Ben Meijering

What Eye Movements Can Tell about Theory of Mind in a Strategic Game

This study investigates strategies in reasoning about mental states of others, a process that requires theory of mind. It is a first step in studying the cognitive basis of such reasoning, as strategies affect tradeoffs between cognitive resources. Participants were presented with a two-player game that required reasoning about the mental states of the opponent. Game theory literature discerns two candidate strategies that participants could use in this game: either forward reasoning or backward reasoning. Forward reasoning proceeds from the first decision point to the last, whereas backward reasoning proceeds in the opposite direction. Backward reasoning is the only optimal strategy, because the optimal outcome is known at each decision point. Nevertheless, we argue that participants prefer forward reasoning because it is similar to causal reasoning. Causal reasoning, in turn, is prevalent in human reasoning. Eye movements were measured to discern between forward and backward progressions of fixations. The observed fixation sequences corresponded best with forward reasoning. Early in games, the probability of observing a forward progression of fixations is higher than the probability of observing a backward progression. Later in games, the probabilities of forward and backward progressions are similar, which seems to imply that participants were either applying backward reasoning or jumping back to previous decision points while applying forward reasoning. Thus, the game-theoretical favorite strategy, backward reasoning, does seem to exist in human reasoning. However, participants preferred the more familiar, practiced, and prevalent strategy: forward reasoning.

On the Identification of Quantifiers' Witness Sets: A Study of Multi-quantifier Sentences

Natural language sentences that talk about two or more sets of entities can be assigned various readings. The ones in which the sets are independent of one another are particularly challenging from the formal point of view. In this paper we will call them ‘Independent Set (IS) readings’. Cumulative and collective readings are paradigmatic examples of IS readings. Most approaches aiming at representing the meaning of IS readings implement some kind of maximality conditions on the witness sets involved. Two kinds of maximization have been proposed in the literature: ‘Local’ and ‘Global’ maximization. In this paper, we present an online questionnaire whose results appear to support Local maximization. The latter seems to capture the proper interplay between the semantics and the pragmatics of multi-quantifier sentences, provided that witness sets are selected on pragmatic grounds.

Correction: What Eye Movements Can Tell about Theory of Mind in a Strategic Game

There is a sentence missing from the Funding Statement. The following is the missing sentence: Open access publication of this article was financially supported by NWOs Incentive Fund Open Access Publications (036.002.111).