Theory of Mind - PYSC 314

Physical stance

• laws of physics

• behavior of neurons, electrons, chemical

• inanimate

Intentional stance

• the mental world

• making inferences about a person’s beliefs and desires

• animate

Design stance

• level of biology and engineering

• concern with purpose, function, and design

Social intelligence

the ability to process information about behavior of others and react adaptively to their behavior

Intentionality detector (ID)

• interprets motion stimuli in terms of goals and desires (good at deciphering goal-directed behavior)

• allows individuals to represent goals and desires

Eye direction detector (EDD)

• detects presence of eyes

• detects direction of eye gaze

• infers that another organisms sees what it is looking at (where its eyes are pointed)

Shared attention mechanism (SAM)

• allows inferences about goals and desires based on eye direction

• ability to know that you and another organism are attending to the same thing

Theory of Mind mechanism (TOMM)

• needed for full range of mental states (pretending, believing, guessing, deceiving, etc.)

• allows the representation of representations

Theory of Mind

being aware that there mental states and that other people have minds with different contents to our own

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

tendency for observers to overestimate the importance of personality and dispositions on behavior, while underestimating the importance of the situation

Actor-Observer Effect (AOE)

people (actors) attribute the cause of their own behavior to situational factors, but attribute the cause of other people’s behavior to stable dispositional characteristics