Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article by: John Barresi & Chris Moore on: INTENTIONAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current BBS Associate. 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An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by anonymous ftp (or gopher or world-wide-web) according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. ____________________________________________________________________ INTENTIONAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING John Barresi and Chris Moore Department of Psychology Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, Canada. jbarresi(a)ac.dal.ca moorec(a)ac.dal.ca ABSTRACT Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities cab be called "intentional relations." We present a four-level framework for social understanding which organizes the ways in which social organisms represent their own intentional relations those of other agents. The information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about other agents' intentional relations (or third person information). Through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals are at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Among nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations to mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals may result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. -------------------------------------------------------------- To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable by anonymous ftp from princeton.edu according to the instructions below (the filename is bbs.barresi). Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. 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