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Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference
Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to represent the mental states of oneself and others, is argued to be central to human social experience, and impairments in this ability are thought to underlie several psychiatric and developmental conditions. To examine the accuracy of mental state inferences, a...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729182/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36477707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25490-x |
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author | Long, Emily L. Cuve, Hélio Clemente Conway, Jane Rebecca Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey |
author_facet | Long, Emily L. Cuve, Hélio Clemente Conway, Jane Rebecca Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey |
author_sort | Long, Emily L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to represent the mental states of oneself and others, is argued to be central to human social experience, and impairments in this ability are thought to underlie several psychiatric and developmental conditions. To examine the accuracy of mental state inferences, a novel ToM task was developed, requiring inferences to be made about the mental states of ‘Targets’, prior participants who took part in a videoed mock interview. Participants also made estimates of the Targets’ personality traits. These inferences were compared to ground-truth data, provided by the Targets, of their true traits and mental states. Results from 55 adult participants demonstrated that trait inferences were used to derive mental state inferences, and that the accuracy of trait estimates predicted the accuracy of mental state inferences. Moreover, the size and direction of the association between trait accuracy and mental state accuracy varied according to the trait—mental state combination. The accuracy of trait inferences was predicted by the accuracy of participants’ understanding of trait covariation at the population level. Findings are in accordance with the Mind-space theory, that representation of the Target mind is used in the inference of their mental states. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9729182 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97291822022-12-09 Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference Long, Emily L. Cuve, Hélio Clemente Conway, Jane Rebecca Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey Sci Rep Article Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to represent the mental states of oneself and others, is argued to be central to human social experience, and impairments in this ability are thought to underlie several psychiatric and developmental conditions. To examine the accuracy of mental state inferences, a novel ToM task was developed, requiring inferences to be made about the mental states of ‘Targets’, prior participants who took part in a videoed mock interview. Participants also made estimates of the Targets’ personality traits. These inferences were compared to ground-truth data, provided by the Targets, of their true traits and mental states. Results from 55 adult participants demonstrated that trait inferences were used to derive mental state inferences, and that the accuracy of trait estimates predicted the accuracy of mental state inferences. Moreover, the size and direction of the association between trait accuracy and mental state accuracy varied according to the trait—mental state combination. The accuracy of trait inferences was predicted by the accuracy of participants’ understanding of trait covariation at the population level. Findings are in accordance with the Mind-space theory, that representation of the Target mind is used in the inference of their mental states. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-12-07 /pmc/articles/PMC9729182/ /pubmed/36477707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25490-x Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Long, Emily L. Cuve, Hélio Clemente Conway, Jane Rebecca Catmur, Caroline Bird, Geoffrey Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title | Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title_full | Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title_fullStr | Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title_full_unstemmed | Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title_short | Novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
title_sort | novel theory of mind task demonstrates representation of minds in mental state inference |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729182/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36477707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25490-x |
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