Reaction time profiles of adults’ action prediction reveal two mindreading systems

Edwards, Katheryn; Low, Jason

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.004

Cited by 30 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Importantly, several authors agree with the psychological distinction between basic-goal and belief systems ( Wellman, 1991 ; Boyer, 2001 ; Gergely and Csibra, 2003 ; Baron-Cohen, 2005 ; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009 ; Edwards and Low, 2017 ). Nevertheless, the two systems are connected ( Apperly and Butterfill, 2009 ).…”

Section: Proximate and Distal Evolutionary Facets Underpinning Mentalmentioning

confidence: 79%

The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution

Varella

2018

Front. Psychol.

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At the core of anthropomorphism lies a false positive cognitive bias to over-attribute the pattern of the human body and/or mind. Anthropomorphism is independently discussed in various disciplines, is presumed to have deep biological roots, but its cognitive bases are rarely explored in an integrative way. Conversely, I present an inclusive, multifaceted interdisciplinary approach to refine the psychological bases of mental anthropomorphism. I have integrated 13 conceptual dissections of folk finalistic reasoning into four psychological inference systems (physical, design, basic-goal, and belief stances); the latter three are truly teleological and thus prone to anthropomorphisms. I then have integrated the genetic, neural, cognitive, psychiatric, developmental, comparative and evolutionary/adaptive empirical evidence that converges to support the nature of the distinct stances. The over-reactive calibration of the three teleological systems prone to anthropomorphisms is framed as an evolved design feature to avoid harmful ancestral contexts. Nowadays, these stances easily engage with scientific reasoning about bio-evolutionary matters with both negative and positive consequences. Design, basic-goal, and belief stances benefit biology by providing cognitive foundations, expressing a high-powered explanatory system, promoting functional generalization, fostering new research questions and discoveries, enabling metaphorical/analogical thinking and explaining didactically with brevity. Hence, it is neither feasible nor advantageous to completely eliminate teleology from biology. Instead, we should engage with the eight classes of problems in bio-philosophy and bio-education that relate to the three stances: types of anthropomorphism, variety of misunderstandings, misleading appeal, legitimacy controversy, gateway to mysticism, total prohibition and its backfire effect. Recognizing the distinction among design, basic-goal, and belief stances helps to elucidate much of the logic underlying these issues, so that it enables a much more detailed taxonomy of anthropomorphisms, and organizes the various misunderstandings about evolution by natural selection. It also offers a solid psychological grounding for anchoring definitions and terminology. This tripartite framework also shed some light on how to better deal with the over-reactive stances in bio-education, by organizing previous pedagogical strategies and by suggesting new possibilities to be tested. Therefore, this framework constitutes a promising approach to advance the debate regarding the psychological underpinnings of anthropomorphisms and to further support regulating and clarifying teleology and anthropomorphism in biology.

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Section: Proximate and Distal Evolutionary Facets Underpinning Mentalmentioning

confidence: 79%

The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution

Varella

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…A fundamental problem for the omniscience interpretation, however, is that other studies have measured implicit and explicit responses to a single scenario. These studies have uniformly observed a difference in performance between aspectual and non-aspectual implicit tasks which disappears on explicit tasks (Low et al, 2014;Edwards & Low, 2017).…”

Section: What Do the Results Show?mentioning

confidence: 98%

Are there signature limits in early theory of mind?

Fizke

Butterfill

Loo

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief (FB) tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on fully developed concepts of belief and other propositional attitudes. One prediction of such theories is that the early-developing system has signature limits concerning aspectuality. We tested this prediction in two experiments. The first experiment showed (in line with previous findings) that 2- and 3-year-olds take into account a protagonist's true or false belief about the location of an object in their active helping behavior. In contrast, toddlers' helping behavior did not differentiate between true and false belief conditions when the protagonist's belief essentially involved aspectuality. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more stringent method designed to rule out more parsimonious explanations. Taken together, the current findings are compatible with the possibility that early theory-of-mind reasoning is subject to signature limits as predicted by the two-systems account.

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“…A cornerstone prediction of the dual-process account is that signature limits on the efficient mindreading process arise from the fact that only objects and their relations to agents can be automatically computed to predict others' behavior, which in turn means that false belief involving identity in the numerical sense cannot be ascribed by representing registrations. There is supportive evidence showing that adults automatically compute people's false beliefs about an object's location but not its numerical identity (Edwards & Low, 2017;Fizke, Butterfill, van de Loo, Reindl, & Rakoczy, 2017;Low, Drummond, Walmsley, & Wang, 2014;Low & Watts, 2013;Mozuraitis, Chambers, & Daneman, 2015;Oktay-Gür, Schulz, & Rakoczy, 2018). For example, Low and Watts found that adults' efficient mindreading, as indicated by certain eye movements, allowed participants to make accurate search anticipations when the agent had a false belief about an object's location but not when the agent's 6 false belief about object identity led him to think that there were two objects present when, in fact, there was only one.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Level 2 perspective-taking distinguishes automatic and non-automatic belief-tracking

Edwards

Low

2019

Cognition

Self Cite

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Little is known about whether human beings' automatic mindreading is computationally restricted to processing a limited kind of content, and what exactly the nature of that signature limit might be. We developed a novel object-detection paradigm to test adults' automatic processing in a Level 1 perspectivetaking (L1PT) context (where an agent's belief, but not his visuospatial perspective, is relevantly different) and in a Level 2 perspective-taking (L2PT) context (where both the agent's belief and visuospatial perspective are relevantly different). Experiment 1 uncovered that adults' reaction times in the L1PT task were helpfully speeded by a bystander's irrelevant belief when tracking two homogenous objects but not in the L2PT task when tracking a single heterogeneous object. The limitation is especially striking given that the heterogeneous nature of the single object was fully revealed to participants as well as the bystander. The results were replicated in two further experiments, which confirmed that the selective modulation of adults' reaction times was maintained when tracking the location of a single object (Experiment 2) and when attention checks were removed (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that automatic mindreading draws upon a distinctively minimalist model of the mental that underspecifies representation of differences in perspective relative to an agent's position in space.

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Reaction time profiles of adults’ action prediction reveal two mindreading systems

Cited by 30 publications

References 53 publications

The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution

The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution

Are there signature limits in early theory of mind?

Level 2 perspective-taking distinguishes automatic and non-automatic belief-tracking

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