If we are to build human-like robots that can interact naturally with people, our robots must know not only about the properties of objects but also the properties of animate agents in the world. One of the fundamental social skills for humans is the attribution of beliefs, goals, and desires to other people. This set of skills has often been called a “theory of mind.” This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. I further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.

It is argued that working memory limitations are best defined in terms of the complexity of relations that can be processed in parallel. Relational complexity is related to processing loads in problem solving, and discriminates between higher animal species, as well as between children of different ages. Complexity is defined by the number of dimensions, or sources of variation, that are related. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation, because its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, and two sources of variation, because two argument instantiations are possible at once. Similarly, a ternary relation is three dimensional, a quaternary relation is four dimensional, and so on. Dimensionality is related to number of chunks, because both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Empirical studies of working memory limitations indicate a soft limit which corresponds to processing one quaternary relation in parallel. More complex concepts are processed by segmentation or conceptual chunking. Segmentation entails breaking tasks into components which do not exceed processing capacity, and which are processed serially. Conceptual chunking entails "collapsing" representations to reduce their dimensionality and consequently their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Parallel distributed processing implementations of relational representations show that relations with more arguments entail a higher computational cost, which corresponds to empirical observations of higher processing loads in humans. Empirical evidence is presented that relational complexity discriminates between higher species...

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What counts as human rationality: reasoning processes that embody content-independent formal theories, such as propositional logic, or reasoning processes that are well designed for solving important adaptive problems? Most theories of human reasoning have been based on content-independent formal rationality, whereas adaptive reasoning, ecological or evolutionary, has been little explored. We elaborate and test an evolutionary approach, Cosmides’ (1989) social contract theory, using the Wason selection task. In the first part, we disentangle the theoretical concept of a “social contract” from that of a “cheater-detection algorithm.” We demonstrate that the fact that a rule is perceived as a social contract—or a conditional permission or obligation, as Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed—is not sufficient to elicit Cosmides’ striking results, which we replicated. The crucial issue is not semantic (the meaning of the rule), but pragmatic: whether a person is cued into the perspective of a party who can be cheated. In the second part, we distinguish between social contracts with bilateral and unilateral cheating options. Perspective change in contracts with bilateral cheating options turns P & not-Q responses into not-P & Q responses. The results strongly support social contract theory, contradict availability theory, and cannot be accounted for by pragmatic reasoning schema theory, which lacks the pragmatic concepts of perspectives and cheating detection.

What are the brain and cognitive systems that allow humans to play baseball, compute square roots, cook soufflés, or navigate the Tokyo subways? It may seem that studies of human infants and of non-human animals will tell us little about these abilities, because only educated, enculturated human adults engage in organized games, formal mathematics, gourmet cooking, or map-reading. In this chapter, we argue against this seemingly sensible conclusion. When human adults exhibit complex, uniquely human, culture-specific skills, they draw on a set of psychological and neural mechanisms with two distinctive properties: they evolved before humanity and thus are shared with other animals, and they emerge early in human development and thus are common to infants, children, and adults. These core knowledge systems form the building blocks for uniquely human skills. Without them we wouldn’t be able to learn about different kinds of games, mathematics, cooking, or maps. To understand what is special about human intelligence, therefore, we must study both the core knowledge systems on which it rests and the mechanisms by which these systems are orchestrated to permit new kinds of concepts and cognitive processes. What is core knowledge? A wealth of research on non-human primates and on human

Abstract: Autism provides a model for exploring the nature of self-consciousness: self-consciousness requires the ability to reflect on mental states, and autism is a disorder with a specific impairment in the neurocognitive mechanism underlying this ability. Experimental studies of normal and abnormal development suggest that the abilities to attribute mental states to self and to others are closely related. Thus inability to pass standard ‘theory of mind ’ tests, which refer to others ’ false beliefs, may imply lack of self-consciousness. Individuals who persistently fail these tests may, in the extreme, be unable to reflect on their intentions or to anticipate their own actions. In contrast, individuals with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome often possess a late-acquired, explicit theory of mind, which appears to be the result of effortful learning. An experimental study with three people with Asperger syndrome suggested that level of performance on standard theory of mind tasks was strongly related to the ability to engage in introspection. Qualitative differences in the introspections of high-functioning people with autism are also reflected in autobiographical accounts which may give a glimpse of what it is like to be autistic.

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the possible states of knowledge among a group of individuals and their relations to decision making. A travelling salesman found himself spending the night at home with his wife when one of his trips was accidentally cancelled. The two of them were sound asleep, when in the middle of the night there was a loud knock at the front door. The wife woke up with a start and cried out, “Oh my God! It’s my husband! ” Whereupon the husband leapt out of bed, ran across the room and jumped out the window. Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 59. Wimmer and Perner begin their paper [WM] on Beliefs about beliefs with this story from Schank and Abelson which may seem amusing to some and disturbing to others. But the point of the story seems to be that husband and wife each have their own scenario and neither corresponds to the actuality. The wife is a bit better off as she knows where she is though not whom she is with. The husband is unaware of the identity of his companion and even of his location. Wimmer and Perner themselves are concerned primarily with the perception by children of other people’s mindsets. The following quote from [WM] is a story about Maxi which they told a group of children: Mother returns from her shopping trip. She bought chocolate for a cake. Maxi may help her put away the things. He asks her, “Where should I put the chocolate? ” “In the blue cupboard, ” says the mother. Later, with Maxi gone out to play, the mother transfers the chocolate from the blue cupboard to the green cupboard. Maxi then comes back from the playground, hungry, and he wants to get some chocolate. In Wimmer and Perner’s experiment, little children who were told the Maxi story were then asked the belief question, “Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?”

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...

Theory grounding is suggested as a way to address the unresolved cognitive science issues of systematicity and productivity. Theory grounding involves grounding the theory skills and knowledge of an embodied artificially intelligent (AI) system by developing theory skills and knowledge from the bottom up. It is proposed that theory grounded AI systems should be patterned after the psychological developmental stages that infants and young children go through in acquiring naïve theories. Systematicity and productivity are properties of certain representational systems indicating the range of representations the systems can form. Systematicity and productivity are likely outcomes of theory grounded AI systems because systematicity and productivity are theoretical concepts. Theory grounded systems should be well oriented to acquire and develop these theoretical concepts.

One of the fundamental social skills for humans is a theory of other minds. This set of skills allows us to attribute beliefs, goals, and desires to other individuals. To take part in normal human social dynamics, a robot must not only know about the properties of objects, but also the properties of animate agents in the world. This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. We further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.