Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds

The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused on reasoning about the minds of isolated individuals, leaving open questions about how we reason about the minds of interacting individuals. In fact, children routinely observe social interactions well before they themselves can interact with others; how do children make sense of these observations? We propose that humans, starting early in life, can extend their understanding of individual minds (Theory of Mind) to encompass the causal relationship between multiple agents’ minds and actions (Theory of Minds). We ground our proposal within existing computational frameworks that consider mental-state reasoning as a core component of action understanding, communication, and social learning. We then review empirical work that examines children's emerging understanding of interacting minds and discuss its development. We close by suggesting directions for future work toward a unified description of how humans make sense of their complex social environment.