13.5 Understanding the Mental States of Others

Question 1

Empathic accuracy

Answer 1

refers to a perceiver’s ability to correctly infer a target person’s thoughts and feelings. To infer the thoughts of others, the perceiver must translate what is observable into an inference about what is unobservable - their psychological state

Question 2

The mental state attribution theory or theory theory

Answer 2

proposes that we acquire a commonsense ‘folk psychology’ and use it, somewhat like a scientific theory, to infer the thoughts of others.

Question 3

the simulation theory, which has since morphed into experience sharing theory.

Answer 3

This proposes that we do not need to have an elaborate theory about the mind of others in order to infer their thoughts or predict their actions. We simply observe someone else’s behavior, simulate it, and use our own mental state produced by that simulation to predict the mental state of the other.

Question 4

theory of mind (ToM)

Answer 4

The ability to impute mental states to oneself and to other people

Question 5

imitative behavior.

Answer 5

From the get-go an infant prefers to look at a human face rather than at other objects, and when she does see a face the infant has a social interaction through imitative behavior. This innate ability to automatically imitate others is the foundation, that leads to our theory of mind.

Question 6

Sally-Ann false belief task

Answer 6

was the essential test in determining the presence or absence of theory of mind.

Question 7

Joint attention

Answer 7

that is, the two individuals share their focus on the same object.