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Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?

Are we able to infer what happened to a person from a brief sample of his/her behaviour? It has been proposed that mentalising skills can be used to retrodict as well as predict behaviour, that is, to determine what mental states of a target have already occurred. The current study aimed to develop...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Pillai, Dhanya, Sheppard, Elizabeth, Mitchell, Peter
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3511474/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23226227
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049859
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author Pillai, Dhanya
Sheppard, Elizabeth
Mitchell, Peter
author_facet Pillai, Dhanya
Sheppard, Elizabeth
Mitchell, Peter
author_sort Pillai, Dhanya
collection PubMed
description Are we able to infer what happened to a person from a brief sample of his/her behaviour? It has been proposed that mentalising skills can be used to retrodict as well as predict behaviour, that is, to determine what mental states of a target have already occurred. The current study aimed to develop a paradigm to explore these processes, which takes into account the intricacies of real-life situations in which reasoning about mental states, as embodied in behaviour, may be utilised. A novel task was devised which involved observing subtle and naturalistic reactions of others in order to determine the event that had previously taken place. Thirty-five participants viewed videos of real individuals reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways, and were asked to judge which of the four ‘scenarios’ they thought the individual was responding to. Their eye movements were recorded to establish the visual strategies used. Participants were able to deduce successfully from a small sample of behaviour which scenario had previously occurred. Surprisingly, looking at the eye region was associated with poorer identification of the scenarios, and eye movement strategy varied depending on the event experienced by the person in the video. This suggests people flexibly deploy their attention using a retrodictive mindreading process to infer events.
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spelling pubmed-35114742012-12-05 Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions? Pillai, Dhanya Sheppard, Elizabeth Mitchell, Peter PLoS One Research Article Are we able to infer what happened to a person from a brief sample of his/her behaviour? It has been proposed that mentalising skills can be used to retrodict as well as predict behaviour, that is, to determine what mental states of a target have already occurred. The current study aimed to develop a paradigm to explore these processes, which takes into account the intricacies of real-life situations in which reasoning about mental states, as embodied in behaviour, may be utilised. A novel task was devised which involved observing subtle and naturalistic reactions of others in order to determine the event that had previously taken place. Thirty-five participants viewed videos of real individuals reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways, and were asked to judge which of the four ‘scenarios’ they thought the individual was responding to. Their eye movements were recorded to establish the visual strategies used. Participants were able to deduce successfully from a small sample of behaviour which scenario had previously occurred. Surprisingly, looking at the eye region was associated with poorer identification of the scenarios, and eye movement strategy varied depending on the event experienced by the person in the video. This suggests people flexibly deploy their attention using a retrodictive mindreading process to infer events. Public Library of Science 2012-11-30 /pmc/articles/PMC3511474/ /pubmed/23226227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049859 Text en © 2012 Pillai et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Pillai, Dhanya
Sheppard, Elizabeth
Mitchell, Peter
Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title_full Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title_fullStr Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title_full_unstemmed Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title_short Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions?
title_sort can people guess what happened to others from their reactions?
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3511474/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23226227
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049859
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