Inserm Unité Mixte de Recherche-Santé (UMR-S) 1028, CNRS UMR 5292, ImpAct, Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, Université Lyon 1.
Plateforme "Mouvement et Handicap" and Plateforme NeuroImmersion, Hôpital Henry-Gabrielle, Hospices Civils de Lyon, Saint-Genis-Laval, France.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2020 Mar;15(2):384-396. doi: 10.1177/1745691619896607. Epub 2020 Feb 18.
In recent decades, the ability to represent others' mental states (i.e., theory of mind) has gained particular attention in various disciplines ranging from ethology to cognitive neuroscience. Despite the exponentially growing interest, the functional architecture of social cognition is still unclear. In the present review, we argue that not only the vocabulary but also most of the classic measures for theory of mind lack specificity. We examined classic tests used to assess theory of mind and noted that the majority of them do not require the participant to represent another's mental state or, sometimes, any mental state at all. Our review reveals that numerous classic tests measure lower-level processes that do not directly test for theory of mind. We propose that more attention should be paid to methods used in this field of social cognition to improve the understanding of underlying concepts.
近几十年来，代表他人心理状态（即心理理论）的能力在从动物行为学到认知神经科学等各个学科中引起了特别关注。尽管人们的兴趣呈指数级增长，但社会认知的功能结构仍不清楚。在本综述中，我们认为不仅词汇，而且大多数经典的心理理论测量方法都缺乏特异性。我们检查了用于评估心理理论的经典测试，并注意到其中大多数测试都不需要参与者代表他人的心理状态，有时甚至不需要代表任何心理状态。我们的综述表明，许多经典测试测量的是较低层次的过程，而不是直接测试心理理论。我们建议应该更加关注社会认知领域中使用的方法，以提高对潜在概念的理解。
