Towards a Logical Formalisation of Theory of Mind: A Study on False Belief Tasks

Theory of Mind, the cognitive capacity to attribute internal mental states to oneself and others, is a crucial component of social skills. Its formal study has become important, witness recent research on reasoning and information update by intelligent agents, and some proposals for its formal modelling have put forward settings based on Epistemic Logic (EL). Still, due to intrinsic idealisations, it is questionable whether EL can be used to model the high-order cognition of ‘real’ agents. This manuscript proposes a mental attribution modelling logical framework that is more in-line with findings in cognitive science. We introduce the setting and some of its technical features, and argue why it does justice to empirical observations, using it for modelling well-known False-Belief Tasks.