Mindreading and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Perspective Taking: Establishing Common Ground

Apperly, Ian A.

doi:10.1111/tops.12308

Cited by 18 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…As mentioned earlier, a component-based account (sampling, maintaining, deploying) is consistent with distinctions others have made about the component processes underlying perspective-taking during language comprehension (Apperly, 2018). It is also consistent with one interpretation of perspective-taking failures demonstrated in previous findings--namely, that apparent failures to adopt a speaker's perspective when inferring their intended interpretation are due primarily to failures to successfully deploy this information, rather than encode it in the first place (Keysar, 2000;Keysar et al, 2003).…”

supporting

confidence: 83%

“…These processes roughly correspond to what Apperly (2018) labels inference, storage, and use. As Apperly (2018) notes, individual differences among comprehenders may produce variability in their ability to successfully engage each process: "the likelihood that others' mental states will be inferred, stored, or used depends upon dispositional characteristics of the participants, their MENTALIZING FOR PRAGMATIC INFERENCE 7 motivation, and their cognitive resources" (Apperly, 2018, pg. 6).…”

Section: A Mechanistic Explanation: Different Component Processes Submentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first implication comes from our characterization, following Apperly (2018), of the phenomenon of perspective-taking as engaging multiple component processes. While others (Keysar, 2000;Keysar et al, 2003;Apperly, 2018) have made similar distinctions, previous work has not characterized the progression of mental state information throughout these component processes in the same task, nor how this progression is influenced by individual variability in mentalizing. We found that comprehenders lose information during each component process; further, we found that mentalizing can play a role in both sets of component processes, but that the size of this role depends on task demands.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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supporting

confidence: 83%

Section: A Mechanistic Explanation: Different Component Processes Submentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitations and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference?

Trott¹,

Bergen²

2020

Discourse Processes

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“…The present results also have broader implications for our understanding of social cognition. Much research has been concerned with the question of how theory of mind allows us to overcome the gap between our own and others' minds and contributes to building common ground (e.g., Apperly, 2018; Schaafsma et al, 2015). While many social interactions indeed require the ability to attribute mental states to others and to keep them apart from one's own, it is interesting to note that coordination in joint action may be achieved through joint action plans in the form of We-representations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for we-representations during joint action planning

Kourtis

Woźniak

Sebanz³

et al. 2019

Neuropsychologia

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Do people engaged in joint action form action plans that specify joint outcomes at the group level? EEG was recorded from pairs of participants who performed coordinated actions that could result in different postural configurations. To isolate individual and joint action planning processes, a pre-cue specified in advance the individual actions and/or the joint configuration. Participants had 1200 ms to prepare their actions. Then a Go cue specified all action parameters and participants performed a synchronized action as quickly as possible. Action onsets were shorter when the pre-cue specified the joint configuration, regardless of whether individual action was also specified. EEG analyses showed that specifying joint action parameters in advance reduced ambiguity in a structured joint action plan (reflected in the decrease of the amplitude of the P600) and helped with representing action goals and interpersonal coordination patterns in sensorimotor brain areas (reflected in increased alpha/mu suppression and CNV amplitudes). These results provide clear evidence that joint action is driven not only by action plans that specify individual contributions, but also by action plans that specify joint action outcomes at the group level.

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“…But in the absence of such motivation there is no evidence at all that beliefs are inferred. " Apperly (2010" Apperly ( , 2018 also claims that experimental paradigms tapping the derivation of pragmatic inferences have in-built incentives to motivate participants to engage in pragmatic reasoning. For example, McKoon and Ratcliff (1986) asked participants to read sentences such as 'The woman, desperate to get away, ran to the car and jumped in' and then later decide whether the word 'driving' had appeared in the sentence.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation

et al. 2019

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There is an ongoing debate, both in philosophy and psychology, as to whether people are able to automatically infer what others may know, or whether they can only derive belief inferences by deploying cognitive resources. Evidence from laboratory tasks, often involving false beliefs or visual-perspective taking, has suggested that belief inferences are cognitively costly, controlled processes. Here we suggest that in everyday conversation, belief reasoning is pervasive and therefore potentially automatic in some cases. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments (N 1 = 91, N 2 = 89). The results of these experiments showed that participants slowed down when a stranger commented 'That greasy food is bad for your ulcer' relative to conditions where a stranger commented on their own ulcer or a friend made either comment-none of which violated participants' commonground expectations. We conclude that Theory of Mind models need to account for belief reasoning in conversation as it is at the center of everyday social interaction. for theoretical models of adult social cognition that fail to account for belief reasoning in conversation (e.g., Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Heyes, 2014) and as a result leave out of their scope the bulk of the data observed in everyday social interaction. Here we argue that belief reasoning is pervasive in communication and therefore needs to be investigated and characterized in conversational settings, and not only in false-belief tasks. Does communication involve belief reasoning? A popular theoretical view, both in philosophy and psychology, is the hypothesis that attributing mental states to others (not only beliefs, but also intentions and desires) is too cognitively demanding to be the basis for real-time social interaction (e.g.

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Mindreading and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Perspective Taking: Establishing Common Ground

Cited by 18 publications

References 30 publications

When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference?

When Do Comprehenders Mentalize for Pragmatic Inference?

Evidence for we-representations during joint action planning

How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation

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