Cognitive Gadgets by Cecilia Heyes

Author:Cecilia Heyes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-05T05:53:32+00:00

Mindreading 159

Familiarization

First

A

B

Second

Test

False Belief 1

C

D

False Belief 2

7.1 Stills from the videos used by Southgate and colleagues to test for the

ascription of false beliefs by twenty-five- month- old infants. (Reprinted with

permission from Southgate, Senju, and Csibra, 2007.)

160

C O G N I T I V E G A D G E T S

more specifically, “inattentional blindness” (Mack and Rock, 1998).

Like adults who fail to notice a gorilla in a group of humans because

they are focused on a counting task (Simons and Chabris, 1999), the

infants may have failed to notice the ball movements while the bell

was ringing because their attention was focused on the agent’s turned

head and the area to which she was looking. Thus, the infants made

their first eye movements to the last location at which they, the infants, had seen the ball: to the right box in False Belief 1, the condition in which the agent turned after the ball was transferred from left to right, and the left box in False Belief 2, the condition in which the

agent turned after the ball was initially placed in that left box.2

The evidence of implicit mindreading in nonhuman apes could

also be due to domain general pro cessing (Heyes, 2015). For example,

Krupenye and colleagues used a procedure modeled on the study

by Southgate and colleagues (2007), described above, to test for false

belief ascription in chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans (Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, and Tomasello, 2016). In their experiment, the agent, rather than turn away, left the scene during critical movements of the target object. This was an advantage in that it allowed the apes, unlike the infants, to view the object movements without distraction. However, it had the unfortunate side effect of making the agent, who wore a bright green shirt, into an ideal retrieval cue, that is, a stimulus that triggers recall of an event

because it was prominent when the event was encoded. The apes

may have seen the target object at each location but, guided in the

test by the pattern established during familiarization trials, retrieved from memory the location at which it last appeared with the bright green stimulus (Heyes, 2017b).

Mindreading can be distinguished from domain general processing using inanimate control procedures, in which social stimuli are replaced by non social stimuli with similar low level perceptual

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