Ian A. Apperly

Seeing It Their Way: Evidence for Rapid and Involuntary Computation of What Other People See.

In a series of three visual perspective-taking experiments, we asked adult participants to judge their own or someone elses visual perspective in situations where both perspectives were either the same or different. We found that participants could not easily ignore what someone else saw when making self-perspective judgments. This was observed even when participants were only required to take their own perspective within the same block of trials (Experiment 2) or even within the entire experiment (Experiment 3), i.e. under conditions which gave participants a clear opportunity to adopt a strategy of ignoring the other persons irrelevant perspective. Under some circumstances, participants were also more efficient at judging the other persons perspective than at judging their own perspective. Collectively, these results suggest that adults make use of rapid and efficient processes to compute what other people can see.

Is Belief Reasoning Automatic

Understanding the operating characteristics of theory of mind is essential for understanding how beliefs, desires, and other mental states are inferred, and for understanding the role such inferences could play in other cognitive processes. We present the first investigation of the automaticity of belief reasoning. In an incidental false-belief task, adult subjects responded more slowly to unexpected questions concerning another persons belief about an objects location than to questions concerning the objects real location. Results in other conditions showed that responses to belief questions were not necessarily slower than responses to reality questions, as subjects showed no difference in response times to belief and reality questions when they were instructed to track the persons beliefs about the objects location. The results suggest that adults do not ascribe beliefs to agents automatically.

Studies of adults can inform accounts of theory of mind development

There is strong evidence that developments in childrens theory of mind (ToM) at 3?4 years are related to developments in language and executive function. However, these relationships might exist for 2 reasons. First, language and executive function might be necessary for the mature ToM abilities that children are in the process of developing. Second, language and executive function may be necessary for developing ToM but have no necessary role in mature ToM. It is difficult to distinguish between these possibilities if researchers only study young children. Studies of adults can provide direct evidence about the role of language and executive function in mature ToM. Recent work suggests that impaired executive function has multiple roles in adult ToM but that severely impaired grammar can leave ToM structurally intact. While studies of children report that ToM correlates with both language and executive function, findings from adults suggest that these relationships should be interpreted in importantly different ways.

What is “theory of mind”? Concepts, cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.

Egocentrism and Automatic Perspective Taking in Children and Adults

Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other persons perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance improved. In addition, it was more difficult to judge ones own perspective when it differed from that of the other person, suggesting that the others perspective was processed even though it interfered with self-perspective judgments. In a logically equivalent, nonsocial task, the same degree of interference was not observed. These findings are discussed in relation to recent findings suggesting precocious theory-of-mind abilities in infancy.

Making tools isn’t child’s play

Tool making evidences intelligent, flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that 4- to 7-year-olds chose a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tube. In Experiment 2, 3- to 5-year-olds consistently failed to innovate a simple hook tool. Eight-year-olds performed at mature levels. In contrast, making a tool following demonstration was easy for even the youngest children. In Experiment 3, childrens performance did not improve given the opportunity to manipulate the objects in a warm-up phase. Childrens tool innovation lags substantially behind their ability to learn how to make tools by observing others.

Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults' ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker

Keysar et al. (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003) report that adults frequently failed to use their conceptual competence for theory of mind (ToM) in an online communication game where they needed to take account of a speakers perspective. The current research reports 3 experiments investigating the cognitive processes contributing to adults’ errors. In Experiments 1 and 2 the frequency of adults’ failure to use ToM was unaffected by perspective switching. In Experiment 3 adults made more errors when interpreting instructions according to the speakers perspective than according to an arbitrary rule. We suggest that adults are efficient at switching perspectives, but that actually using what another person knows to interpret what they say is relatively inefficient, giving rise to egocentric errors during communication.

The Neural and Cognitive Time Course of Theory of Mind

Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies implicate both frontal and temporoparietal cortices when humans reason about the mental states of others. Here, we report an event-related potentials study of the time course of one such “theory of mind” ability: visual perspective taking. The findings suggest that posterior cortex, perhaps the temporoparietal cortex, calculates and represents the perspective of self versus other, and then, later, the right frontal cortex resolves conflict between perspectives during response selection.

Developmental continuity in theory of mind: speed and accuracy of belief-desire reasoning in children and adults.

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult participants completed simple, computer-based tests of belief-desire reasoning, which recorded response times as well as error rates. Both measures suggested that, like young children, older children and adults find it more difficult to reason about false belief and negative desires than true beliefs and positive desires. It is argued that this developmental continuity is most consistent with either executive competence or executive performance accounts of the development of belief-desire reasoning.

Seeing it my way or your way: Frontoparietal brain areas sustain viewpoint-independent perspective selection processes

A hallmark of human social interaction is the ability to consider other peoples mental states, such as what they see, believe, or desire. Prior neuroimaging research has predominantly investigated the neural mechanisms involved in computing ones own or another persons perspective and largely ignored the question of perspective selection. That is, which brain regions are engaged in the process of selecting between self and other perspectives? To address this question, the current fMRI study used a behavioral paradigm that required participants to select between competing visual perspectives. We provide two main extensions to current knowledge. First, we demonstrate that brain regions within dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal cortices respond in a viewpoint-independent manner during the selection of task-relevant over task-irrelevant perspectives. More specifically, following the computation of two competing visual perspectives, common regions of frontoparietal cortex are engaged to select ones own viewpoint over anothers as well as select anothers viewpoint over ones own. Second, in the absence of conflict between the content of competing perspectives, we showed a reduced engagement of frontoparietal cortex when judging anothers visual perspective relative to ones own. This latter finding provides the first brain-based evidence for the hypothesis that, in some situations, another persons perspective is automatically and effortlessly computed, and thus, less cognitive control is required to select it over ones own perspective. In doing so, we provide stronger evidence for the claim that we not only automatically compute what other people see but also, in some cases, we compute this even before we are explicitly aware of our own perspective.