Wellman 1991, Hatano & Inagaki 1994; on folkpsychology see Wimmer & Perner 1983, Leslie 1994, Baron-Cohen 1995, Barrett et al. in press).”

“By ‘‘causal agent,’’ we mean the entity that is the purveyor of causal force, the source of motion or change, in an interaction (Leslie, 1994).”

“The earliest knowledge of artifact function is likely based on integration of information from different core knowledge systems specialized for reasoning about (a) objects’ mechanical properties and (b) the goals of the agents that use objects ( Leslie, 1994 ).”

“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.”

“Thus, some researchers have suggested that children’s naive theories might be generated by domain-specific modules ( Leslie, 1994; Scholl & Leslie, 1999) or innate concepts in core domains (Carey & Spelke, 1994; Keil, 1995), whereas other researchers have focused on children’s ability to learn causal relations from st…”

“Sperber (1994), Leslie (1994), and Keil (1994) provide a view of cognitive architecture that is consistent with this suggestion.”

“Indeed, some of the most prominent theorists of folk psychology maintain that vital parts of folk psychology are innate (e.g. Fodor, 1992; Leslie, 1994).”

“…systems for these two domains: a mind-reading system for inferring the mental states of people (which can be selectively impaired in autism; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) and an object mechanics system for understanding the interactions of inanimate objects (Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 1990).”

“Although there were always critics, and alternative views (Leslie, 1994; Bloom&German, 2000), the data suggested a fairly coherent and cumulative scientific picture of the child's developing “theory of mind”: an earlier stage when preschoolers understood others' perceptions and desires, followed by…”

“The failure of the young children was not due to their lack of some domain-general abili y to reason causally, for there is convinci g vidence that they understand causatio within the cognitive domains of psychology and mechanical physics (e.g., Carey & Spelke, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Wellman & Gelman, 1992).”

“Indeed, one could argue that ‘core’ conceptual systems (e.g. agency, Leslie, 1994; object mechanics, Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992; and number, Wynn, 1998) ought to promote action and problem solution, not just the mere contemplation of knowledge for its own sake (see e.g.…”

“Experiments focusing on motivational states have revealed that even young infants can attribute dispositions and goals to others (e.g., Csibra, 2008; Csibra, Gergely, Bı́ró, Koós, & Brockbank, 1999; Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Johnson, Ok, & Luo, 2007; Kamerawi, Kato, Kanda, Ishiguro, & Hiraki, 2005; Luo & Baillarg…”

“…the infant’s ability to recognize pretending in other people and to share pretense with play partners (e.g., Bosco, Friedman, & Leslie, 2006; Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993; Harris, Kavanaugh, & Dowson, 1997; Leslie, 1988, 1994a; Walker-Andrews & Harris, 1993; Walker-Andrews & Kahana-Kalman, 1999).”

“…argues that, from early in life, children do have the ability to construe the world in different ways, based on a set of intuitive framework theories (e.g., Carey, 1985; Gelman and Wellman, 1991; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997; Keil, 1989, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Murphy and Medin, 1985; Prasada, 2000).”

“For example, Leslie (1994) attempted to explain infants’ understanding of physical objects (or mechanical agency) in terms of a theory of body mechanism (ToBy); Blair (1995) suggested that psychopaths fail to inhibit violence because they lack violence inhibition mechanisms (VIMs); and, in addition…”

“Leslie (1994) thought that it is necessary to have separate innate modules to handle causality, animacy, and theory of mind.”

“This collection of mechanisms has been labeled the Theory of Mind Module (ToMM) by Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995).”

“Notable progress has been made in describing development in intuitive mechanics, psychology (theory of mind), biology, cosmology, and theory of matter (Au, 1994; Carey, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1995; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Hatano & Inagaki, 1994; Keil, 1989, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Perner, 1991; Spelke, 1991; Vosniadu & Brewer,…”

“Some theorists (Fodor 1983; Leslie 1994, 1995; BaronCohen 1995; Carey & Spelke 1996; Johnson 2000; Scholl & Tremoulet 2000) have suggested that the selective use of low-level spatio-temporal information of the sort epitomized in temporally contingent interactions and facial configurations is…”

“More generally, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the hypothesis that infants endow selfpropelled objects with an internal source of energy (e.g., Gelman, 1990; Gelman et al., 1995; Leslie, 1994; Leslie, 1995).”

“…systems specialized for identifying intentional agents and/or for representing and interpreting actions as goal-directed (e.g., BaronCohen, 1994; Csibra & Gergely, 1998; Gergely & Csibra, 1997, 2003; Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998; Leslie, 1994, 1995; Premack, 1990; Premack & Premack, 1995).”

“According to Leslie (1994), they are “actional agents.””

“…be functional early, and independently of later flexible perspective representation, whereas rich accounts of infants’ reasoning about perspectives (Leslie, 1994, 1995; Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004; Luo & Baillargeon, 2010) would predict conceptual coherence with later explicit…”

“Agents, for our purposes, are objects capable of acting in a goal-directed fashion (Leslie, 1994).”

“Numerous experiments suggest that there are domain-specific systems of knowledge for physics and psychology that are set in gear by theory-like algorithms (Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 1994; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997).”

“The 12-month-old infants in Experiment 3 looked reliably longer at the short- than at the tall-cover event, but those in Experiment 3A looked about equally at the two events. These results suggest that the infants (1) realized that the short object could be hidden under either cover, and that the tall object could be…”

“These include a module for reasoning about rigid object mechanics (Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 1990), sometimes called ToBy.”

“We interpret others’ behavior by referring to their mental states such as goals, dispositions (e.g., preferences), perceptions, and beliefs (e.g., Carey & Spelke, 1994; Leslie, 1994; Premack & Premack, 1995; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005; Wellman, 1991).”

“…mental states to others and predicting others’ behavior (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Bartsch and Wellman, 1995; Currie and Ravenscroft, forthcoming; Goldman, 1989; Gopnik and Wellman, 1994; Gordon, 1986; Harris, 1992; Leslie, 1994; Nichols and Stich, forthcoming; Stich and Nichols, 1992).”

“Drawing from the models of Baron-Cohen (1995) and Leslie (1994), a novel architecture called embodied theory of mind was developed to link high-level cognitive skills to the low-level perceptual abilities of a humanoid robot.”

“Other researchers have focused on infants’ reasoning about specific types of physical events such as occlusion and support, and how infants perceive the causal relations among objects (see Baillargeon, 1994, 1995; Leslie, 1994 for reviews).”

“…input, one unitary mentalizing mechanism (Carruthers, 2009) or a set of other-centric or target-agnostic mentalizing mechanisms (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994) are necessarily ill-equipped for handling qualitatively different types of information available for self-referential processing, such…”

“The ToM theory suggests that the deficit in pretend play seen in autism is a result of a deficit in the functioning of the metarepresentational aspect of the ToMM (see Leslie, 1987, 1994 ).”

“The proposition is ‘‘decoupled’’ from typical input – output relations so as to avoid confusion with ‘‘primary’’ representations of the real world (see Leslie, 1994b, for further discussion).”

“…is not caused by selective damage to a domain-specific mentalising module (such as the Theory-of-Mind-Mechanism of Leslie and colleagues: Leslie, 1994a,b; Leslie & Roth, 1993; Leslie & Thaiss, 1992), but is instead caused by general difficulty entertaining any state of affairs that runs…”

“…depends on the development and on-line capacity of a cognitive mechanism dedicated to representing epistemic mental states (beliefs and intentions rather than percepts and emotions) and that this cognitive mechanism fails to develop normally in autism (see, e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994).”

“And where ToMM employs M-Representations 1 (Leslie 1995) of the form Agent-attitude-proposition (e.g., Mother – believes -Johnny – took-the -cookie), TESS employs a new class of representations, which we can all E- Representations 2 of the form Self-Affective state-[Self-Affective…”

“By contrast, several psychologists laudably avoid inferring directly from attribution of action to attribution of mentality (Gergely et al. 1995; Leslie, 1994; Woodward, 1998).”

“In addition, the human mind seems to be innately prepared to learn to seek agency in animate objects (i.e., other humans—e.g., Leslie, 1994; Wellman, 1990).”