Are human adults’ abilities to track others’ beliefs automatic?
For our purposes, a process is \emph{automatic} to the degree that whether it occurs is independent of
its relevance to the particulars of the subject's task, motives and aims.
‘Automatic mindreading’ is short for ‘mindreading that is a consequence of
automatic processes only.’
\citet{Southgate:2007js} created an anticipatory looking false belief task, originally
for use with two-year-olds, which has been adapated to provide evidence for automatic
false belief tracking.
There is evidence that some mindreading in human adults is
entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes
\citep{kovacs_social_2010,Schneider:2011fk,Wel:2013uq} and
that not all mindreading in human adults is
\citep{apperly:2008_back,apperly_why_2010,Wel:2013uq}.
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Explain the southgate et al paradigm
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Southgate et al, 2007; Senju et al, 2009 video S1
Schneider et al (2014, figure 1)
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One way to show that mindreading is automatic is to give subjects a task which does not require tracking beliefs and then to compare their performance in two scenarios:
a scenario where someone else has a false belief, and a scenario in which someone else has a true belief.
If mindreading occurs automatically, performance should not vary between the two scenarios because others’ beliefs are always irrelevant to the subjects’ task and motivations.
Schneider et al (2014, figure 3)
[skip this slide]
\citet{Schneider:2011fk} did just this.
They showed their participants a series of videos and instructed them to detect when a figure waved or, in a second experiment, to discriminate between high and low tones as quickly as possible.
Performing these tasks did not require tracking anyone’s beliefs, and the participants did not report mindreading when asked afterwards.
on experiment 1: ‘Participants never reported belief tracking when questioned in an open format after the experiment (“What do you think this experiment was about?”). Furthermore, this verbal debriefing about the experiment’s purpose never triggered participants to indicate that they followed the actor’s belief state’ \citep[p.~2]{Schneider:2011fk}
Nevertheless, participants’ eye movements indicated that they were tracking the beliefs of a person who happened to be in the videos.
In a further study, \citet{schneider:2014_task} raised the stakes by giving participants a task that would be harder to perform if they were tracking another’s beliefs.
So now tracking another’s beliefs is not only irrelevant to performing the tasks: it may actually hinder performance.
Despite this, they found evidence in adults’ looking times that they were tracking another’s false beliefs.
This indicates that ‘subjects … track the mental states of others even when they have instructions to complete a task that is incongruent with this operation’ \citep[p.~46]{schneider:2014_task} and so provides evidence for automaticity.%
\footnote{%
% quote is necessary to qualify in the light of their interpretation; difference between looking at end (task-dependent) and at an earlier phase (task-independent)?
%\citet[p.~46]{schneider:2014_task}: ‘we have demonstrated here that subjects implicitly track the mental states of others even when they have instructions to complete a task that is incongruent with this operation. These results provide support for the hypothesis that there exists a ToM mechanism that can operate implicitly to extract belief like states of others (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009) that is immune to top-down task settings.’
It is hard to completely rule out the possibility that belief tracking is merely spontaneous rather than automatic.
I take the fact that belief tracking occurs despite plausibly making subjects’ tasks harder to perform to indicate automaticity over spontaneity.
If non-automatic belief tracking typically involves awareness of belief tracking, then the fact that subjects did not mention belief tracking when asked after the experiment about its purpose and what they were doing in it further supports the claim that belief tracking was automatic.
}
Further evidence that mindreading can occur in adults even when counterproductive has been provided by \citet{kovacs_social_2010}, who showed that another’s irrelevant beliefs about the location of an object can affect how quickly people can detect the object’s presence,
and by \citet{Wel:2013uq}, who showed that the same can influence the paths people take to reach an object.
Taken together, this is compelling evidence that mindreading in adult humans sometimes involves automatic processes only.
‘Participants never reported belief tracking when questioned in an open format after the experiment
(“What do you think this experiment was about?”). Furthermore, this verbal debriefing about the
experiment’s purpose never triggered participants to indicate that they followed the actor’s belief
state’ \citep[p.~2]{Schneider:2011fk}
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Kovacs et al, 2010
Back & Apperly (2010, fig 1, part)
This is the data for answers that required a ‘yes’ response.
So does all mindreading in adult humans involve only processes which are automatic?
No: it turns out that verbal responses in false belief tasks that are A-tasks are not typically a consequence of automatic belief tracking.
To show this, \citet{back:2010_apperly} instructed people to watch videos in which someone acquires a belief, either true or false, and then, after the video, asked them an unexpected question about the protagonist’s belief \citep[see also][]{apperly:2006_belief}.
They measured how long people took to answer this question.
Starting with the hypothesis that answering a question about belief involves automatic mindreading only,
they reasoned that the mindreading necessary to answer a question about belief will have occurred before the question is even asked.
Accordingly there should be no delay in answering an unexpected question about belief—or, at least, no more delay than in answering unexpected questions about any other facts that are automatically tracked.
But they found that people were slower to answer unexpected questions about belief than predicted.
Importantly this was not due to any difficulty with questions about belief as such: when such questions were expected, they were answered just as quickly as other, non-belief questions.
It seems that, when asked an unexpected question about another’s belief, people typically need time to work out what the other believes.
We must therefore reject the hypothesis that answering a question about belief involves automatic mindreading only.%
\footnote{%
\citet[ms~p.~9]{carruthers:2015_mindreading} objects (following \citealp{cohen:2009_encoding}) that these experiments are ‘not really about encoding belief but recalling it.’
Note that this objection is already answered by \citet[p.~56]{back:2010_apperly}.
}
This is what you as subject see.
Actually you can't see this so well, let me make it bigger.
This is how the experiment progresses.
You can see that the protagonist leaves in the third
phase. This is the version of the sequence in which the protagonist has a true belief.
van der Wel et al (2014, figure 1)
Just look at the 'True Belief' lines (the effect can also be found when your belief
turns out to be false, but I'm not worried about that here.)
Do you see the area under the curve?
When you are moving the mouse,
the protagonist's false belief is pulling you away from the actual location
and towards the location she believes this object to be in!
van der Wel et al (2014, figure 2)
Here's a zoomed in view. We're only interested in the top left box (implicit condition,
participant has true belief).
To repeat,
When you are moving the mouse,
the protagonist's false belief is pulling you away from the actual location
and towards the location she believes this object to be in!
van der Wel et al (2014, figure 2)
Using the same task, van der Wel et al also show that some processes are NOT automatic ...
\citep[p.\ 132]{Wel:2013uq}:
‘In support of a more rule-based and controlled system, we found that response initiation times
changed as a function of the congruency of the participant’s and the agent’s belief in the
explicit group only. Thus, when participants had to track both beliefs, they slowed down
their responses when there was a belief conflict versus when there was not. The observation
that this result only occurred for the explicit group provides evidence for a controlled system.’
van der Wel et al (2014, figure 3)