Comparison between the Short Story Task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test for evaluating Theory of Mind: A replication report

Giòrdano, Magda; Licea-Haquet, Giovanna; Navarrete, Eduardo; Valles-Capetillo, Elizabeth; Lizcano-Cortés, Fernando; Carrillo-Peña, A.; Zamora-Ursulo, Miguel Angel

doi:10.1080/23311908.2019.1634326

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Behavioral and clinical researchers have described this measurable and consistent cognitive ability, and impairments in this cognitive process for some disorders, which compromise social interactions (Chung et al, 2014 ). In a previous behavioral study we showed the concurrent validity of these two tests (Giordano et al, 2019 ) in our sample of Mexican participants, and found results similar to those published by Dodell-Feder et al ( 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…The RMET comprises 36 photographs depicting the region of the eyes. Subjects were asked to select from four mental state terms, presented in each corner or the screen, the term that best matched the mental state of the actor, as described previously in Giordano et al ( 2019 ). Psychopy v.1.83.01 implemented on Windows 10 operating system, was used to present photographs and register the answer.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Psychopy v.1.83.01 implemented on Windows 10 operating system, was used to present photographs and register the answer. In the SST, participants were asked to read a story written by Ernest Hemingway and to answer questions that assess explicit mental state reasoning (MSR) and comprehension (Dodell-Feder et al, 2013 ; Giordano et al, 2019 ). All 91 participants answered the SST, and a subsample of 69 participants answered both the SST and the RMET.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Theory of Mind and Its Elusive Structural Substrate

Lizcano-Cortés

Rasgado-Toledo

Giudicessi

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Is brain structure related to function? Can one predict the other? These are questions that are still waiting to be answered definitively. In this paper we seek to investigate these questions, in particular, we are interested in the relation between brain structure and theory of mind (ToM). ToM is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to others. Previous studies have observed correlations between performance on ToM tasks, and gray-matter size/volume in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and precuneus (PCu). Despite these findings, there are concerns about false positive results and replicability issues. In this study we used two different tasks to evaluate ToM, Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), and the Short Story Task (SST). Performance in these tasks was correlated to brain anatomy measures including voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and cortical thickness (CT) analysis, from ninety-one neurotypical participants. High-resolution structural brain images were acquired, and whole-brain and region of interest (ROI) analyses were implemented. The analyses did not show statistically significant associations between ToM performance and brain structural measures after correction. Significant associations between performance on ToM tests and a widespread array of regions loosely associated with ToM were observed only for whole brain uncorrected analysis (p < 0.001). These results do not replicate a previous study with neurotypical participants. We tested two different ToM tests, two different softwares for VBM and CT, and we used two samples, one with 91 and a sub-sample with 69 participants. Neither of these conditions made a difference in the results obtained. Consequently, these results suggest that if the population is neurotypical and homogenous, it is unlikely that a reliable association between brain anatomy measures and ToM performance, as measured with these tasks, may be found.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Theory of Mind and Its Elusive Structural Substrate

Lizcano-Cortés

Rasgado-Toledo

Giudicessi

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…On the other hand, our result revealing a link between lexical fluency and RMET is consistent with the previous results pointing to the strong relationship between RMET and vocabulary (Olderbak et al , 2015). Each item in RMET includes four different words describing emotional states of the eye expression; thus, decoding emotional cues may depend on lexical ability (Giordano et al , 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An investigation of affective theory of mind ability and its relation to neuropsychological functions in Alzheimer's disease

Yıldırım

Büyükişcan

Demirtaş-Tatlıdede

et al. 2020

Journal of Neuropsychology

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Although cognitive theory of mind (ToM) has been largely studied within neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD), studies focusing on affective ToM are relatively limited, yielding inconsistent findings. The current study aimed at investigating affective ToM abilities within different stages of AD (mild AD dementia [ADD], mild cognitive impairment [MCI], and subjective cognitive impairment [SCI]), together with its relationship with neuropsychological functioning. Eighty‐one participants were tested with two different ToM tasks (Faux Pas Recognition Test [FPR] and Reading Mind in the Eyes Test [RMET]) and tests of attention, executive functions, episodic memory, and facial recognition. Our results showed two different affective ToM profiles in AD continuum: while ADD group performed poorly on both tasks of ToM, MCI group displayed deteriorated performance on RMET but not on FPR. In addition, ToM performance was significantly related to episodic memory and verbal fluency within the overall sample. These findings suggest that impairment in the decoding process of emotional cues could begin even in the prodromal stage of AD. In contrast, the reasoning process of emotional information, as measured with FPR, could be preserved until the dementia stage. Moreover, the relation of affective ToM with amnestic functions and verbal abilities could provide evidence of a domain‐general ToM impairment in AD.

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“…We also measured participants' mentalizing ability (and propensity) using the Short Story task, or SST (Dodell-Feder et al, 2013), which is described in more detail below. The SST has since been used to assess mentalizing ability in several other studies (Zucchelli et al, 2018;Giordano et al, 2019;Vargas et al, 2019;Licea-Haquet et al, 2019). The explicit mental state reasoning measure has been found to correlate with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), another measure of Theory of Mind ability, in English-speaking (Dodell-Feder et al, 2013), Spanish-speaking (Giordano et al, 2019), and Italian-speaking populations (Zucchelli et al, 2018); it has also been found to negatively correlate with Autism Quotient scores (Zucchelli et al, 2018), as well as reaction time on a speech act recognition task (Licea-Haquet et al, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference?

Trott¹,

Bergen²

2020

Discourse Processes

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People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature, but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, i.e., mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference, then ask: is mentalizing recruited primarily for sampling mental state information, or also for the deployment of that information for pragmatic inference? We find that the role of mentalizing is modulated by how explicitly a task involves knowledge. Mentalizing correlates with task performance when comprehenders are asked to sample and report mental state information (Experiment 1b), or when given mental state information explicitly and asked to make an inference (Experiment 2-Explicit); in contrast, mentalizing does not correlate with task performance, or correlates only weakly, when participants are given mental state information implicitly and asked to make a pragmatic inference (Experiment 1a, Experiment 2-Implicit). These results suggest that mentalizing is recruited flexibly, allowing comprehenders to construct meaning from under-specified input. MENTALIZING FOR PRAGMATIC INFERENCE 2 When do comprehenders mentalize for pragmatic inference? People often speak indirectly. For example, a speaker might say "It's cold in here" not just to comment on the temperature of the room, but also as an indirect request to turn on the heater. These indirect requests are demonstrably common; one study elicited requests from participants and found that over 80% of them were indirect in some way (Gibbs, 1981). Furthermore, they are ambiguous: in isolation, and often even in context, these utterances license more than one interpretation. Consequently, comprehenders must frequently infer which meaning was intended by the speaker in a given context. This inference could be challenging, as a speaker's intended interpretation may depend on what they want or what they know. How do comprehenders succeed under these conditions? One possibility is that making inferences about speaker intent uses a form of mentalizing (Frith & Frith, 2006). That is, comprehenders may infer a speaker's intended interpretation by relying in part on inferences about that speaker's mental states, perhaps constructing a model of their interlocutor. This model could include, among other things, the speaker's preferences, current emotional state, and beliefs about the world (Gibbs, 1987). These inferred mental states might allow a comprehender to modulate their interpretation of ambiguous utterances not only as a function of their own contextual knowledge, but also according to their beliefs about the speaker's contextual knowledge. For example, if a speaker believes that a nearby heater is operational, then they might utter "It's cold in here" as an indirect request to turn on the heater. If a comprehender knows that the heater is in fact br...

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Comparison between the Short Story Task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test for evaluating Theory of Mind: A replication report

Cited by 11 publications

References 33 publications

Theory of Mind and Its Elusive Structural Substrate

Theory of Mind and Its Elusive Structural Substrate

An investigation of affective theory of mind ability and its relation to neuropsychological functions in Alzheimer's disease

When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference?

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