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Updated: Oct 12, 2025
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Knowing What Counts: Unbiased Stereology in the Non-human Primate Brain
Published on: May 14, 2009
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Representing knowledge, belief, and everything in between: Representational complexity in humans and other apes
Kresimir Durdevic1, Christopher Krupenye2,3
1School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St AndrewsKY16 9JP, UKkd96@st-andrews.ac.uk.
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
|November 19, 2021
Summary
We advocate for considering diversity in mentalizing, which involves understanding others' minds. This perspective, supported by animal cognition research, suggests a complex evolutionary path for theory of mind.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Comparative Psychology
- Evolutionary Psychology
Background:
- The primacy of knowledge in understanding mental states has been proposed.
- Existing frameworks may not fully capture the nuances of mentalizing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To advocate for a broader consideration of diversity within mentalizing constructs.
- To explore the relationship between knowledge, belief, and mentalizing.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual analysis building on existing theories.
- Comparative analysis of mentalizing in humans and non-human animals.
Main Results:
- Mentalizing constructs exhibit diversity both within and between knowledge and belief systems.
- Great apes and other animals demonstrate varied levels of representational complexity.
Conclusions:
- Attention to diversity in mentalizing is crucial for a comprehensive understanding.
- The evolution of theory of mind likely involves incremental elaborations of representational and computational complexity.
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