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This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, BaronCohen et al.'s (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare dif...

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words like know harder for learners to acquire than words like dog or jump? We suggest that a considerable part of the difficulty of acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. We sketch a theory of word learning that considers acquisition of the lexicon and of the clause-level syntax to be interlocked throughout their course, rather than distinct and separable parts of language learning. The machinery is set in motion by word-toworld pairing, a procedure that efficiently solves the mapping problem for a stock of concrete lexical items (mostly nouns), but only these. Armed with this basic stock of items, the learner accomplishes further lexical knowledge by an arm-over-arm process in which successively more sophisticated representations of linguistic structure are built. Lexical learning thereby can proceed by adding structure-to-world mapping to the earlier-available machinery. These further linguistic developments enable efficient solution of the mapping problem for the more abstract component of the lexical stock.. The outcome of this procedure is a highly lexicalized grammar whose usefulness does not end with successful learning. Rather, these detailed and highly structured lexical representations serve the purposes of the incremental multiple-cue processing machinery by which people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear.

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Eighty-three 12-month-old infants faced a noisy, active, object for one minute, after which the object turned 45 degrees to the left or the right. Five conditions explored what object features elicited gaze-following behavior in the infants. In one condition, the object was an adult stranger. The other four conditions used a soft, brown, dog-sized, amorphouslyshaped, asymmetrical novel object that varied along two dimensions theorized as central to the identification of intentional beings: facial features and contingently interactive behavior. Infants shifted their own attentional direction to match the orientation of the actor or object in every condition except the one in which the object lacked both a face and contingently interactive behavior. Infants' `gaze'-following behavior in general, therefore, appears to have been driven selectively by a particular configuration of behavioral and morphological characteristics, specifically those theorized as underlying attributions of intentionality rather than attributions of person per se.

The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion

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Experimental evidence on reasoning and decision making has been used to argue both that human rationality is adequate and that it is defective. The idea that reasoning involves not one but two mental systems (see Evans and Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996;