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Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing

Abstract

Social cognition depends on our capacity for ‘mentalizing’, or explaining an agent’s behaviour in terms of their mental states. The development and neural substrates of mentalizing are well-studied, but its computational basis is only beginning to be probed. Here we present a model of core mentalizing computations: inferring jointly an actor’s beliefs, desires and percepts from how they move in the local spatial environment. Our Bayesian theory of mind (BToM) model is based on probabilistically inverting artificial-intelligence approaches to rational planning and state estimation, which extend classical expected-utility agent models to sequential actions in complex, partially observable domains. The model accurately captures the quantitative mental-state judgements of human participants in two experiments, each varying multiple stimulus dimensions across a large number of stimuli. Comparative model fits with both simpler ‘lesioned’ BToM models and a family of simpler non-mentalistic motion features reveal the value contributed by each component of our model.

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Figure 1: Experimental scenario and model schema.
Figure 2: Example experimental stimuli.
Figure 3: The four factors varied in the factorial design of Experiment 1.
Figure 4: Experiment 1 results.
Figure 5: Comparing BToM and mean human (n=16) desire and belief inferences across all individual scenarios.
Figure 6: Experiment 2 results.
Figure 7: Experiment 2 results, comparing models and mean human (n=176) percept inferences across all individual scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Center for Brains, Minds & Machines (CBMM), under NSF STC award CCF-1231216; by NSF grant IIS-1227495 and by DARPA grant IIS-1227504. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

C.L.B., R.S. and J.B.T. designed Experiment 1. C.L.B. ran Experiment 1, implemented the models and performed the analyses of Experiment 1. J.J.E., C.L.B. and J.B.T. designed Experiment 2. J.J.-E. and C.L.B. ran Experiment 2, implemented the models and performed the analyses of Experiment 2. C.L.B. and J.B.T. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joshua B. Tenenbaum.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Figures, Supplementary References. (PDF 731 kb)

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Baker, C., Jara-Ettinger, J., Saxe, R. et al. Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0064 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0064

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