2026
How an understanding of bodily energy constrains theory of mind
Keyu Amber Liu, Shari Liu
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2026 Oral Talk
Theory of mind allows us to connect other people’s behaviors with their hidden mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions). Yet, in addition to mental beings, people are also living organisms with physiological states (e.g., feeling tired or energetic). How do we incorporate these physiological states in our reasoning about other agents? Across three pre-registered experiments (total N = 232), we test the hypothesis that US adults use a concept of bodily energy - a resource of the living body that fuels action - to reason about the minds and behaviors of other agents. Adults systematically judged that certain actions would cause an agent’s energy to rise vs. fall, used an agent’s energy state to reason about action cost, and used an agent’s beliefs about action cost to infer their energy state. These results are consistent with the proposal that our theory of mind connects other agents’ actions with their mental and physiological states.
How an understanding of bodily energy constrains theory of mind
Keyu Amber Liu, Shari Liu
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2026 Oral Talk
Theory of mind allows us to connect other people’s behaviors with their hidden mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions). Yet, in addition to mental beings, people are also living organisms with physiological states (e.g., feeling tired or energetic). How do we incorporate these physiological states in our reasoning about other agents? Across three pre-registered experiments (total N = 232), we test the hypothesis that US adults use a concept of bodily energy - a resource of the living body that fuels action - to reason about the minds and behaviors of other agents. Adults systematically judged that certain actions would cause an agent’s energy to rise vs. fall, used an agent’s energy state to reason about action cost, and used an agent’s beliefs about action cost to infer their energy state. These results are consistent with the proposal that our theory of mind connects other agents’ actions with their mental and physiological states.