Anderson Colloquium Speaker Series

Many of the things humans excel at, like moral reasoning, social learning, and communication, depend on our ability to think about other people’s minds. This capacity, known as Theory of Mind, is typically characterized as the ability to represent mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. In this talk, I will argue that this view is incomplete. Much of social reasoning requires us to go beyond other people’s thoughts, to also represent cognitive processes like attention, memory, and distraction. I will present computational work characterizing the structure of these representations and show how they shape complex social reasoning. I will also present developmental studies suggesting that young children already reason about other people’s cognitive processes, but that this capacity takes longer to mature than reasoning about beliefs and desires. Together, these findings suggest that understanding other minds requires representing not just what people know and want, but how they think.