Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have oftendivided the mind into fundamental component parts. Does thisintuition carry over into folk philosophy of mind? In a seriesof large-scale studies, we explore intuitive distinctions amongdifferent kinds of mental phenomena and consider how thesedistinctions might organize the conceptual space of thediverse “intelligent” and “social” entities in the modernworld. Across studies, independent exploratory factoranalyses reveal a common latent structure underlying mentalcapacity attributions, centered on three types of phenomenalexperiences: physiological experiences of biological needs(e.g., hunger, pain); social-emotional experiences of self- andother-relevant emotions (e.g., guilt, pride); and perceptual-cognitive abilities to detect and use information about theenvironment (e.g., hearing, memory). We argue for anexpanded model of folk philosophy of mind that goes beyondagency and experience (H. M. Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007)to make basic and important distinctions among differentvarieties of experience.