Theory of mind

The success of Large Language Models (LLM) has led to controversial hypotheses about emergent intelligence beyond language competence, amongst which Theory of Mind (ToM) has become the most debated. While some reported gpt-4 to pass the Sally-Anne test, others reported limitations. Here we aim to validate LLM ability to recognise ToM occurrences in natural human dialogue using the activity of ToM-associated brain regions.The current analysis uses an existing corpus of 25 participants recorded with functional MRI while carrying conversations in 4 sessions x 6 trials alternating a Human and a Ro

…A growing body of behavioural and neuroimaging work suggests that we map observed actions onto our own motor system to successfully interpret others’ movements, and that movement similarity between an agent and observer facilitates accurate inferences about the agent’s internal state. A network of frontal, parietal and occipitotemporal regions, termed the action-observation network (AON), is presumed to subserve this coupling

…Cognitive abilities such as theory of mind, cooperation or mental time travel have been considered uniquely human. Despite empirical evidence showing that animals other than humans are able (to some extent) of these cognitive achievements, findings are still heavily contested. In this context, being able to abstract relations of similarity has also been considered one of the hallmarks of human cognition. While previous research has shown that other animals (e.g., primates) can attend to relatio

…advancements made in the framework of the Lendület project entitled ’The cognitive basis of human sociality’. The main objective of this project was to understand the mechanisms that enable the unique sociality of humans, from the angle of cognitive science. In my talk, I will focus on recent empirical evidence in the study of three fundamental social cognitive functions (social categorization, theory of mind and social learning; mainly from the empirical lenses of developmental p

Theory of mind, which consists of reasoning about the knowledge, belief, desire, and similar mental states of others, is a key component of social reasoning and social interaction. While it has been studied by cognitive scientists for decades, none of the prevailing theories of the processes that underlie theory of mind reasoning and development explain the breadth of experimental findings. I propose that this is because theory of mind is, like much of human reasoning, inherently analogical. In this talk, I will discuss several theory of mind findings from the psychology literature, the challe

In social interactions, theory of mind (ToM) is postulated as the reason for why humans can successfully interact with novel people, given that everyone has beliefs, desires, and goals. Most ToM studies design explicit models to represent other agents’ mental states, using this to inform behavior. However, it is unclear whether or how ToM could emerge through learning to act in a social environment. We sought to identify network mechanisms of ToM in a recurrent neural network trained to play a competitive neuroscience task that requires ToM. The network, trained using deep reinforcement learni