T 2 Theory of Mind and Nonhuman 3 Intelligence 4AU1 Brandon Tinklenberg 5 York University, Toronto, Canada 6 Synonyms 7 Mental state attribution; Mindreading; Social 8 cognition 9 Definition 10 The cognitive ability to predict or explain an indi11 viduals' behavior through the attribution of men12 tal states. 13 Introduction 14 Comparative cognition researchers have long 15 been interested in the nature of nonhuman animal 16 social capacities. One capacity has received pro17 longed attention: mindreading, or "theory of 18 mind" as it also called, is often seen to be the 19 ability to attribute mental states to others in the 20 service of predicting and explaining behavior. 21 This attention is garnered in no small measure 22 from interest into what accounts for the distinctive 23 features of human social cognition and what are 24 the evolutionary origins of those features. This 25entry surveys: (1) main hypotheses concerning 26the adaptive value of mindreading, (2) theoretical 27problems complicating our ability to determine 28whether nonhuman animals mindread, and finally 29(3) proposals that mindreading is a plural rather 30than unitary cognitive system. 31Social Intelligence Hypothesis 32One intuitive idea is that mindreading evolved in 33response to social pressures. The Social Intelli34gence Hypothesis asserts that the ability to reason 35about the intelligent action of group members 36affords greater benefits as social settings become 37more complex (Humphrey 1976; Jolly 1966). 38Certain social groupings seem to require substan39tial cognitive control on behalf of group members. 40Individuals must potentially be able to recognize 41and track particular individuals, kin relationships, 42and dominance hierarchies, all of which are sub43ject to rapid changes over time. The Social Intel44ligence Hypothesis holds that social environments 45are necessary conditions on the development of 46social cognitive skills like mindreading. To sub47stantiate this hypothesis, it is important to deter48mine whether nonhuman animals that lack the 49complexity of social groupings seen in similar 50species also lack analogous social cognition skills 51(Vonk et al. 2015). For instance orangutans, which 52are relatively solitary in relation to other great 53apes, are sufficiently similar with regards to social 54cognitive skills (Herrmann et al. 2007). # Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada 2016 T.K. Shackelford, V.A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3604-1 55 Exactly what social cognition skills were 56 selected for is a further question. The ability to 57 reason about others' behavior in social contexts 58 might be useful in out-competing conspecifics. 59 Known under the guise of the "Machiavellian 60 hypothesis," some argue making better predic61 tions of others' future behavior allows for one to 62 manipulate others through various forms of 63 deception (Whiten and Byrne 1988). As individ64 uals gain more sophisticated understanding of 65 social action and greater predictive success, com66 petition becomes tough, thus creating an evolu67 tionary "arms race." This hypothesis interprets the 68 coalition formation and reconciliation behavior 69 found in many primates in terms of long-term 70 strategic responses, though there may be more 71 mundane reasons, such as tracking food locations 72 that promote this behavior (see Barrett and Henzi 73 2005). 74 An alternative view, one commensurate with 75 Alison Jolly's initial account, suggests that coop76 erative social learning, not competition among 77 conspecifics, led to the development of sophisti78 cated social cognitive skills such a mindreading 79 (Andrews 2012a; Heyes and Frith 2014). Social 80 learning is the transmission of information across 81 group members within a social context. While 82 mindreading ability may not be required to engage 83 in forms of social learning in mimicry and imita84 tion, other social cognition skills may be required. 85 For example, imitation might require that agents 86 have (i) a "natural pedagogy" or evolved interpre87 tive biases towards demonstrators and (ii) take a 88 teleological stance, i.e., attribute purpose, design, 89 or function, to others (Csibra and Gergely 2005). 90 Some comparative evidence suggests that over91 imitation, or the tendency to imitate demonstra92 tors' behaviors in spite of their causal irrelevancy, 93 is a distinctively human strategy facilitating more 94 rapid social learning of instrumental skills and 95 social conventions (Horner and Whiten 2004AU2 ). It 96 has been hypothesized then that our species97 specific proclivity for high fidelity imitation may 98 be linked to "cumulative cultural transmission": 99 instrumental skills and social conventions are not 100 only inherited across generations – imitated 101 behaviors may be recombined in novel contexts 102and in innovative ways (Legare and Neilsen 1032015). 104The Logical Problem 105It is widely held that reasoning about the inten106tional actions of others is a form of causal 107reasoning – we attribute unobservable causal 108determinants of others' behavior in intentional 109explanations just as we do when we discover 110what makes simple machines function. This 111view receives partial support from developmental 112research on causal reasoning. Alison Gopnik and 113her colleagues introduced young children to boxes 114called "blickets" that would light up or make a 115sound under various parameters, such as when 116some collection of objects and the device were 117in direct contact (Gopnik and Sobel 2000). They 118concluded that not only did children recruit mem119ories of prior interactions when being asked to 120predict what would make the blicket work, they 121were sensitive to the potential causal mechanisms 122at work. While in many cases causal reasoning 123requires knowledge of the observable states of 124objects at different times, it sometimes requires 125the positing of intermediate states that are percep126tually opaque yet causally relevant in the assess127ment of observed events. The perceptually opaque 128causal determinants in the case of mindreading are 129internal mental states – the beliefs and desires or 130perceptions and goals that cause the resultant 131behavior. 132Comparative researchers disagree about the 133causal reasoning abilities of nonhuman animals. 134While Penn and Povinelli (2007) claim that their 135studies suggest that chimpanzees do not share 136proficiency at inferring the underlying causal 137structure of phenomena with humans, other 138researchers have found evidence of causal reason139ing in great apes on a par with that which we find 140in human children. Völter and Call (2014) AU3show 141that apes infer causal structures from the 142coactivation of blicket detectors similarly to 143young children and can recruit this knowledge in 144their interventions. 145Assuming mindreading is analogous to causal 146reasoning in the way hinted above, there is further 2 Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence 147 disagreement as to whether nonhuman animals' 148 social cognitive abilities call upon unobservable 149 intentional states. While evidence suggests that 150 subordinate chimpanzees know what dominant 151 chimpanzees observe when competing over a 152 food source (Hare et al. 2000), whether their 153 behavioral preferences involve the attribution of 154 mental states is hotly contested. Povinelli and 155 Vonk (2003) take issue with these and similar 156 findings, on the grounds they are subject to "the 157 logical problem". Assume we are deciding 158 between two hypotheses regarding a subjects' 159 behavior in a social context. The mindreading 160 hypothesis assumes the subject confers mental 161 states on some conspecific in the service of pre162 dicting their future behavioral states. The compet163 ing behavior reading hypothesis assumes she 164 confers only behavioral states. If we are limited 165 to the subjects' behavior when deciding between 166 these two hypotheses, it seems just as likely that 167 the subject relies on associations between observ168 able behaviors in predicting the future states of 169 conspecifics as it does that they would rely on the 170 unobservable mental states. 171 Exactly what the logical problem means for 172 comparative research and whether it can be solved 173 is up for debate. Tomasello & Tomasello and Call 174 (2006) argue that mindreading hypotheses pro175 vide the best explanation since they unify a 176 range of very different experiments already dem177 onstrated. Others, while not so sanguine, are 178 hopeful that a novel experimental design could 179 solve the problem (e.g., Lurz 2012; Heyes 2015; 180 Sober 2015, and Bugnyar et al. 2016). Halina 181 (2015)AU4 argues that the logical problem is not a 182 unique theoretical dilemma for comparative 183 researchers, so there is no special epistemic bur184 den with regards to disproving competing behav185 ior reading hypotheses. Andrews (2012b) 186 similarly suggests that the logical problem is an 187 ancillary of the philosophical problem of other 188 minds: what justifies my attributions of mental 189 states to others, given that my access to their 190 mental life is always mediated through their 191 behavior? Buckner (2014) evinces that in order 192 to solve the logical problem, there must be a 193 unique causal role for the contents of an agent's 194 mental states to play in determining their action. 195But which interpretations of the content of inter196nal mental states are causally efficacious, and how 197so? Because any observable behavior is compati198ble with a potentially infinite set of mental atti199tudes, accurate attribution that would facilitate 200causal reasoning about observable actions of 201others appears to be computationally intractable 202(Zadwizki 2014). 203Multiple Systems Hypothesis 204Just as one might distinguish between an agent's 205explicit, reflective, deliberate knowledge from 206their implicit, heuristic-based, automatic knowl207edge of the causal structure of some physical 208system, we might discover multiple processing 209systems for mindreading. Children can correctly 210verbally identify and track false beliefs at around 2114 years of age. Even though some nonhuman 212animals consider others' perceptual perspectives, 213this ability is not on par with children's ability to 214verbally reason about others' beliefs. That said, 215testing false belief responsiveness by measuring 216preferential looking times has some now thinking 217that preverbal infants have mindreading skills as 218well (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005). Infants' sur219prising performance in social contexts means 220could help make sense of the ontogeny and phy221logeny of social cognition. Some conjecture that 222mindreading is not a unitary process, but rather 223can be decomposed into unique social cognition 224skills that have divergent evolutionary and devel225opmental trajectories. 226Partial evidence for these views comes from 227variations in reaction times in belief attribution. 228By comparing performance across species and 229developmental stages, researchers aim to identify 230"signature limits" which reveal the contours of 231mindreading abilities (Butterfill and Apperly 2322013). Signature limits indicate restrictions on 233the performance of some relevant tasks and can 234help to illuminate the mechanisms involved in 235performing the task. For example, while we 236require additional processing to report on some237one's belief; it takes longer to answer questions 238about a person's belief than it does to answer 239factual questions about the situation (Back and Theory of Mind and Nonhuman Intelligence 3 240 Apperly 2010). Perspectival information is differ241 ent; perceptual information about others' point of 242 view are automatically processed by subjects 243 (Samson et al. 2010). These studies suggest that 244 adults' judgments about the number of objects 245 they could see in a visual scene were slower and 246 more error-prone when the scene contained an 247 irrelevant agent whose visual perspective was dif248 ferent, suggesting that another perspective can 249 caused an indicative interference effect. 250 If mindreading was not a unitary cognitive 251 system in humans, then nonhuman animal social 252 skills may mirror some aspects of human capaci253 ties and not others. Still there are other ways of 254 interpreting limitations on subjects' performance 255 that do not necessitate the ascription of multiple 256 processes. Subjects' performance limitations 257 could be the result of limitations on domain gen258 eral capacities such as working memory 259 (Carruthers 2016) or infants' preferential looking 260 times may be the result of implicit memory of the 261 visual contact between the agent and the objects 262 and experience with this sort of behavior (Perner 263 forthcoming). 264 Conclusion 265 Investigations into the social cognition skills of 266 nonhuman animals has profited from the pro267 longed interaction between researchers in devel268 opmental psychology, neuroscience, ecology, 269 anthropology, and philosophy. Above we focus 270 on the development of research with regards to 271 mindreading or the ability to reason about others' 272 mental states in the service of predicting and 273 explaining their behavior. Importantly we see the 274 question of what is the nature of mindreading and 275 what is its adaptive value occur in a parallel, 276 piecemeal fashion. 277 Cross-References 278 ▶Ability to Recognize Individuals 279 ▶Brian Hare 280 ▶Causal Reasoning 281 ▶Cooperation and Social Cognition 282▶Emergence of Social Reasoning about 283Hierarchies 284▶Michael Tomasello 285▶Nonhuman Primates 286▶ Predicting Events and Behavior 287▶ Social Cognition 288▶The False Belief Test 289▶The Social Intelligence Hypothesis 290▶Theory of Mind 291 AU5References 292Andrews, K. (2012a). Do apes read minds? Toward a new 293folk psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 294Andrews, K. (2012b). Review of mindreading animals: 295The debate over what animals know about other 296minds by R. Lurz. Notre Dame philosophical review. 297Retrieved from http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/29824298mindreading-animals-the-debate-over-what-animals299know-about-other-minds/ 300Back, E., & Apperly, I. A. (2010). 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