Leslie Alan M

Department of Psychology and Cogntive Science
SEMINAR DiPSCo
Competence and performance in theory of mind: Modularity in cognitive development
Alan M Leslie - Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, USA
Scientific Coordinator: Luca Surian
April, 20th 2016 – 16.00 – Aula Magna – Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science
Palazzo Istruzione - corso Bettini, 84 - Rovereto
ABSTRACT
I will give a quick overview of the first 30 years of theory of mind (ToM) research, highlighting the main issues that have and
continue to animate the field. For most of this time I was a lone voice arguing for early ToM competence. This competence came in
the form of an evolutionarily adapted modular mechanism that spontaneously tracks agents together with their mental states, such
as believing and pretending. However, modular mechanisms inevitably have “performance” limits — limits on what they can
do. One major ToM limitation is difficulty in overcoming the true-belief (own-belief) default: the presumption that beliefs ought to
be true. This default most likely reflects a design feature essential to competence. Furthermore, overcoming this default seems to
play a major role in the classic “3 to 4 shift” in false belief. The last 10 years have seen an avalanche of studies using non-verbal
tasks with infants and toddlers. This new wave has almost without exception supported the early competence view. Along with the
new findings come new questions about the relationship between infant-toddler ToM, on the one hand, and later preschool (and
adult) ToM, on the other. I will describe some recent work from my lab bearing on some of these questions. First, we show that the
true-belief default is already at work in a non-verbal task in toddlers (and remains so in the same task in adults). Second, we ask
whether working memory in preschoolers limits their false-belief performance. We show that it does not; preschoolers can track the
false beliefs of multiple agents whenever they can track the false belief of one agent. The psychological reality of the theory of mind
module (ToMM) is still credible 30 years later.
Contacts
Staff di Dipartimento - Psicologia e Scienze Cognitive
tel. 0464 808608 – 8610 - [email protected]