Abstract
Effective communication between humans and machines requires artificial tools to adopt a human-like social perspective. The Theory of Mind (ToM) enables understanding and predicting mental states and behaviours, crucial for social interactions from childhood through adulthood. Artificial agents with ToM skills can better coordinate actions, such as in warehouses or healthcare. Incorporating ToM in AI systems can revolutionise our interactions with intelligent machines. This proposal emphasises the current focus on first-order ToM models in the literature and investigates the potential of creating a computational model for higher-order ToM.
Keywords:
artificial intelligence; computational modelling; perspective taking; social agents; theory of mind.
Copyright © 2024 Tavella, Manzi, Vinanzi, Di Dio, Massaro, Cangelosi and Marchetti.
Grants and funding
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. F.T. and A.C.‘s work was partially supported by the UKRI TAS Node on Trust (EP/V026682/1), the EPSRC CRADLE project (EP/X02489X/1), the ERC Advanced project “eTALK” (Selected by the Horizon ERC, funded by UKRI) and the US AFSOR/EOARD project THRIVE++. S.V.‘s work was supported by Sheffield Hallam University’s Early Career Research and Innovation Fellowship. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. F.M., C.D.D., D.M. and A.M’s research and its publication are supported by the research line (funds for research and publication) of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and F.M.‘s also by “PON REACT EU DM 1062/21 57-I-999-1: Artificial agents, humanoid robots and human-robot interactions” funding of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan.