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About the Authors:
Marie Devaine
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing - original draft
Affiliations Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France, INSERM UMR S975, Paris, France
Aurore San-Galli
Roles Data curation, Investigation
Affiliations Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France, INSERM UMR S975, Paris, France
Cinzia Trapanese
Roles Data curation, Investigation
Affiliation: Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7206, Paris, France
Giulia Bardino
Roles Data curation, Investigation
Affiliations Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France, Universita La Sapienza, Rome, Italy
Christelle Hano
Roles Data curation, Investigation
Affiliation: INSERM UMR S975, Paris, France
Michel Saint Jalme
Roles Investigation
Affiliations Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7206, Paris, France, Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France
Sebastien Bouret
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation
Affiliations Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France, INSERM UMR S975, Paris, France
Shelly Masi
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Resources, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
¶‡ These are co-last authors.
Affiliation: Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7206, Paris, France
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5789-0038
Jean Daunizeau
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
¶‡ These are co-last authors.
Affiliations Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France, INSERM UMR S975, Paris, France
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9142-1270Abstract
Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the ability to understand others' mental states, endows humans with highly adaptive social skills such as teaching or deceiving. Candidate evolutionary explanations have been proposed for the unique sophistication of human ToM among primates. For example, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis states that the increasing complexity of social networks may have induced a demand for sophisticated ToM. This type of scenario ignores neurocognitive constraints that may eventually be crucial limiting factors for ToM evolution. In contradistinction, the cognitive scaffolding hypothesis asserts that a species' opportunity to develop sophisticated ToM is mostly determined by its general cognitive capacity (on which ToM is scaffolded). However, the actual relationships between ToM sophistication and either...