In everyday life, mentalizing is nested in a rich context of cognitive faculties and background information that potentially contribute to its success. Yet, we know little about these modulating effects. Here we propose that humans develop a naïve psychological model of attention (featured as a goal-dependent, intentional relation to the environment) and use this to fine-tune their mentalizing attempts, presuming that the way people represent their environment is influenced by the cognitive priorities (attention) their current intentions create. The attention model provides an opportunity to tailor mental state inferences to the temporary features of the agent whose mind is in the focus of mentalizing. The ability to trace attention is an exceptionally powerful aid for mindreading. Knowledge about the partner's attention provides background information, however being grounded in his current intentions, attention has direct relevance to the ongoing interaction. Furthermore, due to its causal connection to intentions, the output of the attention model remains valid for a prolonged but predictable amount of time: till the evoking intention is in place. The naïve attention model theory is offered as a novel theory on social attention that both incorporates existing evidence and identifies new directions in research.

在日常生活中，心理化嵌套在丰富的认知能力和背景信息中，这可能有助于其成功。然而，我们对这些调节作用知之甚少。在这里，我们建议人类发展一种幼稚的注意力心理模型（以与目标相关的，与环境有关的故意关系为特征），并以此来微调他们的心理尝试，并假设人们代表自己的环境的方式受到认知的影响。当前意图创建的优先级（注意）。注意模型提供了一个机会，可以将心理状态推断调整为代理人的临时特征，而代理人的临时特征是进行心理分析的重点。追踪注意力的能力是一种非常强大的心智阅读辅助工具。有关合作伙伴的知识 注意力提供了背景信息，然而，注意是基于他当前的意图，因此注意力与正在进行的互动有直接关系。此外，由于注意力模型与意图之间存在因果关系，因此注意力模型的输出将在较长但可预测的时间内保持有效：直到唤起意图为止。天真的注意力模型理论是一种关于社会注意力的新颖理论，既吸收了现有证据又确定了研究的新方向。