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The Cognitive Basis of Mindreading

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The Neural Basis of Mentalizing

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.

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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.

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  1. School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Ian Apperly

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  1. Ian Apperly
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Correspondence to Ian Apperly .

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  1. Psychology Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel

    Michael Gilead

  2. Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Kevin N. Ochsner

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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

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