Mindreading: Automaticity

Mindreading in adults is sometimes entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes and sometimes not. Further, automatic and nonautomatic mindreading processes are independent in this sense: different conditions influence whether they occur and which ascriptions they generate.

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Notes

Mindreading is the process of identifying a mental state as a mental state that some particular individual, another or yourself, has. To say someone has a theory of mind is another way of saying that she is capable of mindreading.¹

False Belief Tasks

Wimmer & Perner (1983) set out to determine when humans can know facts about others’ beliefs. They told children a story like this:

‘Maxi puts his chocolate in the BLUE box and leaves the room to play. While he is away (and cannot see), his mother moves the chocolate from the BLUE box to the GREEN box. Later Maxi returns. He wants his chocolate.’

They then asked the children, ‘Where will Maxi look for his chocolate?’

The core feature of a standard false belief task is this:

‘[t]he subject is aware that he/she and another person [Maxi] witness a certain state of affairs x. Then, in the absence of the other person the subject witnesses an unexpected change in the state of affairs from x to y’ (Wimmer & Perner, 1983, p. \ 106).

The task is designed to measure the subject’s sensitivity to the probability that Maxi will falsely believe x to obtain.

Models of Minds and Actions

A model is a way the world could logically be, or a set of ways the world could logically be.

We can contrast a fact model of minds and actions with a belief model.

On the fact model, it is facts about where things are which explain an agents’ actions.

On the belief model, it is an agents’ beliefs about where things are which explain her actions.

False belief tasks can be used to distinguish the hypothesis that a subject is using a fact model from the hypothesis that she is using a belief model of minds and actions.

Automatic Mindreading?

Is mindreading automatic? (More carefully: Does belief tracking in human adults depend only on processes which are automatic?)

A process is automatic to the degree that whether it occurs is independent of its relevance to the particulars of the subject’s task, motives and aims.

There is evidence that some mindreading in human adults is entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010; Schneider, Bayliss, Becker, & Dux, 2012; Wel, Sebanz, & Knoblich, 2014; Edwards & Low, 2017; Edwards & Low, 2019), and that not all mindreading in human adults is (Apperly, Back, Samson, & France, 2008; Apperly et al., 2010; Wel et al., 2014).

Qureshi, Apperly, & Samson (2010) found that automatic and nonautomatic mindreading processes are differently influenced by cognitive load, and Todd, Cameron, & Simpson (2016) provided evidence that adding time pressure affects nonautomatic but not automatic mindreading processes.

There is also limited evidence that people are unaware of automatic belief tracking processes:

‘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’ (Schneider et al., 2012, p. 2)

Objection 1

Level 1 perspective-taking in the Samson ‘dot task’ does not appear to be more automatic than Level 2 perspective-taking (Todd, Cameron, & Simpson, 2020).² This finding is puzzing if we take the evidence for automatic belief-tracking at face value: why would belief-tracking but not level-1 perspective taking be automatic? Todd et al.’s finding is also incompatible with, and therefore evidence against, the conjecture that automatic belief-tracking processes rely on minimal theory of mind because minimal theory of mind involves Level-1 perspective-taking.

Objection 2

Christensen and Michael argue that the dual process theory is less well supported overall than an alternative:

‘A cooperative multi-system architecture is better able to explain infant belief representation than a parallel architecture, and causal representation, schemas and models provide a more promising basis for flexible belief representation than does a rule-based approach of the kind described by Butterfill and Apperly’ (Christensen & Michael, 2016; see also Michael & Christensen, 2016; Michael, Christensen, & Overgaard, 2013).

Glossary

References

Endnotes