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So testing for automaticity requires us to manipulate instructions.

How can we test whether someone is able to ascribe beliefs to others? Here is one quite famous way to test this, perhaps some of you are even aware of it already. Let's suppose I am the experimenter and you are the subjects. First I tell you a story ...

We manipulate the instructions to demonstrate automaticity (insensitivity to instructions)

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.

Subjects look significantly more at the no ball location in the false belief condition.

Subjects also look significantly less at the ball location in the false belief condition.

In a further study, Dana Schneider et al. (2014) 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’ (Dana Schneider et al., 2014, p. 46) 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)? %Dana Schneider et al. (2014, p. 46): ‘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 Kovács et al. (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 Wel et al. (2014), 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!

(Wel et al., 2014, p. \ 132): ‘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, Back & Apperly (2010) 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 (Apperly, Riggs, Simpson, Chiavarino, & Samson, 2006, p. see also][). 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{\% Carruthers (2015, p. ms~p. 9) objects (following Cohen & German, 2009) that these experiments are ‘not really about encoding belief but recalling it.’ Note that this objection is already answered by Back & Apperly (2010, p. 56). }

So testing for automaticity required us to manipulate instructions.