Mentalizing and Marr: an information processing approach to the study of social cognition

To interact successfully, individuals must not only recognize one another as intentional agents driven primarily by internal mental states, but also possess a system for making reliable and useful inferences about the nature of those beliefs, feelings, goals, and dispositions. The ability to make such mental state inferences (i.e., to mentalize or mindread) is the central accomplishment of human social cognition. The present article suggests that our understanding of how humans go about making mental state inferences will benefit from treating social cognition primarily as an information processing system that comprises a set of mechanisms for elaborating more basic social information into an understanding of another's mind. Following Marr's [Marr, D., 1982. Vision. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA] framework for the study of such information processing systems, I suggest that questions about social cognition might profitably be asked at three levels--computation, algorithm, and implementation--and outline a number of ways in which a description of social cognition at the middle level (i.e., the step-by-step processes that give rise to mental state inferences) can be informed by analysis at the other two.