Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults’ ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker

Abstract

Keysar et al. (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003) report that adults frequently failed to use their conceptual competence for theory of mind (ToM) in an online communication game where they needed to take account of a speaker's perspective. The current research reports 3 experiments investigating the cognitive processes contributing to adults' errors. In Experiments 1 and 2 the frequency of adults' failure to use ToM was unaffected by perspective switching. In Experiment 3 adults made more errors when interpreting instructions according to the speaker's perspective than according to an arbitrary rule. We suggest that adults are efficient at switching perspectives, but that actually using what another person knows to interpret what they say is relatively inefficient, giving rise to egocentric errors during communication.

Language complexity modulates 8- and 10-year-olds’ success at using their theory of mind abilities in a communication task

“…This result underscores an important point that is frequently overlooked in studies of theory of mind abilities with a narrow focus on preschool children: Although the conceptual understanding of visual perspective and other aspects of theory of mind develops by 5 years of age (Moll & Tomasello, 2006;Wellman et al, 2001;Wimmer & Perner, 1983), the ability to use information about other's perspective has a much more protracted developmental course, with egocentric biases and errors observed even in adults (e.g., Apperly et al, 2010;Birch & Bloom, 2007;Mitchell et al, 1996;Royzman et al, 2003).…”

“…Recent years have also seen a burgeoning literature investigating the cognitive and neural basis of theory of mind in adult participants (e.g., Apperly, 2013, for a recent review). Among the most striking findings in this research is that healthy adults, who have a clear grasp of mental concepts, nonetheless show egocentric effects on many theory of mind tasks, observed either as a slowing of responses when judging someone whose perspective differs from their own (e.g., Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010), or as a complete failure to take that perspective into account when responding (e.g., Apperly et al, 2010;Birch & Bloom, 2007;Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003). These results from adults show that traditional approaches to the development of theory of mind significantly underestimate the task that they face.…”

“…Despite the intuition that human beings are good communicators, studies suggest that even adults frequently struggle to account for their communicative partner's perspective by fixating or selecting objects only available to themselves (e.g., Apperly et al, 2010;Keysar et al, 2003). Clearly healthy adults do not lack the conceptual understanding that their communicative partner may hold a limited perspective.…”

‘She says, he says’: Does the sex of an instructor interact with the grammatical gender of targets in a perspective-taking task?

“…perspective harder than taking their own (Apperly et al, 2010;Keysar, Lin & Barr, 2003;Wu & Keysar, 2007), and that this would be reflected in more distractor object choices and/or longer response latencies on 'Other' perspective trials compared to 'Own'. However, if bilinguals are better able to inhibit irrelevant information, then bilingualism should modulate the difficulty of ignoring one's own perspective and/or the difficulty in switching perspectives (as opposed to maintaining one).…”

“…Here, participants were asked to take one of two perspectives to select the correct object in an array, based on the 'Keysar' task (Keysar, Lin & Barr, 2003) in computerised form (Apperly et al, 2010).…”