As the article notes, theory of mind encompasses a lot of different applied ability, including cognitive, affective, and behavioral theories of mind. Further work should examine AI reasoning about the full range of distinct theories of mind

Broadly speaking we might distinguish theories of mind like:

• Motivational states
  • Goals
  • Intentions
  • Desires
  • Preferences
• Cognitive/epistemic states
  • Different kinds of states:
    • Perceptions
    • Knowledge
      • e.g., understanding vs. no understanding
    • Beliefs
      • e.g., False vs. true
  • Different kinds of perspective-taking
    • Understanding what others can perceive
    • Understanding how something appears from another’s perspective
• Social
  • Faux pas
  • Inter-actor preferences, desires, etc
• Complexity
  • Second, third order etc.
  • ToM space: concurrent processing of theory of mind for multiple actors
• I/O
  • How ToM is inferred from perspectives

Some useful psychological papers might be:

Wellman (2018) describes the “state of the art” of theory of mind research, with an applied developmental focus.

Schaafsma et al. (2015) argues that current theory of mind research is "not constrained adequately in its diverse usages, and too much by anchoring to a single concept” (Bob Spunt is a coauthor and I could definitely reach out to him for more guidance). Krupenye et al. (2019) describe current and future directions of ToM in animals. They make distinctions between ToM of desires [goals, intentions] vs beliefs.

Conway et al. (2019) describe individual differences in ToM as differences in ability to represent minds in a multidimensional psychological space.

Leer, Troust, and Vorguanti (2023) use violation of expectation about a user’s responses to enable an LLM to learn about their users. Is this really meta-cognitive thought though? Seems like not necessarily meta-cognitive thought. https://plasticlabs.ai/

REFERENCES

Conway, J. R., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2019). Understanding individual differences in theory of mind via representation of minds, not mental states. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 26, 798-812.

Krupenye, C., & Call, J. (2019). Theory of mind in animals: Current and future directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 10(6), e1503.

Schaafsma, S. M., Pfaff, D. W., Spunt, R. P., & Adolphs, R. (2015). Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(2), 65-72:

Wellman, H. M. (2018). Theory of mind: The state of the art* . European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15(6), 728–755. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2018.1435413