Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning

Ferguson, Heather J.; Scheepers, Christoph; Sanford, Anthony J.

doi:10.1080/01690960903041174

Cited by 47 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…These results provide further evidence that readers have set up a mental representation of the described counterfactual world, and can interpret events according to this plausible counterfactual world in the earliest moments of processing (e.g. Ferguson et al, 2010;Nieuwland, 2013;Nieuwland & Martin, 2012). Moreover, the fact that this pattern of inconsistency detection did not differ between the counterfactual-counterfactual and factual context conditions suggests that similar pragmatic constraints were activated by this counterfactual world as within a factual context.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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Recent empirical research suggests that understanding a counterfactual event (e.g. 'If Josie had revised, she would have passed her exams') activates mental representations of both the factual and counterfactual versions of events. However, it remains unclear when readers switch between these models during comprehension, and whether representing multiple 'worlds' is cognitively effortful. This paper reports two ERP studies where participants read contexts that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, followed by a second sentence describing a consequence of this event.Critically, this sentence included a noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the preceding context, and either included a modal verb to indicate reference to the counterfactualworld or not (thus referring to the factual-world). Experiment 2 used adapted versions of the materials used in Experiment 1 to examine the degree to which representing multiple versions of a counterfactual situation makes heavy demands on cognitive resources by measuring individuals' working memory capacity. Results showed that when reference to the counterfactual-world was maintained by the ongoing discourse, readers correctly interpreted events according to the counterfactual-world (i.e. showed larger N400 for inconsistent than consistent words). In contrast, when cues referred back to the factual-world, readers showed no difference between consistent and inconsistent critical words, suggesting that they simultaneously compared information against both possible worlds. These results support previous dualrepresentation accounts for counterfactuals, and provide new evidence that linguistic cues can guide the reader in selecting which world model to evaluate incoming information against.Crucially, we reveal evidence that maintaining and updating a hypothetical model over time relies upon the availability of cognitive resources.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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“…Similarly, tasks in which the participant is a passive observer to narrated events in a discourse have shown rapid and accurate prediction of other peoples' actions based on an understanding of their (false) beliefs (e.g. Ferguson & Breheny, 2012;Ferguson, Scheepers, & Sanford, 2010;Rubio-Fernández, 2013), or conflicting desires (Ferguson & Breheny, 2011). These studies, showing early use of perspective, suggest that interpretation of language is driven by multiple probabilistic constraints, one of which is perspective (Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011).…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

Using perspective to resolve reference: The impact of cognitive load and motivation.

Cane¹,

Ferguson²,

Apperly³

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Research has demonstrated a link between perspective taking and working memory. Here we used eye tracking to examine the time course with which working memory load (WML) influences perspective-taking ability in a referential communication task and how motivation to take another’s perspective modulates these effects. In Experiment 1, where there was no reward or time pressure, listeners only showed evidence of incorporating perspective knowledge during integration of the target object but did not anticipate reference to this common ground object during the pretarget-noun period. WML did not affect this perspective use. In Experiment 2, where a reward for speed and accuracy was applied, listeners used perspective cues to disambiguate the target object from the competitor object from the earliest moments of processing (i.e., during the pretarget-noun period), but only under low load. Under high load, responses were comparable with the control condition, where both objects were in common ground. Furthermore, attempts to initiate perspective-relevant responses under high load led to impaired recall on the concurrent WML task, indicating that perspective-relevant responses were drawing on limited cognitive resources. These results show that when there is ambiguity, perspective cues guide rapid referential interpretation when there is sufficient motivation and sufficient cognitive resources.

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“…This approach is highly sensitive in that it allows an implicit, incremental analysis of gaze preference between visual objects as a scenario develops. For example, such an approach has been used recently to demonstrate that people are able to infer the thoughts of others and set up expectations about those people's actions, based on their beliefs (Ferguson, Scheepers, & Sanford, 2010;Ferguson & Breheny, 2012) or complex desires (Ferguson & Breheny, 2011).…”

Section: Eye Movements To Audio-visual Scenes Reveal Expectations Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements to audiovisual scenes reveal expectations of a just world.

Callan¹,

Ferguson²,

Bindemann³

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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When confronted with bad things happening to good people, observers often engage reactive strategies, such as victim derogation, to maintain a belief in a just world. Although such reasoning is usually made retrospectively, we investigated the extent to which knowledge of another person's good or bad behavior can also bias people's online expectations for subsequent good or bad outcomes. Using a fully-crossed design, participants listened to auditory scenarios that varied in terms of whether the characters engaged in morally good or bad behavior while their eye movements were tracked around concurrent visual scenes depicting good and bad outcomes. We found that the good (bad) behavior of the characters influenced gaze preferences for good (bad) outcomes just prior to the actual outcomes being revealed. These findings suggest that beliefs about a person's moral worth encourage observers to foresee a preferred deserved outcome as the event unfolds. We include evidence to show that this effect cannot be explained in terms of affective priming or matching strategies.

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Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning

Cited by 47 publications

References 53 publications

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Using perspective to resolve reference: The impact of cognitive load and motivation.

Eye movements to audiovisual scenes reveal expectations of a just world.

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