The closing of the theory of mind: A critique of perspective-taking

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and is often said to be one of the cornerstones of efficient social interaction. In recent years, a number of authors have suggested that one particular ToM process occurs spontaneously in that it is rapid and outside of conscious control. This work has argued that humans efficiently compute the visual perspective of other individuals. In this article, we present a critique of this notion both on empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that the experiments and paradigms that purportedly demonstrate spontaneous perspective-taking have not as yet convincingly demonstrated the existence of such a phenomenon. We also suggest that it is not possible to represent the percept of another person, spontaneous or otherwise. Indeed, the perspective-taking field has suggested that humans can represent the visual experience of others. That is, going beyond assuming that we can represent another's viewpoint in anything other than symbolic form. In this sense, the field suffers from the same problem that afflicted the "pictorial" theory in the mental imagery debate. In the last section we present a number of experiments designed to provide a more thorough assessment of whether humans can indeed represent the visual experience of others.

Perspective-Taking: In Search of a Theory

“…Building upon Cole and Millett [ 23 ], we first begin with an overarching suggestion; that the mental imagery debate provides a useful guide as to why a theory of perspective-taking is required, as was a theory of imagery. That debate also highlights some of the important issues that should be considered with any theory of visual perspective-taking.…”

Large-scale functional brain networks for consciousness

“…Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand and share the affective states of others, and the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg) and subgenual anterior cingulate gyrus (sgACC) are usually involved in the process of empathy [ 92 , 93 ]. The Theory of Mind concerns ability to assess the mental states of others [ 94 - 96 ], and several kinds of tests such as the Sally-Ann test, the dot perspective task, and the ambiguous figure perception test support this theory [ 97 , 98 ]. Perspective-taking mainly involves the TPJ, DMPFC, and PrC (Theory of Mind) [ 99 - 101 ].…”

Perspective Taking in Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents

“…For the neural network implementation we used the Keras library (Chollet, 2015). We used Adam optimizer (batch size set to 16) with a fixed learning rate at 0.001 and annealed the exploration probability with a schedule from an initial value of 1 until reaching 0.1 at the 75% of the total number of steps.…”

“…It is one of the social competencies that underlies social understanding in many contexts (Galinsky et al, 2008 ; Apperly, 2011 ). While perspective taking is a very general ability, in the basic form it boils down to knowing what the other agent does or does not know (Cole and Millett, 2019 ). The existence of such simple forms of perspective taking is supported by the fact that this ability is not unique to humans and has been observed in other animals like chimpanzees (Hare et al, 2000 ; Tomasello et al, 2003 ).…”