Interpersonal relationships are a central feature of what it is to be human. Theory of Mind (ToM), or mentalising, is the ability to represent the hidden thoughts and beliefs of the self and others to navigate these relationships. However, to date there is no common set of formal principles that can be used to understand interpersonal relationships across context, disorder, and diversity, and in humans and artificial agents. Here we synthesise previously distinct components of social representation and inference from a broad range of past works into a common computational framework – the Standard Framework for Social Cognition - to allow translation across previously disparate processes, and to provide a starting point for local theories. We discuss applications of our standard framework to problems regarding dysfunctional theory of mind, neural implementation, artificial intelligence, and discuss potential future directions for the field.
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Barnby et al. (2023) studied this question.