Our own perceptual experience, but not that of others, influences object detection

Abstract

Is adult Theory-of-Mind (ToM) automatic? Kovács et al. (2010) indicated that adults are faster to process an unexpected event if the event would have been expected from another agent’s point of view. This suggests that 1) adults attribute beliefs to others spontaneously and 2) these belief representations influence subjects’ own perceptual judgments. However, recent replication studies have highlighted alternative explanations for the results, and the available evidence for such processes is inconclusive (Phillips et al., 2015). The present research aimed to take a fresh look at this putative theoretical phenomenon using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults were required to indicate the location of an object revealed at one of two possible locations, after watching one of four different types of animations involving an agent and the object. The animations were such that the object would show up either were the subject believed it to be (i.e. where they had seen it hide last), or where the agent believed it to be (i.e. where the agent saw it hide last). In a second condition, participants had an additional “instructed tracking” task which required them to occasionally report the location that the object visited first, which always corresponded to the agent’s belief about the object’s location. Participants across conditions were consistently better at detecting the object if its final location corresponded to their own beliefs. However, only in the second condition did the agent’s “belief” correlate with participant reactions: subjects made more errors when the object appeared where the agent did not believe it to be, compared to when it appeared where the agent believed it to be. Thus taken together, the results of the current experiments strongly suggest that while first person beliefs clearly influence anticipated object locations, another agent’s beliefs do not do so spontaneously.

Acknowledgement: Swedish Research Council, EUR FrontCog