The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What is “theory of mind”? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences
Abstract
Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.
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Citations
Cites
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Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing
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Individual Differences in Inhibitory Control and Children's Theory of Mind
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Social cognition and the brain: A meta-analysis
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“The fact that egocentrism is also observed in adult participants (e.g., Nickerson, 1999; Royzman, Cassidy, & Baron, 2003) suggests that immature concepts are an insufficient explanation for egocentric phenomena.2 For example, when judging how a target person will interpret an ambiguous message, participants who know t…”
BackgroundThree-year-olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit
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Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states
Apperly, I. A., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/a0016923 · Cited by 1,261
Self-citationAction Anticipation Through Attribution of False Belief by 2-Year-Olds
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x · Cited by 1,066
False-belief understanding in infants
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“I know, you know”: epistemic egocentrism in children and adults
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Cited by
Lai, M.-C., Lombardo, M. V., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2014) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(13)61539-1 · Cited by 2,371
Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind
Schaafsma, S. M., Pfaff, D. W., Spunt, R. P., & Adolphs, R. (2015) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.11.007 · Cited by 498
What Do Theory-of-Mind Tasks Actually Measure? Theory and Practice
Quesque, F., & Rossetti, Y. (2020) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691619896607 · Cited by 287
Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans
Strachan, J. W. A., Albergo, D., Borghini, G., Pansardi, O., Scaliti, E., Gupta, S., Saxena, K., Rufo, A., Panzeri, S., Manzi, G., et al. (2024) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-024-01882-z · Cited by 299
The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure
Theriault, J. E., Young, L., & Barrett, L. F. (2021) · Physics of Life Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004 · Cited by 201
Metadata
- Authors
- Apperly, I. A.
- Venue
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2012-05
- Volume
- 65
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 825-839
- ISSN
- 0033-555X (ISSN-L)
- 1747-0218
- 1747-0226
- OpenAlex
- W2018800929
- Cited by
- 368
- References
- 11
- FWCI
- 37.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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