In cognitive science, there has been comparatively much more attention for first-order theory of mind ("Bob knows that Alice will throw him a surprise party") than for second-order theory of mind ("Alice does not know that Bob knows that she will throw him a suprise party"). People can apply theory of mind recursively, up to a point, but the literature about higher orders of theory of mind is rather scant. In this lecture, the tables will be turned: I will gloss over first-order theory of mind rather quickly and focus mostly on higher-order theory of mind, especially on second-order theory of mind.
Second-order theory of mind starts to develop when children are around 5-6 years old. Second-order (and sometimes even higher-order) theory of mind becomes more and more important as children become older. It helps them to understand and thrive in complex social interactions, for example, to understand the concept of a lie or a promise. In adult life, second-order theory of mind is vital for reaching win-win solutions in negotiations and for establishing and maintaining teamwork.
Based on research in my Vici project "Cognitive systems in interaction: Logical and computational models of higher-order social cognition", I will discuss several strands of research seeking answers to difficult questions about recursive theory of mind and its relation to causal reasoning. How do children learn to apply second-order theory of mind reasoning in story tasks, and does causal reasoning play a role in this development? Can 5-year old children on the brink of developing second-order theory of mind be trained to solve second-order false belief tasks? How is success on second-order false belief tasks related to their abilities to apply recursion in the language domain and to their working memory capacities? Do adults use backward induction or a kind of causal reasoning when they apply recursive theory of mind in a game? To investigate these questions, we combine computational cognitive models and empirical research.
© 2017 K. Schulz