ABSTRACT
The traditional view in the cognitive sciences holds that humans understand the behavior of others in terms of their mental states—intentions, beliefs, and desires—by exploiting what is commonly designated as “folk psychology.” According to a widely shared view, nonhuman primates are, instead, focused on the statistical recurrence of observable causal aspects of reality rather than attributing a causal role to opaque mental states. This view prefigures a sharp distinction between nonhuman species, confined to behavior reading, and our species, whose social cognition makes use of a more abstract level of explanation: mind reading. The claim according to which behavior reading and mind reading constitute two autonomous realms has nevertheless been radically questioned by recent findings in both animal and human infants social cognition.
