Theory of mind

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mental states to oneself and others, using them to explain or predict behavior.

Belief: A proposition or representation that a person accepts as true, whether or not it is accurate. Beliefs can differ between people and from reality, making them central to mental-state attribution.
Mentalizing: The process of interpreting behavior in terms of mental states such as beliefs and intentions. It names the interpretive activity that theory of mind enables.
Autism: A neurodevelopmental condition involving differences in social communication, interaction, and patterns of behavior or interests. Research has examined mental-state reasoning in autism, while rejecting a single-deficit account of autistic people.
Sally–Anne test: A false-belief task in which a child predicts where Sally will search for an object moved while she was absent. Its prediction tests whether the child tracks Sally's outdated belief rather than the object's real location.
Empathy: The capacity to understand or share another person's emotional state. Empathy overlaps with social understanding but is not identical to representing beliefs and intentions.
Intention: A mental commitment to perform an action or bring about an outcome. Attributing intentions helps explain why people act, beyond what their movements show.
Joint attention: Coordinated attention in which people attend to the same object while monitoring one another. Shared attention gives clues about what another person perceives and knows.
Asperger syndrome: A former diagnostic category now generally included within autism spectrum disorder. Older theory-of-mind studies often discussed this diagnosis separately from autism.
Smarties task: A false-belief task in which a familiar candy container holds an unexpected object, testing predictions about another person's expectation. It tests whether someone can distinguish another person's likely belief from their own knowledge.
Cognitive empathy: The capacity to infer another person's emotional state without necessarily sharing it. It raises the question of how emotion inference relates to broader mental-state attribution.

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