Liane Young
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Liane Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I often yell at my kids for things that they did by accident, like spilling a smoothie or leaving a cap off of a permanent marker and, you know, making black permanent stains all over the sofa.
It's not my fault. I didn't mean to do it. I shouldn't say this, but I tell them it doesn't matter that you didn't mean to do it. What matters is that you won't do it again.
We need to think about other people's minds in order to figure out who our friends are, who to avoid, whom to punish, whether to punish. And we need to read people's intentions in any ordinary interaction, like having a conversation and figuring out what to say and how to respond.
Thanks so much. It's good to be here, Shankar.
Well, I think we wouldn't be able to appreciate the humor and the irony in that scene where Daniel is essentially, he knows what is going on with his wife and he is trying to get his wife to not date this other man. And of course, we know that the wife doesn't know Daniel's true identity as Daniel. She thinks that He is this housekeeper and we know that she doesn't know.
And so there's this very sort of layered understanding that we need to have as the audience to find the scene funny. Yeah. We can't find it funny without realizing that she doesn't know what he knows and who he is.
Yeah, so we're able to. And I remember watching this movie as a child who, of course, hadn't had the benefit of studying how theory of mind works in the brains of children and adults. And I still found it very funny. I knew exactly what was happening, who was misunderstanding, who knew what other people didn't know, and so on, in order to be able to enjoy the scene and really the entire movie.
Yes. So I should say that many psychologists and neuroscientists use a number of different terms. Theory of mind is one of those terms, and that describes the theory that we all have, ordinary people have, about other people's minds. And what I mean by that is how we understand that other people have thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intentions, mental states in general.
And so other terms that have been used for this general cognitive capacity include mental state reasoning, mentalizing, reasoning about intentions, and so on.
Exactly. Even as you and I are having this conversation, Shankar, I'm trying to figure out what it is that you want to know and how to explain the term theory of mine in a way that will be accessible and so on. And sometimes we take different cues from people as we're having that conversation, whether they're nodding their heads, whether they're pausing, whether they look confused and so on.
And so We take in all of that information to figure out what people are thinking and how they're responding to the information that we're giving them.
I think it's really important that we're able to take the perspective of different characters when we're watching movies, watching TV shows. reading books. And often as the reader, as the viewer, we have a sort of different, in some cases, omniscient perspective. We can see the scene unfolding in a way that characters within the scene cannot.
And so on one level, we understand what's going on in a way that characters within the story do not. And we also are able to not just get into the minds of characters, but get into the hearts of characters as well. So we know how they're feeling and how they're reacting and responding in ways that maybe other characters in the story don't.
This is a little bit controversial in the field, but I think what is generally recognized in the field is that at least children's capacity for explicit theory of mind, being able to reason and verbalize answers to theory of mind tasks, that ability emerges between the ages of three and five years. Psychologists are able to administer
batteries of theory of mind tasks to young children to figure out when exactly it is that individual children are able to think about other agents in the world as having minds that are maybe separate from the reality of a situation.
So one example of a false belief task would be the Sally-Anne task in which you have two puppets, Sally and Anne. Sally is playing with a ball and then she takes the ball and puts it away in a basket. She leaves the room and another puppet comes in and moves the ball to a different location. And then children are asked when Sally comes back into the room, where does she think her ball is?
Did Sally see Anne move the block?
And three-year-old children will tend to say that she thinks the ball is where it really is, even though she's not supposed to know that Anne came in and moved her ball, whereas older children, by the time children are five, they know that Sally has a false belief about where that ball is.
Yes, that's exactly right. So younger children, three-year-old children don't have a concept that people could have beliefs in their heads that depart from the reality of the world, the facts of the situation.
Yeah, this is in a uniform capacity that we see the same in all people across all situations. It can be dependent on the individual. It can be dependent on the context, even in healthy, typical populations. We've also looked at specific patient populations as well, including patients with specific brain damage.
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