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

“Leslie (6) argued that the “ToM mechanism” is domain specific, employs a proprietary representational system, and forms the basis for acquiring a ToM.”

“Leslie (1994, 1995) and Scholl and Tremoulet (2000) saw perceptual causality as modular, whereas Schlottmann (2000) argued that there is no evidence for encapsulation.”

“between agents and non-agents ( Leslie, 1994 ), and this distinction is evident in”

“Mentalizing involves processes at a number of levels, from relatively automatic perceptual processes, such as biological motion perception, to higher-level conceptual processes, such as understanding others’ intentions and emotions (Leslie, 1994 ; Blakemore & Decety, 2001).”

“In a comparable but more detailed account, Leslie (1994, 1995) proposed that infants have modular systems that process properties of objects that he calls Agents; such properties include the ability to move from an internal source of energy, act on goals, and understand the minds of others.”

“Agency succeeds through domain-specific learning: Leslie (1994) showed this effect for early childhood.”

“For an alternate approach, see Scassellati[2] who implemented a hybrid model of work by Leslie[3] and Baron-Cohen[4] where joint attention is viewed to be a critical precursor to the theory of mind competence.”

“Functional response to intentional stimulus may be another important kind of cue: for example, following eye gaze, looking in response to pointing, running in response to chasing, and so on (Gelman & Spelke, 1981; Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1995; Leslie, 1994; Mandler, 1992).”

“…& Adams, 1997; Silverman & Eals, 1992), language (Pinker, 1994; Pinker & Bloom, 1990), number (Dehaene & Cohen, 1995), and intuitive mechanics (Leslie, 1994; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992), as well as for the existence of functionally specialized food avoidance mechanisms in…”

“Stemming from this framework, one possibility is that ToMM is not modular as Leslie proposes (Leslie & Thaiss, 1992; Leslie & Roth, 1993; Leslie, 1994), but depends on what DeLoache calls a capacity for “dual orientation.”

“In line with others (Premack 1990; Leslie 1994, 1995), Biro and Leslie (2007) proposed a cue-based bootstrapping model as describing the theoretical origin of infants’ interpretation of goal-directed actions.”

“…modules, as defined by Fodor (1983), is no longer useful – at least, not with respect to the developing brain, despite the fact that it has been a very popular explanatory concept with some developmental psychologists (Hermer & Spelke, 1996; Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 2000; Wellman & Gelman, 1998).”

“A core concept theory is espoused by a number of developmental psychologists (Carey, 1991; Leslie, 1994; Spelke & Newport, 1998) as being most consistent with the data from developmental psychology.”

“Research indicates that mindreading involves several different capacities, with different developmental trajectories (e.g., Leslie, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 2005).”

“This has been dubbed a theory of mind mechanism (ToMM) (Leslie, 1995).”

“An intriguing proposal is that domain-specific mechanisms are in fact modular ways of reasoning (e.g., Atran, 1990; Carey & Spelke, 1994; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Leslie, 1994).”

“For 6-month-olds, whose conceptual repertoire is small, essential content may be limited to core-knowledge concepts such as object and agent (cf. Carey, 2009; Leslie, 1994; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992).”

“Leslie and Keeble (1987) examined causal perception in 6-month old infants. They suggested that reversing the temporal order of a display (i.e., reversing the film) could change the causal properties and the spatiotemporal properties of that display. For a launching effect stimulus, the causal direction (i.e., in the…”

“Traditionally the theory theory approach (e.g., Gopnik and Wellman, 1994) has emphasized the third-person observation of the activity of the agents and the construction or maturational unfolding (e.g., Leslie, 1994) of a conceptual system that is used to explain and predict such behavior.”

“One object property, besides function, to which infants are particularly sensitive are the mechanical properties of objects (e.g., Baillargeon, 1998; Leslie, 1994).”

“But independent of the extent to which we have core knowledge of basic causal principles (e.g., Carey, 2009; Leslie, 1994; Setoh, Wu, Baillargeon, & Gelman, 2013; Spelke, 1990), we surely are not born with specific causal knowledge about particular social conventions (e.g., waiting in line),…”

“These results have led some to conclude that the representational resources to express a representational ToM are manifest in infancy and immutable throughout development (e.g., Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Leslie, 1994; Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004).”

“Finally, pretend play has been proposed as an early manifestation of children's capacity for meta-representation (Leslie, 1987 , 1994 ).”

“eral authors make a conceptual distinction between the two and hypothesize distinct systems for dealing with them (Leslie, 1994).”

“This only requires a primitive recognition of agency, a capability that, according to the relevant literature, can be safely ascribed to infants not older than a few weeks (Leslie, 1994; Premack, 1990).”

“Thus, infant ability to track individuals’ mental states in infant ‘‘false belief” tasks is typically taken as evidence that such early implicit theory-of-mind representations are innate (Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Leslie, 1994).”

“Baron-Cohen et al (1985), Leslie (1987, 1994), and Scholl and Leslie (2001) hypothesize an innate mechanism that allows for 'second-order' representations – representations, e.g., of the mental representations of other people.”

“( Leslie, 1995 ) captures this distinction by proposing two indepedent modules are part of”

“…system that guides from the beginning their interpretation of agents’ intentional actions (e.g., BaronCohen, 1995; Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Gergely et al., 1995; Johnson, 2003; Leslie, 1994, 1995; Luo & Baillargeon, 2005a; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Premack, 1990; Premack & Premack, 1995).”

“The distinction has important consequences on behaviour, for example: the cognitive strategies that humans use to explain and predict the movements of moving objects change depending on whether they think the moving object is animate or not (Dennett, 1978; Leslie, 1994).”

“…limbs (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Carey & Spelke, 1996; Guajardo & Woodward, 2004); (2) biological motion, such as self-propelled motion (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1994, 1995; Premack, 1990), non-rigid transformation (Gibson, Owsley, & Johnston, 1978), and the ability to react contingently and…”

“A final assumption is that nonphysical causation is in some way modeled after physical causation ( Leslie, 1994; Talmy, 1988).”

“…/ knowledge–ignorance psychology is earlier to emerge in childhood than false-belief psychology, no matter whether the theorists in question are general-learning theorists (Wellman, 1990; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) or modularists (Leslie, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Song and Baillargeon, 2008).”

“Leslie (1994) has discussed how infants might represent the way object geometries affect the transmission of contact-mechanical forces.”

“Leslie, 1994; Spelke, 1994), such as that of continuity: objects exist continuously in time and space, retaining their physical properties as they do so (e.g.”

“…that humans start out with a preconfigured system with internal rules (Perner, 2010) or representational capacities (Baillargeon et al., 2010; Leslie, 1994), or that the system consists of abstract ToM concepts developing one after another until a full ToM has emerged (e.g., Wellman & Liu,…”

“Baron-Cohen (1995), for example, has claimed that a fully functioning ToMM (Theory of Mind Mechanism: Leslie, 1994b) would be identifiable around the fourth year of age, as the final step of a developmental sequence which would include the successive activation of several precursors: first, an innate intentional detector…”

“…gs fo rs ch un g] a t 0 7: 06 0 2 Se pt em be r 20 15 330 COMMENTARIES development (e.g. Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Goldstein & Weber, in press; Leslie, 1994; Premack & Premack, 1994; Sperber, 1994; Todd & Miller, 1993) and from selective impairments following brain damage (e.g. Carammo,…”

“bra, 2003; Leslie, 1994; Luo & Baillargeon, in review; Premack & Premack, 1995; Song, Onishi, Baillargeon, & Fisher, in review).”

“An especially contentious issue concerns whether these mechanisms handle a broad class of representations (Corballis, 2003; Doherty, 2000; Iao & Leekam, 2014; Iao, Leekam, Perner, & McConachie, 2011; Leekam & Perner, 1991; Leekam, Perner, Healey, & Sewell, 2008; Perner, 1991, 1995; Stone & Gerrans, 2006; Suddendorf, 1…”

“Proponents of this view (i.e., performance view of ToM) suggest that cognitive enhancement allows bilingual children to outperform their monolingual peers in tasks of ToM (Bialystok & Senman, 2004; Carlson & Moses, 2001; Leslie, 1994; Leslie et al., 2005; Scholl & Leslie, 2001).”

“…with a set of reliably-developing cognitive mechanisms that allow them to predict and explain the behavior of others – collectively, these are referred to as Theory of Mind, or commonsense psychology (Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016; Dennett, 1987; Leslie, 1994; Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004).”

“Given sensitivity to causal information in infancy, Leslie and Keeble (1987; Leslie 1994) and Schlottmann and Shanks (1992) argued for an innate mechanism of phenomenal causality in the launching effect.”

“The observed variable y i represents an agent's perception of the physical world (akin to what Leslie [28] calls a Theory of Body, and/or what Wellman and Bartsch [44] consider the input to belief-desire reasoning, see also Wellman [43]).”