The many sides of mind reading

When trying to make sense of other people’s behaviour we usually invoke their mental states, such as their intentions, beliefs or emotions, an ability often referred to as having or using a “Theory of Mind”. Far from seeing theory of mind as a unitary ability, mounting evidence now forces us to consider the multiple pathways and processes available to humans to read other people’s mind. In the first part of the talk, I will show that theory of mind relies on various complex cognitive processes, and I will illustrate how neuropsychology can help us identify and understand the nature of these processes. In the second part of the talk, I will show how in certain circumstances, we can also call upon much simpler and automatic processes to compute other people’s perspective. The co-existence of these two types of processes (high-level and low-level processes) explains why, on the one hand, adults are far from performing at ceiling in theory of mind tasks and, on the other hand, young infants are able to easily solve complex theory of mind problems.