Mental Files in Perspective: Theory, Development, and Neural Foundations (Context & Content)

Intellectual development is primarily considered a domain specific enterprise. Children develop naïve physics, a folk psychology (theory of mind), a naïve biology, etc. But understanding perspective is a general, overarching phenomenon that cuts across such domains in development and in the brain. This has important theoretical consequences. For instance, our folk psychology cannot consist of a uniform "theory of mind" for explaining behaviour. Parts of the theory that are sensitive to perspective differences have to be separated from those that are not.

A central concern is how perspective is represented in the mind. The answer comes from mental files theory. A mental file represents or refers to an object. It presents the object under a particular mode of presentation-perspective. Coreferential files refer to the same object and present the object under different perspectives. Files, thus, give us a concrete way to capture perspectives with the tools for basic object cognition.

This book introduces mental files theory in relation to object files and discourse referents and then applies it to the development of perspective taking in early childhood and to brain imaging. The theory goes well beyond perspective; it is the theoretical tool for representing persisting objects, tracking them over time, and storing knowledge about them.

From a leading figure in developmental psychology, this book addresses a topic much neglected in the cognitive sciences.


The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Josef Perner, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg

JOSEF PERNER received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto. He was Professor in Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, and is now Professor of Psychology and member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg. He authored over 200 articles on cognitive development, consciousness, simulation in decision making, mental representation, and cognitive neuroscience. He served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, is a Fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Leopoldina, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel.