Social Affordance Tracking over Time - A Sensorimotor Account of False-Belief Tasks

False-belief task have mainly been associated with the explanatory notion of the theory of mind and the theory-theory. However, it has often been pointed out that this kind of highlevel reasoning is computational and time expensive. During the last decades, the idea of embodied intelligence, i.e. complex behavior caused by sensorimotor contingencies, has emerged in both the fields of neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. Viewed from this perspective, the failing in a false-belief test can be the result of the impairment to recognize and track others’ sensorimotor contingencies and affordances. Thus, social cognition is explained in terms of lowlevel signals instead of high-level reasoning. In this work, we present a generative model for optimal action selection which simultaneously can be employed to make predictions of others’ actions. As we base the decision making on a hidden state representation of sensorimotor signals, this model is in line with the ideas of embodied intelligence. We demonstrate how the tracking of others’ hidden states can give rise to correct falsebelief inferences, while a lack thereof leads to failing. With this work, we want to emphasize the importance of sensorimotor contingencies in social cognition, which might be a key to artificial, socially intelligent systems.