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Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In this study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task...

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Autores principales: Westra, Evan, Terrizzi, Brandon F, van Baal, Simon T, Beier, Jonathan S, Michael, John
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8392802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33752520
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211007388
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author Westra, Evan
Terrizzi, Brandon F
van Baal, Simon T
Beier, Jonathan S
Michael, John
author_facet Westra, Evan
Terrizzi, Brandon F
van Baal, Simon T
Beier, Jonathan S
Michael, John
author_sort Westra, Evan
collection PubMed
description In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In this study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalising” processes. Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalising processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g., arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze–following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalising interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct.
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spelling pubmed-83928022021-08-28 Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm Westra, Evan Terrizzi, Brandon F van Baal, Simon T Beier, Jonathan S Michael, John Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) Original Articles In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In this study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalising” processes. Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalising processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g., arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze–following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalising interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. SAGE Publications 2021-04-13 2021-10 /pmc/articles/PMC8392802/ /pubmed/33752520 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211007388 Text en © Experimental Psychology Society 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Articles
Westra, Evan
Terrizzi, Brandon F
van Baal, Simon T
Beier, Jonathan S
Michael, John
Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title_full Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title_fullStr Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title_full_unstemmed Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title_short Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
title_sort beyond avatars and arrows: testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8392802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33752520
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211007388
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