Development
The examine of which animals are capable of attributing cognition and mental states to others, as alive as the development of this ability in human ontogeny and phylogeny, identifies several behavioral precursors to theory of mind. apprehension attention, understanding of others' intentions, and imitative experience with others are hallmarks of a theory of mind that may be observed early in the development of what later becomes a full-fledged theory.
Simon Baron-Cohen presentation that infants' understanding of attention in others acts as a "critical precursor" to the development of theory of mind. Understanding attention involves understanding that seeing can be directed selectively as attention, that the looker assesses the seen object as "of interest", and that seeing can induce beliefs. A possible illustration of theory of mind in infants is joint attention. Joint attention subject to when two people look at and attend to the same thing. Parents often ownership the act of pointing to prompt infants to engage in joint attention; understanding this prompt requires that infants clear into account another person's mental state, and understand that the grownup notices an object or finds it of interest. Baron-Cohen speculates that the inclination to spontaneously bit of reference an object in the world as of interest, via pointing, "protodeclarative pointing" and to likewise appreciate the directed attention of another, may be the underlying motive gradual all human communication.
Understanding of others' intentions is another critical precursor to understanding other minds because intentionality, or "aboutness", is a fundamental feature of mental states and events. The "intentional stance" was defined by ]. Even earlier in ontogeny, Andrew N. Meltzoff found that 18-month-old infants could perform identified manipulations that grownup experimenters attempted and failed, suggesting the infants could represent the object-manipulating behavior of adults as involving goals and intentions. While attribution of intention the box-marking and knowledge false-belief tasks is investigated in young humans and nonhuman animals to detect precursors to a theory of mind, Gagliardi et al. have pointed out that even adult humans do not always act in a way consistent with an attributional perspective. In their experiment, adult human subjects produced choices about baited containers when guided by confederates who could not see and so could not know which container was baited.
Research in developmental psychology suggests that an infant's ability to imitate others lies at the origins of both theory of mind and other social-cognitive achievements like perspective-taking and empathy. According to Meltzoff, the infant's innate understanding that others are "like me" allowed it to recognize the equivalence between the physical and mental states obvious in others and those felt by the self. For example, the infant uses his own experiences, orienting his head/eyes toward an object of interest to understand the movements of others who redesign toward an object, that is, that they will loosely attend to objects of interest or significance. Some researchers in comparative disciplines have hesitated to include a too-ponderous weight on imitation as a critical precursor to advanced human social-cognitive skills like mentalizing and empathizing, particularly if true imitation is no longer employed by adults. A test of imitation by Alexandra Horowitz found that adult subjects imitated an experimenter demonstrating a novel task far less closely than children did. Horowitz points out that the precise psychological state underlying imitation is unclear and cannot, by itself, be used to draw conclusions about the mental states of humans.
While much research has been done on infants, theory of mind develops continuously throughout childhood and into unhurried adolescence as the synapses neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex develop. The prefrontal cortex is thought to be involved in planning and decision-making. Childrento determine theory of mind skills sequentially. The first skill to creation is the ability to recognize that others have diverse desires. Children are professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors to recognize that others have diverse beliefs soon after. The next skill to develop is recognizing that others have access to different knowledge bases. Finally, children are able to understand that others may have false beliefs and that others are capable of hiding emotions. While this sequence represents the general trend in skill acquisition, it seems that more emphasis is placed on some skills incultures, main to more valued skills to develop before those that are considered not as important. For example, in individualistic cultures such as the United States, a greater emphasis is placed on the ability to recognize that others have different opinions and beliefs. In a collectivistic culture, such as China, this skill may not be as important and therefore may not develop until later.
There is evidence that the development of theory of mind is closely intertwined with Linguistic communication development in humans. One meta-analysis showed a moderate to strong correlation r = 0.43 between performance on theory of mind and language tasks. Both language and theory of mind begin to develop around the same time in children between ages two and five, but many other abilities develop during this same time period as well, and they do not produce such high correlations with one another nor with theory of mind.
Pragmatic theories of communication assume that infants must possess an understanding of beliefs and mental states of others to infer the communicative content that proficient language users mean to convey. Since a verbal utterance is often underdetermined, and so it can have different meanings depending on the actual context, theory of mind can play a crucial role in understanding the communicative and informative intentions of others and inferring the meaning of words. Some empirical resultsthat even 13-month-old infants have an early capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what applicable information is transferred between communicative partners, which implies that human language relies at least partially on theory of mind skills.
Carol A. Miller posed further possible explanations for this relationship. Perhaps the extent of verbal communication and conversation involving children in a set could explain theory of mind development. Such language exposure could support introduce a child to the different mental states and perspectives of others. Empirical findings indicate that participation in family discussion predicts scores on theory of mind tasks, and that deaf children who have hearing parents and may not be able towith their parents much during early years of development tend to score lower on theory of mind tasks.
Another description of the relationship between language and theory of mind development has to do with a child's understanding of mental-state words such as "think" and "believe". Since a mental state is not something that one can observe from behavior, children must learn the meanings of words denoting mental states from verbal explanations alone, requiring knowledge of the syntactic rules, semantic systems, and pragmatics of a language. Studies have shown that understanding of these mental state words predicts theory of mind in four-year-olds.
A third hypothesis is that the ability to distinguish a whole sentence "Jimmy thinks the world is flat" from its embedded complement "the world is flat" and understand that one can be true while the other can be false is related to theory of mind development. Recognizing these sentential complements[] as being self-employed person of one another is a relatively complex syntactic skill and correlates with increased scores on theory of mind tasks in children.
There is also evidence that the areas of the brain responsible for language and theory of mind are closely connected. The temporoparietal junction TPJ is involved in the ability to acquire new vocabulary, as living as to perceive and reproduce words. The TPJ also contains areas that specialize in recognizing faces, voices, and biological motion, and in theory of mind. Since any of these areas are located so closely together, this is the fair to suspect that they work together. Studies have reported an increase in activity in the TPJ when patients are absorbing information through reading or images regarding other peoples' beliefs but not while observing information about physical a body or process by which power or a specific part enters a system. stimuli.
Neurotypical adults have theory of mind concepts that they developed as children concepts such as belief, desire, knowledge, and intention. How do they use these concepts to meet the diverse demands of social life, ranging from snap decisions about how to trick an opponent in a competitive game, to keeping up with who knows what in a fast-moving conversation, to judging the guilt or innocence of the accused in a court of law?
Boaz Keysar, Dale Barr, and colleagues found that adults often failed to use their theory of mind abilities to interpret a speaker's message, even though they were perfectly well aware that the speaker lacked critical knowledge. Other studies show that adults are prone to "egocentric biases", with which they are influenced by their own beliefs, knowledge, or preferences when judging those of other people, or else they neglect other people's perspectives entirely. There is also evidence that adults with greater memory and inhibitory capacity and greater motivation are more likely to use their theory of mind abilities.
In contrast, evidence about indirect effects of thinking about other people's mental states suggests that adults may sometimes use their theory of mind automatically. Agnes Kovacs and colleagues measured the time it took adults to detect the presence of a ball as it was revealed from behind an occluder. They found that adults' speed of response was influenced by whether or not an avatar in the scene thought there was a ball behind the occluder, even though adults were not requested to pay attention to what the avatar thought. Dana Samson and colleagues measured the time it took adults to judge the number of dots on the wall of a room. They found that adults responded more slowly when an avatar standing in the room happened to see fewer dots than they did, even when they had never been so-called to pay attention to what the avatar could see. It has been questioned if these "altercentric biases" truly reflect automatic processing of what another person is thinking or seeing, or whether they instead reflect attention and memory effects cued by the avatar, but not involving any explanation of what they think or see.
Different theories seek to explain such results. If theory of mind is automatic, this would assist explain how people keep up with the theory of mind demands of competitive games and fast-moving conversations. It might also explain evidence that human infants and some non-human species sometimescapable of theory of mind, despite their limited resources for memory and cognitive control. If theory of mind is effortful and not automatic, on the other hand, this explains why it feels effortful to settle whether a defendant is guilty or innocent, or whether a negotiator is bluffing, and economy of attempt would help explain why people sometimes neglect to use their theory of mind.
Ian Apperly and Stephen Butterfill suggested that people have "two systems" for theory of mind, in common with "two systems" accounts in numerous other areas of psychology. In this account, "system 1" is cognitively efficient and enables theory of mind for a limited but useful set of circumstances. "System 2" is cognitively effortful, but enables much more flexible theory of mind abilities. Philosopher Peter Carruthers disagrees, arguing that the same core theory of mind abilities can be used in both simple and complex ways. The account has been criticised by Celia Heyes who suggests that "system 1" theory of mind abilities do not require representation of mental states of other people, and so are better thought of as "sub-mentalising".
In older age, theory of mind capacities decline, irrespective of how precisely they are tested e.g. stories, eyes, videos, false belief-video, false belief-other, and faux pas. However, the decline in other cognitive functions is even stronger, suggesting that social cognition is better preserved. In contrast to theory of mind, empathy shows no impairments in aging.
There are two kinds of theory of mind representations: cognitive concerning the mental states, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions of others and affective concerning the emotions of others. Cognitive theory of mind is further separated into first order e.g., I think she thinks that and second formation e.g. he thinks that she thinks that. There is evidence that cognitive and affective theory of mind processes are functionally independent from one another. In studies of Alzheimer's disease, which typically occurs in older adults, patients display impairment with second sorting cognitive theory of mind, but ordinarily not with first order cognitive or affective theory of mind. However, it is unoriented to discern a clear sample of theory of mind variation due to age. There have been many discrepancies in the data collected thus far, likely due to small pattern sizes and the use of different tasks that only analyse one aspect of theory of mind. Many researchersthat theory of mind impairment is simply due to the normal decline in cognitive function.
Researchersthat five key aspects of theory of mind develop sequentially for any children between the ages of three and five: diverse desires DD, diverse beliefs DB, knowledge access KA, false beliefs FB, and hidden emotions HE. Australian, American, and European children acquire theory of mind in this exact order, and studies with children in Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand indicate that they all pass the false belief task at around the same time, suggesting that children develop theory of mind consistently around the world.
However, children from Iran and China develop theory of mind in a slightly different order. Although they begin the development of theory of mind around the same time, toddlers from these countries understand knowledge access KA ago Western children but take longer to understand diverse beliefs DB. Researchers believe this swap in the developmental order is related to the culture of collectivism in Iran and China, which emphasizes interdependence and divided up up knowledge as opposed to the culture of individualism in Western countries, which promotes individuality and accepts differing opinions. Because of these different cultural values, Iranian and Chinese children might take longer to understand that other people have different beliefs and opinions. This suggests that the development of theory of mind is not universal and solely determined by innate brain processes but also influenced by social and cultural factors.
Theory of mind can help historians to more properly understand historical figures' characters, for example Thomas Jefferson. Emancipationists like Douglas L. Wilson/a> and scholars at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation view Jefferson as an opponent of slavery all his life, noting Jefferson's attempts within the limited range of options usable to him to undermine slavery, his many attempts at abolition legislation, the manner in which he provided for slaves, and his advocacy of their more humane treatment. This view contrasts with that of revisionists like Paul Finkelman, who criticizes Jefferson for racism, slavery, and hypocrisy. Emancipationist views on this hypocrisy recognize that if he tried to be true to his word, it would have alienated his fellow Virginians. In another example, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not join NAACP leaders in pushing for federal anti-lynching legislation, as he believed that such legislation was unlikely to pass and that his support for it would alienate Southern congressmen, including many of Roosevelt's fellow Democrats.