The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks

a r t i c l e i n f o Recursive mindreading is the ability to embed mental representations inside other mental representations e.g. to hold beliefs about beliefs about beliefs. An advanced ability to entertain recursively embedded mental states is consistent with evolutionary perspectives that emphasise the importance of sociality and social cognition in human evolution: high levels of recursive mindreading are argued to be involved in several distinctive human behaviours and institutions, such as communication, religion, and story-telling. However, despite a wealth of research on first-level mindreading under the term Theory of Mind, the human ability for recursive mindreading is relatively understudied, and existing research on the topic has significant methodological flaws. Here we show experimentally that human recursive mindreading abilities are far more advanced than has previously been shown. Specifically, we show that humans are able to mindread to at least seven levels of embedding, both explicitly, through linguistic description , and implicitly, through observing social interactions. However, our data suggest that mindreading may be easier when stimuli are presented implicitly rather than explicitly. We argue that advanced mindreading abilities are to be expected in an extremely social species such as our own, where the ability to reason about others' mental states is an essential, ubiquitous and adaptive component of everyday life. " Humans have the ability to represent representations… This meta-representational ability is as distinctive of humans, and as important in understanding their behaviour, as is echolocation for bats " (Sperber, 1997, p.69). Mindreading is the ability to mentally represent others' mental representations. It is also known as mental metarepresentation, or theory of mind. Recursive mindreading is the ability to embed further levels of mental representation inside existing mental representations (e.g. I think 0 that you believe 1 that he thinks 2 that she wants 3 … and so on; subscripts count the number of metarepresentations 3). An intuitive and commonly held view is that high-level recursive mindreading (i.e. beyond first or second level) is cognitively demanding, and perhaps beyond normal human abilities (e. Yet theoretical explanations of many important human behaviours and institutions, such as communication, religion, story-telling, and culture itself either argue or assume that humans can and do process high levels of recursive mindreading routinely and without difficulty In such an environment, the ability to monitor and manage one's social environment, by reasoning about the motives and intentions of others, keeping track …