ABSTRACT
In order to successfully navigate the physical world and to flourish as a biological agent, it is very useful to acquire information about what is in one’s environment. If you don’t want to walk off a cliff or run into a tree, you would do well to check what is in front of you before you step. And if you don’t want to starve to death, then it behooves you to find out where there is something to eat. For highly social species such as we humans are, it is also very useful to acquire information about other agents in one’s environment. After all, we need to be able to anticipate and adapt to others’ behavior, to coordinate with them, to learn from them, to choose appropriate cooperation partners and to appropriately calibrate our degree of commitment to joint activities. It is therefore no surprise that we have developed sophisticated social-cognitive abilities that enable us to detect agents in our environment and to track a great many features of them – ranging from their bodily features, such as size, age, gender, and attractiveness, to social-relational features such as social status and group membership, to mental features such as preferences (Michael and Christensen, 2016), intentions (Sartori, Becchio, and Castiello, 2011), beliefs (Apperly and Butterfill, 2009; Michael, Christensen, and Overgaard, 2013), desires (Rakoczy, Warneken, and Tomasello, 2008; Steglich-Petersen and Michael, 2015), emotions (Tamietto and de Gelder, 2010), and personality traits (Westra, 2017).
