ABSTRACT
The eight central claims of the paper are that: (1) Humans have evolved to be able to attribute mental states to interpret and predict action—that is, to “mindread” (Premack’s claim). (2) The neurocognitive system dedicated to this function (the Mindreading System) has 4 modular components: (a) an Intentionality Detector (ID), akin to Premack’s suggestion, whose function is to represent behaviour in terms of volitional states (desire and goal); (b) an Eye Direction Detector (EDD), whose function is initially to detect the presence of eye-like stimuli, and later to represent their direction as an Agent “seeing” the Self or something else; (c) a Shared Attention Mechanism (SAM), whose function is to represent if the Self and another Agent are attending to the same object or event; and (d) a Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM), as Leslie outlines, whose function is to represent the full range of mental states (including the epistemic ones), and to integrate mental state knowledge into a coherent and usable theory for interpreting action. (3) ID and EDD are held to process dyadic representations, SAM processes triadic representations, and ToMM processes what Leslie calls “M-Representations”. (4) Whilst SAM can build triadic representations from the output of either ID or EDD, these are more easily built in the visual modality, hence the evolution of a special relationship between EDD and SAM. (5) SAM also functions to link ID with EDD, enabling eye-direction to be read in terms of volitional states. (6) When SAM outputs its triadic representations to ToMM, this triggers the latter to function. (7) A subgroup of children with autism are postulated to be impaired in SAM, whilst congenitally blind children are not. (8) In this subgroup of autism, ToMM is therefore not activated.
