Cognitive Science An Introduction to the Science of the Mind

This chapter introduces mindreading (the ability to understand others' thoughts and to interact with them socially). The first section looks at childrens' pretend play behavior and how it is explained by Leslie's metarepresentation models. The second section addresses the false belief test, which was developed to detect whether young children can understand that other people might hold misleading information about their environment. The third section introduces Baron-Cohen's model of the mindreading system, explaining data from different paradigms, such as the false belief test in normal or autistic children. The fourth section looks at an alternative approach -- the simulation theory, which hypothesizes that we predict other people by simulating how we would react if we received the same information. The last section reviews recent neural evidence on mindreading mechanisms.