In this paper we ask and try to answer seven questions, some bigger than others, on perceiving and understanding minds in others: 1) Do humans, animals, artificial agents have minds? Objectively and subjectively speaking? 2) How do we perceive and understand these other minds? 3) How are other minds represented in the brain? 4) Is the perception of minds in other species or artificial agents not just mere anthropomorphism? 5) Is it important how the other looks? Does it matter if the other is human-like (e.g., robots) or cute (e.g., animals)? 6) Does it matter at all if you think an agent has a mind on how you view yourself and others? And finally, 7) where does it all end? What methods and techniques, perspectives or approaches does the field need to answer these and future questions? Together, the answers to these questions suggest that minds are grounded in sociality and people judge minds on the capacity to feel and think, with a distinct neural network supporting this. There is emerging evidence on the flexibility thereof in terms of activity to diverse minds and presence of this network across species. Mind perception and anthropomorphism are distinct at the conceptual, psychological, and neural level, and beliefs and other top-down effects are more important than just the visual appearance of an agent. Reports on threat to human identity, intergroup effects, as well impact on group dynamics, show that there are clear inter- and intrapersonal consequences of mind perception. Future research should focus on an interdisciplinary approach embracing different disciplines from comparative psychology to linguistics, employing a multi-method assessment of mind perception in interactive, embodied, everyday situations, capturing the inter- and intrapersonal consequences thereof, to provide further answers on these and other questions.
beek et al. (Mon,) studied this question.