Everyday understanding of human behavior rests on having a theory of mind--the ability to relate people's actions to underlying mental states such as beliefs and desires. It has been suggested that an impaired theory of mind may lie at the heart of psychological disorders that are characterized by deficits in social understanding, such as autism. In this study, we employed the event-related pot...

People commonly interpret others’ behavior in terms of the actors’ underlying beliefs, knowledge, or other mental states, thereby using their ‘‘theory of mind.” Two experiments suggest that using one’s theory of mind is a relatively effortful process. In both experiments, people reflexively used their own knowledge and beliefs to follow a speaker’s instruction, but only effortfully used their t...

We formulate a simple theory of deductive reasoning based on mental models. One prediction of the theory is experimentally tested and found to be incorrect. The bearing of our results on contemporary theories of mental models is discussed. We then consider a potential objection to current rule-theories of deduction. Such theories picture deductive reasoning as the successive application of infe...

Human adults conceive of one another as beings with minds, and attribute to one another mental states like perceptions, desires and beliefs. That is, we understand other people using a 'Theory of Mind'. The current study investigated the contributions of four brain regions to Theory of Mind reasoning. The right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) was recruited selectively for the attribution of me...

David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness (HOT) is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. The second mental state is ‘‘higher order’’ since it is about a mental state. ...

There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely...