Determine the scope and boundaries of theory of mind

Determine whether knowledge concerning social relationships and groups, cognitive resources such as memory and attention, bodily states such as hunger and pain, personality traits, social networks, and physical appearances belongs to the conceptual repertoire of theory of mind, to intuitive theories of other domains such as intuitive biology or intuitive sociology, or to systems that are not theory-like at all, including systems supporting face, animacy, and social-interaction perception.

Background

The paper presents the domain-specific programming language memo as a partial formalization of adult theory of mind, particularly its treatment of beliefs and desires. The authors explicitly acknowledge that memo does not settle the full scope of the domain. They identify a substantive unresolved classification problem: determining which kinds of social, cognitive, bodily, personality-related, relational, and perceptual knowledge should count as part of theory of mind rather than as part of another intuitive theory or a non-theory-like cognitive system.

This problem matters for the proposed DSL framework because the answer determines whether memo should be expanded with additional constructs or instead interfaced with separate domain-specific languages representing other cognitive domains.