All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK.
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK.
Science. 2014 Jun 20;344(6190):1243091. doi: 10.1126/science.1243091.
It is not just a manner of speaking: "Mind reading," or working out what others are thinking and feeling, is markedly similar to print reading. Both of these distinctly human skills recover meaning from signs, depend on dedicated cortical areas, are subject to genetically heritable disorders, show cultural variation around a universal core, and regulate how people behave. But when it comes to development, the evidence is conflicting. Some studies show that, like learning to read print, learning to read minds is a long, hard process that depends on tuition. Others indicate that even very young, nonliterate infants are already capable of mind reading. Here, we propose a resolution to this conflict. We suggest that infants are equipped with neurocognitive mechanisms that yield accurate expectations about behavior ("automatic" or "implicit" mind reading), whereas "explicit" mind reading, like literacy, is a culturally inherited skill; it is passed from one generation to the next by verbal instruction.
“读心术”，即推断他人所思所感，与阅读印刷文字极为相似。这两种人类特有的技能都从符号中提取意义，依赖于特定的皮质区域，受遗传障碍影响，表现出普遍核心之外的文化差异，并调节着人们的行为。但在发展方面，证据相互矛盾。一些研究表明，与学习阅读印刷文字一样，学习读心术是一个漫长而艰难的过程，需要接受教导。另一些研究则表明，即使是非常年幼、还不识字的婴儿，已经具备读心的能力。在这里，我们提出了一个解决这一矛盾的方案。我们认为，婴儿具有神经认知机制，可以对行为产生准确的预期（“自动”或“内隐”读心术），而“外显”读心术则像读写能力一样，是一种文化传承的技能；它通过口头指导从一代传递到下一代。
