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Origins of Mind

Automatic Mindreading in Adults

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

In adults, mindreading is sometimes entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes and sometimes not. Further, automatic and nonautomatic mindreading processes are independent in this sense: different conditions influence whether they occur and which ascriptions they generate.

Slides

Notes

Is mindreading automatic? (More carefully: Does belief tracking in human adults depend only on processes which are automatic?)

A process is automatic to the degree that whether it occurs is independent of its relevance to the particulars of the subject’s task, motives and aims.

There is evidence that some mindreading in human adults is entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010; Schneider, Bayliss, Becker, & Dux, 2012; Wel, Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2014; Edwards & Low, 2017; Edwards & Low, 2019), and that not all mindreading in human adults is (Apperly, Back, Samson, & France, 2008; Apperly et al., 2010; Wel et al., 2014).

Qureshi, Apperly, & Samson (2010) found that automatic and nonautomatic mindreading processes are differently influenced by cognitive load, and Todd, Cameron, & Simpson (2016) provided evidence that adding time pressure affects nonautomatic but not automatic mindreading processes.

There is also limited evidence that people are unaware of automatic belief tracking processes:

‘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’ (Schneider et al., 2012, p. 2)

Objection

Level 1 perspective-taking in the Samson ‘dot task’ does not appear to be more automatic than Level 2 perspective-taking (Todd, Cameron, & Simpson, 2020).1 This finding is puzzing if we take the evidence for automatic belief-tracking at face value: why would belief-tracking but not level-1 perspective taking be automatic? Todd et al.’s finding is also incompatible with, and therefore evidence against, the conjecture that automatic belief-tracking processes rely on minimal theory of mind because minimal theory of mind involves Level-1 perspective-taking.

Glossary

automatic : On this course, a process is _automatic_ just if whether or not it occurs is to a significant extent independent of your current task, motivations and intentions. To say that _mindreading is automatic_ is to say that it involves only automatic processes. The term `automatic' has been used in a variety of ways by other authors: see Moors (2014, p. 22) for a one-page overview, Moors & De Houwer (2006) for a detailed theoretical review, or Bargh (1992) for a classic and very readable introduction
minimal theory of mind : A theory of the mental in which: (a) mental states are assigned functional roles that can be readily codified; and, (b), the contents of mental states can be distinguished by things which, like locations, shapes and colours, can be held in mind using some kind of quality space or feature map.

References

Apperly, I. A., Back, E., Samson, D., & France, L. (2008). The cost of thinking about false beliefs: Evidence from adults’ performance on a non-inferential theory of mind task. Cognition, 106(3), 1093–1108.
Apperly, I. A., Carroll, D. J., Samson, D., Humphreys, G. W., Qureshi, A., & Moffitt, G. (2010). Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults’ ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1201–1217. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210903281582
Apperly, I. A., Riggs, K., Simpson, A., Chiavarino, C., & Samson, D. (2006). Is belief reasoning automatic? Psychological Science, 17(10), 841–844.
Back, E., & Apperly, I. A. (2010). Two sources of evidence on the non-automaticity of true and false belief ascription. Cognition, 115(1), 54–70.
Bargh, J. A. (1992). The Ecology of Automaticity: Toward Establishing the Conditions Needed to Produce Automatic Processing Effects. The American Journal of Psychology, 105(2), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.2307/1423027
Carruthers, P. (2015). Mindreading in adults: Evaluating two-systems views. Synthese, forthcoming, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0792-3
Cohen, A. S., & German, T. C. (2009). Encoding of others’ beliefs without overt instruction. Cognition, 111(3), 356–363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.03.004
Edwards, K., & Low, J. (2017). Reaction time profiles of adults’ action prediction reveal two mindreading systems. Cognition, 160, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.004
Edwards, K., & Low, J. (2019). Level 2 perspective-taking distinguishes automatic and non-automatic belief-tracking. Cognition, 193, 104017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104017
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1190792
Moors, A. (2014). Examining the mapping problem in dual process models. In Dual process theories of the social mind (pp. 20–34). Guilford.
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.297
Qureshi, A., Apperly, I. A., & Samson, D. (2010). Executive function is necessary for perspective selection, not level-1 visual perspective calculation: Evidence from a dual-task study of adults. Cognition, 117(2), 230–236.
Schneider, D., Bayliss, A. P., Becker, S. I., & Dux, P. E. (2012). Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others’ mental states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 433–438.
Schneider, Dana, Nott, Z. E., & Dux, P. E. (2014). Task instructions and implicit theory of mind. Cognition, 133(1), 43–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.05.016
Todd, A. R., Cameron, C. D., & Simpson, A. (2016). Dissociating processes underlying level-1 visual perspective taking in adults. Cognition, in press.
Todd, A. R., Cameron, C. D., & Simpson, A. J. (2020). The goal-dependence of level-1 and level-2 visual perspective calculation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, No Pagination Specified-No Pagination Specified. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000973
Todd, A. R., Simpson, A. J., & Cameron, C. D. (2019). Time pressure disrupts level-2, but not level-1, visual perspective calculation: A process-dissociation analysis. Cognition, 189, 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.002
Wel, R. P. R. D. van der, Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2014). Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a continuous measure. Cognition, 130(1), 128–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.004

Endnotes

  1. These authors comment:

    ‘not only did we consistently observe that altercentric interference was weaker when the avatar’s perspective was less relevant to participants’ task goal; we also consistently failed to observe any evidence of altercentric interference in L1-VPT in these conditions’ (Todd et al., 2020, p. 16).

    and

    ‘reducing the goal-relevance of a cartoon avatar’s perspective weakened both Level-1 and Level-2 visual perspective calculation. … both Level-1 and Level-2 visual perspective calculation may be dependent on having a (remote) goal to process a target agent’s perspective’ (Todd et al., 2020, p. 18).

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