Integration Between Social and Physical Intelligence in the Human Mind and Brain

Join us for a talk by Shari Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. This talk is part of the Kempner Seminar Series, a research-level seminar series on recent advances in the field.

How do people make sense of other people, who are simultaneously psychological beings and physical objects? Across the cognitive sciences, researchers have studied theory of mind (making sense of other people’s behaviors in terms of their mental states, or ‘naive psychology’) and physical reasoning (making sense of physical events in terms of their underlying mechanics and dynamics, or ‘naive physics’), as two separate processes. In this talk, I’ll argue for two key ways in which psychological reasoning depends on physical reasoning.

First, we represent animate agents as objects who act on and in a physical world. Second, we use physical knowledge in order to make inferences about other minds, including what other people want, feel, and know, how hard they are trying, and how much danger they are in. We will tour research in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which provides evidence for the intersection of these two systems, and Bayesian computational models of theory of mind, which articulate a formal hypothesis about how these two systems work together. From early in human development, we solve a ‘commonsense mind-body problem’ by dedicating two distinct systems for reasoning about ethereal minds and physical bodies, grounded in a shared representation of the physical world.

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