REVIEWS 是口 take up in the concluding section of this review. y on n:they bring and in ntion etal lobu mental states OLUME 4 MARCH 2003171NATURE REVIEWS | NEUROSCIENCE VOLUME 4 | MARCH 2003 | 171 REVIEWS Theory of mind. Abilities that have been dubbed ‘theory of mind’68 allow us to attribute mental states to other people69. Attributions of beliefs, specifically false beliefs, to other subjects have been particularly studied (FIG. 5a). Such abilities, which emerge at about four years of age, might be unique to humans, and might be assembled out of a collection of more basic skills by which we assign animacy, actions, goals and intentions to stimuli, an issue that has seen intense recent investi￾gation using visual motion stimuli70. In addition to the reliable activation of superior temporal gyrus that I mentioned earlier, several functional imaging studies have shown activation of the medial frontal lobe and inferior parietal lobule when people view visual motion38,71,72 or gaze stimuli73 that signal such directed mental states. structures that mediate social judgements also mediate basic reward processing, we are led to question whether the former might be reducible to the latter, an issue that I take up in the concluding section of this review. Thinking about other people Several of the processes discussed in the preceding sec￾tion involve more than perception; they bring in addi￾tional information beyond what is conveyed by the stimulus to guide our social decisions and judgements about it. Primates, and especially humans, stand out in their ability to take into account what others are think￾ing — an ability that requires representing what might be going on in other people’s minds. A varied collection of processes comprise such higher-level manipulation of social information. b c a Sagittal Transverse Coronal 0 1 2 3 4 5 z-values Figure 5 | Investigating theory of mind. a | Sally-Ann task. Schematic of the scenario that is shown to infants and children to assess theory-of-mind abilities, specifically the capacity to attribute false beliefs. Sally has a pram and Ann has a box. Sally puts a toy into her pram, and then she goes out for a walk. While she is outside, Ann takes the toy from the pram and puts it into her own box. When Sally comes back, where will she look for the toy? Normal children of four years of age and older answer that Sally will look inside her pram, because that is where she (falsely) believes the toy is. b | Theory-of-mind from cartoons. Assessing theory of mind in adults without ceiling effects is more difficult and various tasks have been used. This figure shows examples of cartoon stimuli in which understanding the joke depends on the ability to attribute mental states to others (left) or does not (right). Contrasting these two kinds of cartoons results in brain activation that reflects engagement of theory-of-mind processes, specifically an activation in medial prefrontal cortex (c). Panel c reproduced, with permission from REF. 71 © (2000) Elsevier Science