In recent decades, the ability to represent others' mental states (i.e., theory of mind) has gained particular attention in various disciplines ranging from ethology to cognitive neuroscience. Despite the exponentially growing interest, the functional architecture of social cognition is still unclear. In the present review, we argue that not only the vocabulary but also most of the classic measures for theory of mind lack specificity. We examined classic tests used to assess theory of mind and noted that the majority of them do not require the participant to represent another's mental state or, sometimes, any mental state at all. Our review reveals that numerous classic tests measure lower-level processes that do not directly test for theory of mind. We propose that more attention should be paid to methods used in this field of social cognition to improve the understanding of underlying concepts.

中文翻译：

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心智理论任务实际上能衡量什么？理论与实践。

在最近的几十年中，代表其他人的心理状态（即心理理论）的能力在从心理学到认知神经科学的各个学科中都得到了特别的关注。尽管人们的兴趣呈指数增长，但社会认知的功能架构仍不清楚。在本综述中，我们认为不仅词汇量而且心理理论的大多数经典量度都缺乏特异性。我们检查了用于评估心理理论的经典测验，并指出大多数测验不需要参与者代表他人的心理状态，有时甚至根本不代表任何心理状态。我们的评论表明，许多经典测试衡量的是不直接测试心理理论的低级流程。