Title: When and why do humans fail to use their "theory of mind"?
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to think about what others see, know, think, want and intend, and is thought to be a fundamental basis of social interaction and communication. ToM has been widely studied in young children and infants, and more recently its cognitive and neural basis has begun to be studied in adults. Of course, adults undoubtedly "have" ToM abilities, but their ability to actually use ToM to guide everyday activities is poorly understood. This is an important question for fundamental psychological research on social cognition and language, where ToM abilities are frequently believed to be critical, and where there is evidence of significant variation in ToM-use both between individuals and between "Western" and "Eastern" cultures. Understanding when and how ToM is used is also important for understanding impairments in ToM following brain injury, or in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. Finally, with increasing "socialisation" of human-computer interfaces, which may use virtual agents who speak and interact with their users, it is increasingly important to know when and how humans succeed and fail in their use of ToM. Only by doing so will it be possible to optimise such systems for their human users. The current project will investigate fundamental questions about ToM-use that will be of interest to these broad audiences. Reflection on communication with others leads to conflicting intuitions about when and how ToM abilities are used. Viewed one way, communication can feel relatively effortless, suggesting that my consideration of your perspective during our conversation is cognitively efficient and highly accurate. On the other hand, we can probably think of many instances where communication is disrupted because of a failure of perspective-taking. This feeds an intuition that designing what we say in a way that is appropriate for the audience may be rather effortful, and indeed error-prone. This tension is reflected in the scientific literature on ToM-use, where apparently contradictory findings about adults' abilities to take account of a speaker's perspective when interpreting what they say have led to heated debate both about the validity of experimental methods and about how the findings from these studies should be interpreted. The guiding hypothesis for the proposed work is that the polarisation of this debate may be an error: There will be no simple "yes or no" answer about whether adults use their ToM online during communication. Instead we should pay attention to the factors that may influence people's ability to use ToM, and how it is that these influences have their effect. To do this we will use both computer-based laboratory methods that allow relevant factors to be manipulated with very precise control, and we will examine how these findings generalise to "live" interactions between speaker and listener, and the degree to which these same factors might explain development of ToM-use in children and individual differences in ToM-use in adults. Our main paradigm requires participants to follow instructions from a speaker who does not fully share their visual perspective on the scene under discussion. Critical instructions have different meanings depending on whether or not participants successfully take the speaker's perspective into account. Previous work by the applicants, our collaborator at the University of Chicago, and others, shows that adults frequently show errors when following such instructions, and such difficulty is also observed in more sensitive measures, based on participants' eye movements during the tasks. By adapting these tasks, our findings will provide insights about 1) the extent and limits of adults' abilities to use their ToM 2) how these limits vary between cultures (Western versus Chinese) 3) how they change through children's development into adults, and 4) whether people who are good at ToM-use have generally better social abilities.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH