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Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test
It has been proposed that humans possess an automatic system to represent mental states (‘implicit mentalizing’). The existence of an implicit mentalizing system has generated considerable debate however, centered on the ability of various experimental paradigms to demonstrate unambiguously such men...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
American Psychological Association
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5327864/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27893269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000319 |
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author | Conway, Jane R. Lee, Danna Ojaghi, Mobin Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey |
author_facet | Conway, Jane R. Lee, Danna Ojaghi, Mobin Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey |
author_sort | Conway, Jane R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | It has been proposed that humans possess an automatic system to represent mental states (‘implicit mentalizing’). The existence of an implicit mentalizing system has generated considerable debate however, centered on the ability of various experimental paradigms to demonstrate unambiguously such mentalizing. Evidence for implicit mentalizing has previously been provided by the ‘dot perspective task,’ where participants are slower to verify the number of dots they can see when an avatar can see a different number of dots. However, recent evidence challenged a mentalizing interpretation of this effect by showing it was unaltered when the avatar was replaced with an inanimate arrow stimulus. Here we present an extension of the dot perspective task using an invisibility cloaking device to render the dots invisible on certain trials. This paradigm is capable of providing unambiguous evidence of automatic mentalizing, but no such evidence was found. Two further well-powered experiments used opaque and transparent goggles to manipulate visibility but found no evidence of automatic mentalizing, nor of individual differences in empathy or perspective-taking predicting performance, contradicting previous studies using the same design. The results cast doubt on the existence of an implicit mentalizing system, suggesting that previous effects were due to domain-general processes. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5327864 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | American Psychological Association |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-53278642017-03-06 Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test Conway, Jane R. Lee, Danna Ojaghi, Mobin Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform Reports It has been proposed that humans possess an automatic system to represent mental states (‘implicit mentalizing’). The existence of an implicit mentalizing system has generated considerable debate however, centered on the ability of various experimental paradigms to demonstrate unambiguously such mentalizing. Evidence for implicit mentalizing has previously been provided by the ‘dot perspective task,’ where participants are slower to verify the number of dots they can see when an avatar can see a different number of dots. However, recent evidence challenged a mentalizing interpretation of this effect by showing it was unaltered when the avatar was replaced with an inanimate arrow stimulus. Here we present an extension of the dot perspective task using an invisibility cloaking device to render the dots invisible on certain trials. This paradigm is capable of providing unambiguous evidence of automatic mentalizing, but no such evidence was found. Two further well-powered experiments used opaque and transparent goggles to manipulate visibility but found no evidence of automatic mentalizing, nor of individual differences in empathy or perspective-taking predicting performance, contradicting previous studies using the same design. The results cast doubt on the existence of an implicit mentalizing system, suggesting that previous effects were due to domain-general processes. American Psychological Association 2016-11-28 2017-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5327864/ /pubmed/27893269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000319 Text en © 2016 The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. |
spellingShingle | Reports Conway, Jane R. Lee, Danna Ojaghi, Mobin Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title | Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title_full | Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title_fullStr | Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title_full_unstemmed | Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title_short | Submentalizing or Mentalizing in a Level 1 Perspective-Taking Task: A Cloak and Goggles Test |
title_sort | submentalizing or mentalizing in a level 1 perspective-taking task: a cloak and goggles test |
topic | Reports |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5327864/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27893269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000319 |
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