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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Perspective-taking; animacy attribution; dot-perspective task; submentalising.

Figure 1.

Schematic depiction of familiarisation and test phase procedures from Experiment 1. On matching trials (“yes” response) in the test phase, the digit specifying the target number corresponded to the number of dots on the walls. On mismatching trials (“no” response) in the test phase, the digit specified a number that was either one higher or one lower than the number of dots on the walls. On Inconsistent trials, the number of dots on the wall matched for one perspective, but not for the other. On Consistent trials, the number of dots matched both perspectives.

Figure 2.

Experiment 1: Results for IES. Error bars indicate standard error.

Figure 3.

Experiment 2 Results for IES for (a) Self-perspective trials and for (b) Other-perspective trials. Error bars indicate standard error.

Figure 4.

Experiment 3: Results for IES. Error bars indicate standard error.

Figure 5.

Experiment 4: Results for IES. Error bars indicate standard error.