Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research suggests that people’s folk conception of themind is organized along a few fundamental dimensions; butstudies disagree on the exact number of those dimensions. Withan expanded item pool of mental capacities, variations ofquestion probes, and numerous judged agents, four studies pro-vide consistent evidence for three dimensions of perceivedmind: Affect (A), Moral and Mental Regulation (M), and Real-ity Interaction (R). The dimensions are not simply bundles ofsemantically related features but capture psychological func-tions of the mind—to engage with its own processes, with otherminds, and with the social and physical world. Under someconditions, two of the three dimensions further divide: Adivides into negative and positive (social) affect, and M dividesinto moral cognition and social cognition. We offer a 20-iteminstrument to measure people’s 3- and 5-dimensionalrepresentations of human and other minds.