Efficient belief tracking in adults: The role of task instruction, low-level associative processes and dispositional social functioning

Are visual artists better visual perspective takers? An exploratory study with an unexpected outcome

Visual perspective taking (VPT) has been argued to elicit image-like representations of other people's visual experiences. Separately, it has been demonstrated that there are inter-individual differences in the ability to successfully take other people's visual perspectives. In the present study, adults were asked to judge how long two lines appeared visually from the point of view of an agent. The lines were of identical length, but the agent was always closer to one of the lines than the other, meaning that the closer line should be judged as appearing visually longer. It was hypothesised that adults with experience in the visual arts would perform better at this task for one or both of two reasons: (1) they should be more familiar with the knowledge that the closer an object is the larger it appears visually (i.e., the retinal image is larger), and (2) they might be able to "draw" an image-like representation that more accurately reflects the effect of distance on perceived size. Consistent with previous experiments with this paradigm, adults generally failed to judge the closest line as appearing longer; indeed, as many judged this line would appear visually shorter. Crucially, increasing experience in the visual arts failed to improve the accuracy of VPT judgements; even a group of professional illustrators failed to recognise that the line closest to the agent would appear longer than the line furthest from the agent. These results are discussed in the context of the processes and representation types potentially involved in VPT.

A review of level-1 visual perspective-taking: potential relationship with the uncanny valley effect

Calculating others' visual perspective automatically is a pivotal ability in human social communications. In the dot-perspective task, the ability is shown as a consistency effect: adults respond more slowly to judge the number of discs that they can see when a computer-generated avatar sees fewer discs. The implicit mentalizing account attributes the effect to relatively automatic tracking of others' visual perspective. However, the submentalizing account attributes the effect to domain-general attentional orienting. Accordingly, the current study focuses on elucidating the ongoing implicit mentalizing vs. submentalizing debate. The review tried to shed light on the debate regarding level-1 visual perspective taking and its potential relationship between the uncanny valley effect. Future research may focus on new manipulations of uncanny valley effect to further uncover the relationship between uncanny valley effect and level-1 visual perspective taking. This may provide new insight into the debate and the processing mechanisms of level-1 visual perspective-taking and uncanny valley effect, which may be beneficial for AI development.

Level 2 perspective-taking distinguishes automatic and non-automatic belief-tracking

Little is known about whether human beings' automatic mindreading is computationally restricted to processing a limited kind of content, and what exactly the nature of that signature limit might be. We developed a novel object-detection paradigm to test adults' automatic processing in a Level 1 perspective-taking (L1PT) context (where an agent's belief, but not his visuospatial perspective, is relevantly different) and in a Level 2 perspective-taking (L2PT) context (where both the agent's belief and visuospatial perspective are relevantly different). Experiment 1 uncovered that adults' reaction times in the L1PT task were helpfully speeded by a bystander's irrelevant belief when tracking two homogenous objects but not in the L2PT task when tracking a single heterogeneous object. The limitation is especially striking given that the heterogeneous nature of the single object was fully revealed to participants as well as the bystander. The results were replicated in two further experiments, which confirmed that the selective modulation of adults' reaction times was maintained when tracking the location of a single object (Experiment 2) and when attention checks were removed (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that automatic mindreading draws upon a distinctively minimalist model of the mental that underspecifies representation of differences in perspective relative to an agent's position in space.

What Do You Have in Mind? Measures to Assess Mental State Reasoning in Neuropsychiatric Populations

Social interaction is closely associated with both functional capacity and well-being. Previous research has not only revealed evidence of social dysfunction in individuals with a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders but also generated an abundance of potential measures for assessing social cognition. This review explores the most popular measures used within neuropsychiatric populations to investigate the ability to recognize or reason about the mental states of others. Measures are also critically analyzed in terms of strengths and limitations to aid task selection in future clinical studies. The most frequently applied assessment tools use verbal, visual or audiovisual forms of presentation and assess recognition of mental states from facial features, self-rated empathy, the understanding of other's cognitive mental states such as beliefs and intentions, or the ability to combine knowledge of other's thoughts and emotions in order to understand subtle communications or socially inappropriate behavior. Key weaknesses of previous research include limited investigation of relationships with clinical symptoms, and underutilization of measures of everyday social functioning that offer a useful counterpart to traditional "lab" tasks. Future studies should aim to carefully select measures not only based on the range of skills to be assessed but also taking into account potential difficulties with interpretation and the need to gain insight into the application of social cognitive skills as well as ability per se. Some of the best measures include those with well-matched control trials (e.g., Yoni Task) or those that restrict the influence of verbal deficits (e.g., intentions comic strip task), elicit spontaneous mentalizing (e.g., Animations Task), and possess greater ecological validity (e.g., Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition). Social cognitive research within psychiatric populations will be further enhanced through the development of more closely matched control tasks, and the exploration of relationships between task performance, medication, strategy use, and broader emotional and motor functions.

Repetitive TMS of the temporo-parietal junction disrupts participant's expectations in a spontaneous Theory of Mind task

A recent debate about Theory of Mind (ToM) concerns whether spontaneous and explicit mentalizing are based on the same mechanisms. However, only a few neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural bases of spontaneous ToM, with inconsistent results. The present study had two goals: first, to investigate whether the right Temporo-Parietal Junction (rTPJ) is crucially involved in spontaneous ToM and second, to gain insight into the role of the rTPJ in ToM. For the first time, we applied rTMS to the rTPJ while participants were engaged in a spontaneous false belief task. Participants watched videos of a scene including an agent who acquires a true or false belief about the location of an object. At the end of the movie, participants reacted to the presence of the object. Results show that, during stimulation of the control site, RTs were affected by both the participant's expectations and the belief of the agent. Stimulation of the rTPJ significantly modulated task performance, supporting the idea that spontaneous ToM, as well as explicit ToM, relies on TPJ activity. However, we did not observe a disruption of the representation of the agent's belief. Rather, the stimulation interfered with participant's predictions, supporting the idea that rTPJ is crucially involved in self-other distinction.