theory of mind: a standalone construct

David Premack and Guy Woodruff coined the phrase in their 1978 paper Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?, defining it as an individual's capacity to impute unobservable mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, to itself and to others, and to use those imputed states to predict behavior. Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith gave the idea its seminal developmental test in 1985 with the false-belief task, in which a child must recognise that another person can hold a belief the child knows to be untrue, for example searching for an object where the person last saw it rather than where it actually is. The construct names the everyday ability to treat other people as minds with their own separate contents, and to reason about what they know, want, and expect, even when those contents differ from one's own or from reality. It anchors a large literature spanning developmental psychology, primate cognition, autism research, and philosophy of mind, where debate continues over whether the capacity is built from a theory-like body of inference or from a more direct simulation of others.[1][2]

Unit

A cognitive capacity of an individual, present or absent and graded in degree, inferred from performance on mental-state reasoning tasks

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with false-belief tasks (such as the Sally-Anne and unexpected-contents tasks), the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, and other structured mental-state attribution measures