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Aside ... we don’t know much about adults humans’ mindreading abilities

Work through minimal theory of mind with Onishi & Baillargeon ...

There is some evidence that this prediction is correct. Jason Low and his collegaues set out to test it. They have now published three different papers showing such limits; and Hannes Rakoczy and others have more work in progress on this. Collapsing several experiements using different approaches, the basic pattern of their findings is this ...

Take non-automatic responses first; in this case, communicative responses. When you do a false-belief-identity task, you see the pattern you also find for false-belief-locations tasks. But things look different when you measure non-automatic responses ...

The non-automatic responses all show the signature limit of minimal models of the mental. This is evidence for the hypothesis that Some automatic belief-tracking systems rely on minimal models of the mental.

I also hear that quite a few scientists have pilot data that speaks against this signature limit.

One particular task for future research will be to examine whether other automatic responses to scenarios involving false beliefs about identity, such as response times and movement trajectories, are also subject to this signature limit.

Windows light up, you will look in anticipation

Another experiment got similar results (rabbits quack): this graph is nice because it illustrates how you can dissociate the proactive gaze from the verbal response (make it uniformly good, or uniformly bad)

Just say that you can do this with other stimuli and paradigms, and we have done this with infants and would like to do it with adults.

These findings complicate the picture: is helping driven by automatic processes only? If not, why do we predict that the signature limit of minimal theory of mind is found in this case too?

Scott and colleagues \citep{scott:2015_infants} provided other evidence suggesting that infants’ mindreading may be relatively sophisticated. Specifically, 17-month-olds watched a thief attempt to steal a preferred object (a rattling toy) when its owner was momentarily absent by substituting it with a less-preferred object (a non-rattling toy). Infants looked longer when the thief substituted the preferred object with a non-visually-matching silent toy compared to when the thief substituted it with a visually-matching silent toy. The authors postulated that infants can ascribe to the thief an intention to implant in the owner a false-belief about the identity of the substituted toy. The authors further suggested that infants make such ascriptions only when the substitution involves a visually-matching toy and the owner will not test whether the toy rattles on her return.

However, Scott et al.’s \citep{scott:2015_infants} explanations also require postulating that infants take the thief to be strikingly inept; despite having opportunity simply to pilfer from a closed box known to contain at least three rattling toys, the thief engages in elaborate deception which will be uncovered whenever the substituted toy is next shaken and the thief, as sole suspect, easily identified. A further difficulty is that factors unrelated to the thief’s mental states vary between conditions, such as the frequencies with which toys visually matching one present during the final phase of the test trial have rattled. These considerations jointly indicate that further evidence would be needed to support the claim that humans’ early mindreading capacity enables them to ascribe intentions concerning false beliefs involving numerical identity.

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One way to show that mindreading is automatic is to give subjects a task which does not require tracking beliefs and then to compare their performance in two scenarios: a scenario where someone else has a false belief, and a scenario in which someone else has a true belief. If mindreading occurs automatically, performance should not vary between the two scenarios because others’ beliefs are always irrelevant to the subjects’ task and motivations.

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\citet{Schneider:2011fk} did just this. They showed their participants a series of videos and instructed them to detect when a figure waved or, in a second experiment, to discriminate between high and low tones as quickly as possible. Performing these tasks did not require tracking anyone’s beliefs, and the participants did not report mindreading when asked afterwards.

on experiment 1: ‘Participants never reported belief tracking when questioned in an open format after the experiment (“What do you think this experiment was about?”). Furthermore, this verbal debriefing about the experiment’s purpose never triggered participants to indicate that they followed the actor’s belief state’ \citep[p.~2]{Schneider:2011fk}

Nevertheless, participants’ eye movements indicated that they were tracking the beliefs of a person who happened to be in the videos.

In a further study, \citet{schneider:2014_task} raised the stakes by giving participants a task that would be harder to perform if they were tracking another’s beliefs. So now tracking another’s beliefs is not only irrelevant to performing the tasks: it may actually hinder performance. Despite this, they found evidence in adults’ looking times that they were tracking another’s false beliefs. This indicates that ‘subjects … track the mental states of others even when they have instructions to complete a task that is incongruent with this operation’ \citep[p.~46]{schneider:2014_task} and so provides evidence for automaticity.% \footnote{% % quote is necessary to qualify in the light of their interpretation; difference between looking at end (task-dependent) and at an earlier phase (task-independent)? %\citet[p.~46]{schneider:2014_task}: ‘we have demonstrated here that subjects implicitly track the mental states of others even when they have instructions to complete a task that is incongruent with this operation. These results provide support for the hypothesis that there exists a ToM mechanism that can operate implicitly to extract belief like states of others (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009) that is immune to top-down task settings.’ It is hard to completely rule out the possibility that belief tracking is merely spontaneous rather than automatic. I take the fact that belief tracking occurs despite plausibly making subjects’ tasks harder to perform to indicate automaticity over spontaneity. If non-automatic belief tracking typically involves awareness of belief tracking, then the fact that subjects did not mention belief tracking when asked after the experiment about its purpose and what they were doing in it further supports the claim that belief tracking was automatic. }

Further evidence that mindreading can occur in adults even when counterproductive has been provided by \citet{kovacs_social_2010}, who showed that another’s irrelevant beliefs about the location of an object can affect how quickly people can detect the object’s presence, and by \citet{Wel:2013uq}, who showed that the same can influence the paths people take to reach an object. Taken together, this is compelling evidence that mindreading in adult humans sometimes involves automatic processes only.

This is what you as subject see. Actually you can't see this so well, let me make it bigger.

[This is just to show you what the trajectories were like]

Just look at the 'True Belief' lines (the effect can also be found when your belief turns out to be false, but I'm not worried about that here.) Do you see the area under the curve? When you are moving the mouse, the protagonist's false belief is pulling you away from the actual location and towards the location she believes this object to be in!

Here's a zoomed in view. We're only interested in the top left box (implicit condition, participant has true belief). To repeat, When you are moving the mouse, the protagonist's false belief is pulling you away from the actual location and towards the location she believes this object to be in!

\citep[p.\ 132]{Wel:2013uq}: ‘In support of a more rule-based and controlled system, we found that response initiation times changed as a function of the congruency of the participant’s and the agent’s belief in the explicit group only. Thus, when participants had to track both beliefs, they slowed down their responses when there was a belief conflict versus when there was not. The observation that this result only occurred for the explicit group provides evidence for a controlled system.’

This is the data for answers that required a ‘yes’ response.

So does all mindreading in adult humans involve only processes which are automatic? No: it turns out that verbal responses in false belief tasks that are A-tasks are not typically a consequence of automatic belief tracking. To show this, \citet{back:2010_apperly} instructed people to watch videos in which someone acquires a belief, either true or false, and then, after the video, asked them an unexpected question about the protagonist’s belief \citep[see also][]{apperly:2006_belief}. They measured how long people took to answer this question. Starting with the hypothesis that answering a question about belief involves automatic mindreading only, they reasoned that the mindreading necessary to answer a question about belief will have occurred before the question is even asked. Accordingly there should be no delay in answering an unexpected question about belief—or, at least, no more delay than in answering unexpected questions about any other facts that are automatically tracked. But they found that people were slower to answer unexpected questions about belief than predicted. Importantly this was not due to any difficulty with questions about belief as such: when such questions were expected, they were answered just as quickly as other, non-belief questions. It seems that, when asked an unexpected question about another’s belief, people typically need time to work out what the other believes. We must therefore reject the hypothesis that answering a question about belief involves automatic mindreading only.% \footnote{% \citet[ms~p.~9]{carruthers:2015_mindreading} objects (following \citealp{cohen:2009_encoding}) that these experiments are ‘not really about encoding belief but recalling it.’ Note that this objection is already answered by \citet[p.~56]{back:2010_apperly}. }

Kovacs-like but with two balls, red and blue, always one goes. Beliefs concern which belief remains

Key finding is P-A- vs P-A+

Kovacs-like identity starring the robota

further evidence (only indirect) ...

Here you can see how participants moved in the false belief location condition. There was also a true belief condition.

As you can see, participants mostly started off in the right direction. This is the swerve.

But there is quite a bit of switching, and a number of

The swerve is correlated with the protagonists’ belief state: which direction they swerve in differs between true and false beliefs. The direction of swerve is also correlated with proactive gaze

Start with a simple causal model.

‘response 1’ is a variable representing which response the subject will give. [Which values it takes will depend on what sort of response it is (e.g. a verbal response, proactive gaze, button press.) We can think of it as taking three values, one for correct belief tracking, one for fact tracking, and one for any other response.]

‘process 1’ and ‘process 2’ are variables which each represent whether a certain kind of mindreading process will occur and, if so, what it’s outcome is.

And the arrows show that the probability that response 1 will have a certain value is influenced by the value of the variables process 1 and process 2 (and by other things not included in the model). So it should be possible to intervene on the value of ‘process 1’ in order to bring about a change in the value of ‘response 1’.

[I’ve used thicker and thinner arrows informally to indicate stronger and weaker dependence. Strictly speaking the width has no meaning and this model doesn’t specify exactly how the values of variables are related, only that they are.]

First, the conditions under which one or another response type tracks beliefs should vary.

1.a E.g. changing the \textbf{instructions} should reduce the probability that responses of one type will track beliefs without much affecting the probability that responses of the other type will track belief.

Evidence for this includes studies by Schenider et al

1.b Or, e.g., changing the \textbf{content of the belief} to be tracked from location to identity, say, should reduce the probability that responses of one type track beliefs without much affecting the probability that responses of the other type will track beliefs.

Evidence for this includes studies by Low and his collaborators.

1a+b. And, ideally, it should be possible find different conditions that reduce the probability that different responses track beliefs.

Further, the probability that responses of these two types track beliefs should be differently affected by factors such as time pressure and cognitive load. (It isn’t important that either is entirely unaffected; what matters is just that the effects are different.)

As far as I know we don’t yet have direct evidence for this, because few studies have compared what happens to two response types as factors like time pressure or cognitive load are varies. There is, of course, some evidence that responses of some types are less susceptible to cognitive load than others (e.g. \citet{qureshi:2010_executive} on L1 VPT).

To illustrate, take the case where we instruct subjects to track the location of a ball. Subjects are asked to press a button to indicate whether a ball is present or absent. We know that button selection will not track beliefs when subjects are not under time pressure. But what happens if we increase time pressure.

It is possible that increasing time pressure will very slightly, but perhaps measurably increase the probability that button presses are dominated by a different mindreading process, one that is less sensitive to instructions. In that case, we would expect to observe slightly more belief tracking in the responses as time pressure is increased.

\citet{todd:2016_dissociating} have recently demonstrated this type of effect for L1-VPT; as far as I know, it has not yet been demonstrated for belief tracking.

The model of minds and actions underpinning automatic mindreading process does not significantly change over development.

By contrast, the model of minds and actions underpinning nonautomatic mindreading process does significantly change over development. In the first three or four years of life, nonautomatic mindreading processes involve relatively crude models of minds and actions, models which do not enable belief tracking. What changes over development is typically just that the model underpinning nonautomatic mindreading becomes gradually more sophisticated and eventually comes to enable belief tracking.