Spontaneous attribution of underspecified belief of social partners facilitates processing shared information.

ABSTRACT: The main question of Theory of Mind research is not only how we represent others' mental states, but also how these representations influence our first-person interaction with our surrounding environment. A novel theory of belief files proposes that we should think about belief tracking as an online, spontaneous, and effortless mechanism giving rise to structured representations, thus easing the use of beliefs in behavior selection. Beliefs are formed by two different sub mechanisms: (1) opening an empty placeholder belief file, for a particular intentional agent, and (2) filling it up with mental content attributed to the agent. This theory opens the possibility of exploiting theory of mind abilities even in situations when we can attribute only underspecified mental contents to others. T

SUBMITTER: Hegedus AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9508175 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature