Specialized mechanisms for theory of mind: are mental representations special because they are mental or because they are representations?

Evidence for a Weak but Reliable Processing Advantage for False Beliefs Over Similar Nonmental States in Adults

The ability to understand the mental states of others has sometimes been attributed to a domain-specific mechanism which privileges the processing of these states over similar but nonmental representations. If correct, then others' beliefs should be processed more efficiently than similar information contained within nonmental states. We tested this by examining whether adults would be faster to process others' false beliefs than equivalent "false" photos. Additionally, we tested whether they would be faster to process others' true beliefs about something than their own (matched) personal knowledge about the same event. Across four experiments, we found a small but reliable effect in favor of the first prediction, but no evidence for the second. Results are consistent with accounts positing specialized processes for (false) mental states. The size of the effect does, however, suggest that alternative explanations such as practice effects cannot be ruled out.

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

Inspired by early proposals in philosophy, dominant accounts of language posit a central role for mutual knowledge, either encoded directly in common ground, or approximated through other cognitive mechanisms. Using existing empirical evidence from language and memory, we challenge this tradition, arguing that mutual knowledge captures only a subset of the mental states needed to support communication. In a novel theoretical proposal, we argue for a cognitive architecture that includes separate, distinct representations of the self and other, and a cognitive process that compares these representations continuously during conversation, outputting both similarities and differences in perspective. Our theory accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel predictions about the role of perspective in language use. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of mental states in communication.

Two independent sources of difficulty in perspective-taking/theory of mind tasks

Many perspective-taking and theory of mind tasks require participants to pass over the answer that is optimal from the self-perspective. For instance, in the classic change-of-location (false belief) task, participants are required to ignore where they know the object to be, and in the director task participants are required to ignore the best match for the instruction the other, less knowledgeable agent gives them (e.g., 'the top cup'). However, a second but equally critical requirement in such tasks is the ability to select a response which is wrong from the self-perspective; where the object is not, or an object that does not match the instruction (e.g., the middle cup instead of the top cup from one's own perspective). We present the results of an experiment that teases apart these two effects and demonstrate that both contribute independently to the difficulty in taking other perspectives. Reanalyses of data from previous experiments confirm this dual effect. These results suggest a revision of our understanding of egocentricity and difficulty in perspective-taking generally.

Perspective-Taking: In Search of a Theory

Perspective-taking has been one of the central concerns of work on social attention and developmental psychology for the past 60 years. Despite its prominence, there is no formal description of what it means to represent another’s viewpoint. The present article argues that such a description is now required in the form of theory—a theory that should address a number of issues that are central to the notion of assuming another’s viewpoint. After suggesting that the mental imagery debate provides a good framework for understanding some of the issues and problems surrounding perspective-taking, we set out nine points that we believe any theory of perspective-taking should consider.

Reduced egocentric bias when perspective-taking compared with working from rules

Previous research has suggested that adults are sometimes egocentric, erroneously attributing their current beliefs, perspectives, and opinions to others. Interestingly, this egocentricity is sometimes stronger when perspective-taking than when working from functionally identical but non-perspectival rules. Much of our knowledge of egocentric bias comes from Level 1 perspective-taking (e.g., judging whether something is seen) and judgements made about narrated characters or avatars rather than truly social stimuli such as another person in the same room. We tested whether adults would be egocentric on a Level 2 perspective-taking task (judging how something appears), in which they were instructed to indicate on a continuous colour scale the colour of an object as seen through a filter. In our first experiment, we manipulated the participants’ knowledge of the object’s true colour. We also asked participants to judge either what the filtered colour looked like to themselves or to another person present in the room. We found participants’ judgements did not vary across conditions. In a second experiment, we instead manipulated how much participants knew about the object’s colour when it was filtered. We found that participants were biased towards the true colour of the object when making judgements about targets they could not see relative to targets they could, but that this bias disappeared when the instruction was to imagine what the object looked like to another person. We interpret these findings as indicative of reduced egocentricity when considering other people’s experiences of events relative to considering functionally identical but abstract rules.

The Embodied God: Core Intuitions About Person Physicality Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus

Why are disembodied extraordinary beings like gods and spirits prevalent in past and present theologies? Under the intuitive Cartesian dualism hypothesis, this is because it is natural to conceptualize of minds as separate from bodies; under the counterintuitiveness hypothesis, this is because beliefs in minds without bodies are unnatural-such beliefs violate core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and consequently have a social transmission advantage. We report on a critical test of these contrasting hypotheses. Prior research found that among adult Christian religious adherents, intuitions about person psychology coexist and interfere with theological conceptualizations of God (e.g., infallibility). Here, we use a sentence verification paradigm where participants are asked to evaluate as true or false statements on which core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and psychology and Christian theology about God are inconsistent (true on one and false on the other) versus consistent (both true or both false). We find, as predicted by the counterintuitiveness hypothesis but not the Cartesian dualism hypothesis, that Christian religious adherents show worse performance (lower accuracy and slower response time) on statements where Christian theological doctrines about God's physicality (e.g., incorporeality, omnipresence) conflict with intuitions about person physicality. We find these effects for other extraordinary beings in Christianity-the Holy Spirit and Jesus-but not for an ordinary being (priest). We conclude that it is unintuitive to conceptualize extraordinary beings as disembodied, and that this, rather than inherent Cartesian dualism, may explain the prevalence of beliefs in such beings.

Is Language Required to Represent Others' Mental States? Evidence From Beliefs and Other Representations

An important part of our Theory of Mind-the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states-is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, thereby rendering the belief and either the photo or text false. At the same time, participants performed either a concurrent verbal interference task (rehearsing strings of digits) or a visual interference task (remembering a visual pattern). Results showed that performance on false belief trials did not decline under verbal interference relative to visual interference. We interpret these findings as further support for the view that language does not form an essential part of the process of reasoning online ("in the moment") about false beliefs.

The unreliability of egocentric bias across self-other and memory-belief distinctions in the Sandbox Task

Humans are often considered egocentric creatures, particularly (and ironically) when we are supposed to take another person's perspective over our own (i.e. when we use our theory of mind). We investigated the underlying causes of this phenomenon. We gave young adult participants a false belief task (Sandbox Task) in which objects were first hidden at one location by a protagonist and then moved to a second location within the same space but in the protagonist's absence. Participants were asked to indicate either where the protagonist remembered the item to be (reasoning about another's memory), believed it to be (reasoning about another's false belief), or where the protagonist would look for it (action prediction of another based on false belief). The distance away from Location A (the original one) towards Location B (the new location) was our measure of egocentric bias. We found no evidence that egocentric bias varied according to reasoning type, and no evidence that participants actually were more biased when reasoning about another person than when simply recalling the first location from memory. We conclude that the Sandbox Task paradigm may not be sensitive enough to draw out consistent effects related to mental state reasoning in young adults.

Egocentric bias across mental and non-mental representations in the Sandbox Task

In the Sandbox Task, participants indicate where a protagonist who has a false belief about the location of an object will look for that object in a trough filled with a substrate that conceals the hidden object's location. Previous findings that participants tend to indicate a location closer to where they themselves know the object to be located have been interpreted as evidence of egocentric bias when attributing mental states to others. We tested the assumption that such biases occur as a result of reasoning about mental states specifically. We found that participants showed more egocentric bias when reasoning from a protagonist's false belief than from their own memory, but found equivalent levels of bias when they were asked to indicate where a false film would depict the object as when they were asked about a protagonist's false belief. Our findings suggest that that egocentric biases found in adult false belief tasks are more likely due to a general difficulty with reasoning about false representations than a specialised difficulty with reasoning about false mental states.

Neural signatures for sustaining object representations attributed to others in preverbal human infants

A major feat of social beings is to encode what their conspecifics see, know or believe. While various non-human animals show precursors of these abilities, humans perform uniquely sophisticated inferences about other people's mental states. However, it is still unclear how these possibly human-specific capacities develop and whether preverbal infants, similarly to adults, form representations of other agents' mental states, specifically metarepresentations. We explored the neurocognitive bases of eight-month-olds' ability to encode the world from another person's perspective, using gamma-band electroencephalographic activity over the temporal lobes, an established neural signature for sustained object representation after occlusion. We observed such gamma-band activity when an object was occluded from the infants' perspective, as well as when it was occluded only from the other person (study 1), and also when subsequently the object disappeared, but the person falsely believed the object to be present (study 2). These findings suggest that the cognitive systems involved in representing the world from infants' own perspective are also recruited for encoding others' beliefs. Such results point to an early-developing, powerful apparatus suitable to deal with multiple concurrent representations, and suggest that infants can have a metarepresentational understanding of other minds even before the onset of language.

Left inferior parietal lobe engagement in social cognition and language

Social cognition and language are two core features of the human species. Despite distributed recruitment of brain regions in each mental capacity, the left parietal lobe (LPL) represents a zone of topographical convergence. The present study quantitatively summarizes hundreds of neuroimaging studies on social cognition and language. Using connectivity-based parcellation on a meta-analytically defined volume of interest (VOI), regional coactivation patterns within this VOI allowed identifying distinct subregions. Across parcellation solutions, two clusters emerged consistently in rostro-ventral and caudo-ventral aspects of the parietal VOI. Both clusters were functionally significantly associated with social-cognitive and language processing. In particular, the rostro-ventral cluster was associated with lower-level processing facets, while the caudo-ventral cluster was associated with higher-level processing facets in both mental capacities. Contrarily, in the (less stable) dorsal parietal VOI, all clusters reflected computation of general-purpose processes, such as working memory and matching tasks, that are frequently co-recruited by social or language processes. Our results hence favour a rostro-caudal distinction of lower- versus higher-level processes underlying social cognition and language in the left inferior parietal lobe.