Abstract
In contrast to many other areas of cognitive neuroscience, early neuroscientific investigations of mindreading broke new ground without the support of detailed cognitive models. Consequently, commonly used tasks combine or confound multiple processes. I illustrate how progress is being made in distinguishing different processes and building cognitive models, how this work has been critically informed by neuroscientific as well as cognitive approaches, and how a mature cognitive neuroscience of mindreading has an exciting future in store.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adolphs, R. (2009). The social brain: Neural basis of social knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 693–716.
Apperly, I. A. (2008). Beyond simulation-theory and theory-theory: Why social cognitive neuroscience should use its own concepts to study “theory of mind”. Cognition, 107, 266–283.
Apperly, I. A. (2010). Mindreaders: The cognitive basis of “theory of mind”. Hove, UK: Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis Group.
Apperly, I. A., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009). Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review, 116(4), 953–970.
Apperly, I. A., Riggs, K. J., Simpson, A., Chiavarino, C., & Samson, D. (2006). Is belief reasoning automatic? Psychological Science, 17(10), 841–844.
Apperly, I. A., Warren, F., Andrews, B. J., Grant, J., & Todd, S. (2011). Error patterns in the belief-desire reasoning of 3- to 5-year-olds recur in reaction times from 6 years to adulthood: Evidence for developmental continuity in theory of mind. Child Development, 82(5), 1691–1703.
Barwise, J., & Perry, J. (1983). Situations and attitudes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brass, M., Bekkering, H., Wohlschläger, A., & Prinz, W. (2000). Compatibility between observed and executed finger movements: Comparing symbolic, spatial, and imitative cues. Brain and Cognition, 44(2), 124–143.
Burgess, P. W., Dumontheil, I., & Gilbert, S. J. (2007). The gateway hypothesis of rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10) function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(7), 290–298.
Cook, J. L. (2014). Task-relevance dependent gradients in medial prefrontal and temporoparietal cortices suggest solutions to paradoxes concerning self/other control. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 42, 298–302.
Corbetta, M., Patel, G., & Schulan, G. L. (2008). The reorienting system of the human brain: From environment to theory of mind. Neuron, 58, 306–324.
Davidson, D. (1990). The structure and content of truth. Journal of Philosophy, 87(6), 279–328.
Davies, M., & Stone, T. (Eds.). (1995). Folk psychology: The theory of mind debate. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Evans, J. S. B., & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 223–241.
Fauconnier, G. (1985). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Friedman, O., & Leslie, A. M. (2004). Mechanisms of belief-desire reasoning: Inhibition and bias. Psychological Science, 15, 547–552.
Frith, C. D. (2007). The social brain? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 671–678.
German, T., & Hehman, J. (2006). Representational and executive selection resources in ‘theory of mind’: Evidence from compromised belief-desire reasoning in old age. Cognition, 101(1), 129–152.
Hartwright, C. E., Apperly, I. A., & Hansen, P. C. (2012). Multiple roles for executive control in belief-desire reasoning: Distinct neural networks are recruited for self perspective inhibition and complexity of reasoning. NeuroImage, 61(4), 921–930.
Hartwright, C., Apperly, I. A., & Hansen, P. C. (2014). Representation, Control or Reasoning? Distinct Functions for Theory of Mind within the Medial Prefrontal Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(4), 683–698.
Hartwright, C. E., Hardwick, R., Apperly, I. A., & Hansen, P. (2016). Structural morphology in resting state networks predict the effect of theta burst stimulation in false belief reasoning. Human Brain Map**, 37, 3502–3514.
Haxby, J. V., Connolly, A. C., & Guntupalli, J. S. (2014). Decoding neural representational spaces using multivariate pattern analysis. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 37, 435–456.
Heyes, C. (2014). Submentalizing: I am not really reading your mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9, 131–143.
Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive gadgets: The cultural evolution of thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jara-Ettinger, J., Gweon, H., Schulz, L. E., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2016). The naïve utility calculus: Computational principles underlying commonsense psychology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 589–604.
Jenkins, A. C., & Mitchell, J. P. (2010). Mentalizing under uncertainty: dissociated neural responses to ambiguous and unambiguous mental state inferences. Cerebral Cortex, 20(2), 404–410.
Keysar, B., Lin, S., Barr, D.J., (2003). Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition 89, 25–41.
Koster-Hale, J., & Saxe, R. (2013). Functional neuroimaging of theory of mind. In S. Baron-Cohen, M. Lombardo, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental social neuroscience (pp. 132–163). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Koster-Hale, J., Saxe, R., Dungan, J., & Young, L. L. (2013). Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 110, 5648–5653.
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330, 1830–1834.
Kriegeskorte, N., & Kievit, R. A. (2013). Representational geometry: Integrating cognition, computation, and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 401–412.
Kuhl, B. A., & Chun, M. M. (2014). Successful remembering elicits event-specific activity patterns in lateral parietal cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(23), 8051–8060.
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review, 94, 412–426.
Leslie, A. M. (2005). Developmental parallels in understanding minds and bodies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 459–462.
Low, J., Apperly, I. A., Butterfill, S. A., & Rakoczy, H. (2016). Cognitive architecture of belief reasoning in children and adults: A primer on the two-systems account. Child Development Perspectives, 10(3), 184–189.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman.
McCleery, J. P., Surtees, A. D., Graham, K. A., Richards, J. E., & Apperly, I. A. (2011). The neural and cognitive time course of theory of mind. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(36), 12849–12854.
Perner, J., & Leekam, S. (2008). The curious incident of the photo that was accused of being false: Issues of domain specificity in development, autism, and brain imaging. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(1), 76–89.
Phillips, J., Ong, D. C., Surtees, A. D., **n, Y., Williams, S., Saxe, R., & Frank, M. C. (2015). A second look at automatic theory of mind: Reconsidering Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010). Psychological Science, 26(9), 1353–1367.
Qureshi, A., Apperly, I. A., & Samson, D. (2010). Executive function is necessary for perspective-selection, not Level-1 visual perspective-calculation: Evidence from a dual-task study of adults. Cognition, 117(2), 230–236.
Royzman, E. B., Cassidy, K. W., & Baron, J. (2003). “I know, you know”: Epistemic egocentrism in children and adults. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 38–65.
Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Braithwaite, J. J., Andrews, B. J., & Bodley Scott, S. E. (2010). Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1255–1266.
Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Kathirgamanathan, U., & Humphreys, G. W. (2005). Seeing it my way: A case of selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective. Brain, 128, 1102–1111.
Samson, D., Houthuys, S., & Humphreys, G. W. (2015). Self-perspective inhibition deficits cannot be explained by general executive control difficulties. Cortex, 70, 189–201.
Santiesteban, I., Banissy, M. J., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2012). Enhancing social ability by stimulating right temporoparietal junction. Current Biology, 22, 2274–2277.
Santiesteban, I., White, S., Cook, J., Gilbert, S. J., Heyes, C., & Bird, G. (2012). Training social cognition: From imitation to theory of mind. Cognition, 122, 228–235.
Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2003). People thinking about thinking people. The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. Neuroimage, 19, 1835–1842.
Schaafsma, S. M., Pfaff, D. W., Spunt, R. P., & Adolphs, R. (2015). Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(2), 65–72.
Stone, V. E., Baron-Cohen, S., & Knight, R. T. (1998). Frontal lobe contributions to theory of mind. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 640–656.
Stuhlmüller, A., & Goodman, N. D. (2014). Reasoning about reasoning by nested conditioning: Modeling theory of mind with probabilistic programs. Cognitive Systems Research, 28, 80–99.
Surtees, A., Samson, D., & Apperly, I. A. (2016). Unintentional perspective-taking calculates whether something is seen, but not how it is seen. Cognition, 146, 97–105.
Tamir, D. I., Thornton, M. A., Contreras, J. M., & Mitchell, J. P. (2016). Neural evidence that three dimensions organize mental state representation: Rationality, social impact, and valence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, 113(1), 194–199.
van der Meer, L., Groenewold, N.A., Nolen, W.A., Pijnenborg, M., Aleman, A., (2011). Inhibit yourself and understand the other: Neural basis of distinct processes underlying Theory of Mind. NeuroImage 56, 2364–2374.
van der Wel, R. P., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2014). Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a continuous measure. Cognition, 130(1), 128–133.
Vogeley, K., Bussfeld, P., Newen, A., Herrmann, S., Happe, F., Falkai, P., … Zilles, K. (2001). Mind reading: Neural mechanisms of theory of mind and self-perspective. NeuroImage, 14(1).
Wagner, A. D., Maril, A., Bjork, R. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). Prefrontal contributions to executive control: fMRI evidence for functional distinctions within lateral prefrontal cortex. Neuroimage, 14(6), 1337–1347.
Wimber, M., Alink, A., Charest, I., Kriegeskorte, N., & Anderson, M. C. (2015). Retrieval induces adaptive forgetting of competing memories. Nature Neuroscience, 18, 582–589.
Zeithamova, D., Dominick, A. L., & Preston, A. R. (2012). Hippocampal and ventral medial prefrontal activation during retrieval-mediated learning supports novel inference. Neuron, 75, 168–179.
Summary
I have outlined a cognitive model of mindreading that is narrowly focused on processes directly involved in inferring, storing and using information about other people’s mental states. A narrow focus makes it possible to think about the relationships between individual processing steps and their cognitive and neural bases, but of course it should not blind us to the fact that there is much more to mindreading than what I have discussed here. More ambitious and exhaustive models are very valuable but they face a daunting challenge in knowing where to stop. A good case can be made for including gaze processing, face recognition, moral and causal reasoning as part of mindreading (e.g. Schaafsma et al., 2015), However, following this logic, since I can imagine you thinking anything I can think for myself, there seems no principled limit on the information and processes on which I might need to draw, and so no straight-forward way of distinguishing between processes that are involved and not involved in mindreading. This is a deep issue with mindreading, but it should not stop us from building rich models of how mindreading is supported by a variety of cognitive and neural processes.
I hope I have also demonstrated that this is a two-way street, with results from neuroscientific studies informing cognitive theories just as much as the reverse. Relevant theories and methods must also interact. For example, it is important to recognize that subtractive neuroimaging designs optimized to detect domain-specific mindreading processes will tell us little about the nature of the processes involved, whereas designs that contrast different conditions within a mindreading task might tell you more about processes but little about their domain specificity. The rate of innovation in neuroscientific methods holds out great future promise for a cognitive neuroscience of mindreading, which will be maximized when combined with functional models of the cognitive processes involved.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Apperly, I. (2021). The Cognitive Basis of Mindreading. In: Gilead, M., Ochsner, K.N. (eds) The Neural Basis of Mentalizing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-51889-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51890-5
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)