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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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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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.
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0064
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