20 - Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience of Theory of Mind

Imagine you arrive back at the laundromat and see a stranger take your clothes out of the dryer and start to fold them. What is going on? With only seconds of perceptual data about this stranger, you can immediately conjure upmultiple plausible explanations: maybe he intends to steal your clothes, maybe he is feeling amazingly generous and wants to help someone out, or maybe he just falsely believes that those are his own clothes. In this example and in countless other brief and extended social interactions every day, we do not just describe people’s actions as movements through space and time. Instead we seek to explain and judge and predict their actions, and we do so by appealing to a rich but invisible causal structure of thoughts, beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions inside their heads. This capacity to reason about people’s actions in terms of their mental states is called a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM). This chapter is about what we know, and what we do not know, about how the human brain acquires its amazing capacity for ToM. In the past few decades, ToM has been studied intensively in childhood development (using behavioral measures) and in the adult human brain (using functional neuroimaging). Converging evidence from these two approaches provides insight into the cognitive and neural basis of this key human cognitive capacity. However, as we highlight later, we are especially excited about the future of ToM in developmental cognitive neuroscience: studies that combine both methods, using neuroimaging methods to directly study cognitive and neural development in childhood. We start by describing an account of ToM, in development and in neuroscience, that we shall call the ‘Standard’ view. Next, we describe some recent challenges that shake the foundations of the Standard view. Finally, we point to the open questions, and especially the key contributions that developmental cognitive neuroscience can make in the next generation of studies of ToM.