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Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect

Understanding the mental states of our social partners allows us to successfully interact with the world around us. Mental state attributions are argued to underpin social attention, and have been shown to modulate attentional orienting to social cues. However, recent research has disputed this clai...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Morgan, Emma J., Freeth, Megan, Smith, Daniel T.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6835774/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31735875
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vision2010011
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author Morgan, Emma J.
Freeth, Megan
Smith, Daniel T.
author_facet Morgan, Emma J.
Freeth, Megan
Smith, Daniel T.
author_sort Morgan, Emma J.
collection PubMed
description Understanding the mental states of our social partners allows us to successfully interact with the world around us. Mental state attributions are argued to underpin social attention, and have been shown to modulate attentional orienting to social cues. However, recent research has disputed this claim, arguing that this effect may arise as an unintentional side effect of study design, rather than through the involvement of mentalising processes. This study therefore aimed to establish whether the mediation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises beyond the specific experimental paradigm used in previous research. The current study used a gaze cueing paradigm within a change detection task, and the gaze cue was manipulated such that participants were aware that the cue-agent was only able to ‘see’ in one condition. The results revealed that participants were influenced by the mental state of the cue-agent, and were significantly better at identifying if a change had occurred on valid trials when they believed the cue-agent could ‘see’. The computation of the cue-agent’s mental state therefore mediated the gaze cueing effect, demonstrating that the modulation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises to other experimental paradigms.
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spelling pubmed-68357742019-11-14 Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect Morgan, Emma J. Freeth, Megan Smith, Daniel T. Vision (Basel) Article Understanding the mental states of our social partners allows us to successfully interact with the world around us. Mental state attributions are argued to underpin social attention, and have been shown to modulate attentional orienting to social cues. However, recent research has disputed this claim, arguing that this effect may arise as an unintentional side effect of study design, rather than through the involvement of mentalising processes. This study therefore aimed to establish whether the mediation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises beyond the specific experimental paradigm used in previous research. The current study used a gaze cueing paradigm within a change detection task, and the gaze cue was manipulated such that participants were aware that the cue-agent was only able to ‘see’ in one condition. The results revealed that participants were influenced by the mental state of the cue-agent, and were significantly better at identifying if a change had occurred on valid trials when they believed the cue-agent could ‘see’. The computation of the cue-agent’s mental state therefore mediated the gaze cueing effect, demonstrating that the modulation of gaze cueing by mental state attributions generalises to other experimental paradigms. MDPI 2018-02-19 /pmc/articles/PMC6835774/ /pubmed/31735875 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vision2010011 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Morgan, Emma J.
Freeth, Megan
Smith, Daniel T.
Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title_full Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title_fullStr Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title_full_unstemmed Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title_short Mental State Attributions Mediate the Gaze Cueing Effect
title_sort mental state attributions mediate the gaze cueing effect
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6835774/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31735875
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vision2010011
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