Link Search Menu Expand Document
Origins of Mind

Minimal Theory of Mind

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

The construction of a minimal theory of mind provides one explanation for how mindreading could be automatic in a limited but useful range of cases.

Slides

Notes

Which models of minds and actions underpin which mental state tracking processes?

What Is a Model?

A model is just a way some aspects of the world could be. A model of minds and actions is a way mental aspects of the world could be.

A model is something that can serve different purposes. Having a model does not commit you to using it for any particular purpose. The model’s usefulness does not depend only on its accuracy: the ease with which it can be used to imagine, build or navigate matters. The best model for a given set of purposes may not be the most accurate. Further, it can be advantageous to have multiple models of a single thing. For example, building a house can involve creating multiple models.

Theorists specify models in various ways including by giving a theory or by constructing something physical.

A model is distinct from a theory. A model can be used to make claims about the world, but the model itself entails nothing about how the world actually is. By contrast, a theory does (Godfrey-Smith, 2005).

In saying that an individual or a process relies on a model, we are attempting to capture the way aspects of the world seem from the individual’s or processes’ point of view. There is no commitment to any claim about how the model relates to the individual or process. There is no suggestion, in saying that an individual relies on a model, that they have a physical model; nor that they know any of a theory which we, as theorists, use to specify the model.

Minimal Theory of Mind

An agent’s field is a set of objects related to the agent by proximity, orientation and other factors.

First approximation: an agent encounters an object just if it is in her field.

A goal is an outcome to which one or more actions are, or might be, directed.1

Principle 1: one can’t goal-directedly act on an object unless one has encountered it.

Applications: subordinate chimps retrieve food when a dominant is not informed of its location (Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2001); when observed scrub-jays prefer to cache in shady, distant and occluded locations (Dally, Emery, & Clayton, 2004; Clayton, Dally, & Emery, 2007).

First approximation: an agent registers an object at a location just if she most recently encountered the object at that location.

A registration is correct just if the object is at the location it is registered at.

Principle 2: correct registration is a condition of successful action.

Applications: 12-month-olds point to inform depending on their informants’ goals and ignorance (Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2008); chimps retrieve food when a dominant is misinformed about its location (Hare et al., 2001); scrub-jays observed caching food by a competitor later re-cache in private (Clayton et al., 2007; Emery & Clayton, 2007).

Principle 3: when an agent performs a goal-directed action and the goal specifies an object, the agent will act as if the object were actually in the location she registers it at.

Applications: some false belief tasks (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007; Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009).

References

Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition, 112(2), 337–342.
Clayton, N. S., Dally, J. M., & Emery, N. J. (2007). Social cognition by food-caching corvids. The western scrub-jay as a natural psychologist. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 507–552.
Dally, J. M., Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2004). Cache protection strategies by western scrub-jays (aphelocoma californica): Hiding food in the shade. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271(0), S387-S390-S387–S390.
Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2007). How to build a scrub-jay that reads minds. In S. Itakura & K. Fujita (Eds.), Origins of the social mind: Evolutionary and developmental perspectives. Tokyo: Springer.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2005). Folk psychology as a model. Philosophers’ Imprint, 5(6).
Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2001). Do chimpanzees know what conspecifics know? Animal Behaviour, 61(1), 139–151.
Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Twelve-month-olds communicate helpfully and appropriately for knowledgeable and ignorant partners. Cognition, 108(3), 732–739.
Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(8), 255–258.
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by two-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587–592.

Endnotes

  1. Not to be confused with a goal-state, which is an intention or other state of an agent linking an action to a particular goal to which it is directed. ↩