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our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. one signature of motor representations is that they can be disrupted by constraints on an observed agent's action capacities. We therefore used a 'mummification' technique to manipulate whether the agent in a visual ball-detection task was free to act or whether he was visibly constrained from acting. Adults' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs only when the agent was free to act on the ball and not when the agent was visibly constrained from acting. furthermore, it was the agent's constrained action capabilities, rather than any perceptual novelty, that determined whether adult observers' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs. These findings signal that our motor system may underpin more of social cognition than previously imagined, and, in particular, that motor representations may underpin automatic false-belief tracking.

Little is known about whether human beings' automatic mindreading is computationally restricted to processing a limited kind of content, and what exactly the nature of that signature limit might be. We developed a novel object-detection paradigm to test adults' automatic processing in a Level 1 perspectivetaking (L1PT) context (where an agent's belief, but not his visuospatial perspective, is relevantly different) and in a Level 2 perspective-taking (L2PT) context (where both the agent's belief and visuospatial perspective are relevantly different). Experiment 1 uncovered that adults' reaction times in the L1PT task were helpfully speeded by a bystander's irrelevant belief when tracking two homogenous objects but not in the L2PT task when tracking a single heterogeneous object. The limitation is especially striking given that the heterogeneous nature of the single object was fully revealed to participants as well as the bystander. The results were replicated in two further experiments, which confirmed that the selective modulation of adults' reaction times was maintained when tracking the location of a single object (Experiment 2) and when attention checks were removed (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that automatic mindreading draws upon a distinctively minimalist model of the mental that underspecifies representation of differences in perspective relative to an agent's position in space.

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Understanding food preference among animals in human care can support improvements to welfare through training and day-to-day care (e.g., diet management).Little has been published about food preference in zoo-housed meerkats. Assessing meerkat food preference would be useful, not only for the welfare of that species, but also for developing approaches to assessing food preference in other grouphoused, social species. The specific aim of this study was to quantify food preference within the meerkat mob at Wellington Zoo. We developed a simple, cost-effective method for characterizing the food preference hierarchy in meerkats by presenting pairs of foods to the mob as a group. We observed stable preference with the hierarchy for pups closely resembling that for adults. This study demonstrated that it is possible to assess food preference and identify a food preference hierarchy for a group of animals from a social species where it was neither practical nor appropriate to assess individuals' preferences separately.

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<p>Five experiments investigated evidence for a dual-process account of mindreading (Apperly, 2010). This account is motivated by two puzzles: First, why is it that three-year-olds fail standard false-belief tests when looking patterns infer that infants are sensitive to others’ false beliefs? Secondly, why is adult mindreading sometimes slow and effortful, and at other times fast and effortless? The seemingly contradictory observations may be explained by drawing upon two relatively distinct mindreading abilities: ‘Efficient’ processing supports precocious infant performances in non-verbal tasks and fast-paced social interaction in adults, while the later developing ‘flexible’ processing permits full blown understanding of beliefs and facilitates correct verbal responding in standard false-belief tests. Evidence for this theory can be sought by exploiting the idea that there are ‘signature limits’ to the type of information that can be efficiently processed.  One conjecture is that representations underpinning efficient belief-tracking relate agents to objects, leading to the prediction that efficient processing cannot handle false-beliefs involving identity. Experiments 1 and 2 used a novel action-prediction paradigm to determine if adults’ reaction-time patterns differed between two false-belief tasks, one involving a standard change-of-location scenario, and one which also incorporated an identity component. The findings revealed equivalent flexible processing across both tasks. However, there were distinct reaction-time profiles between the tasks such that efficient belief-tracking was only observed in the change-of-location task. The absence of efficient processing in the task incorporating an identity component supports the conjecture that efficient belief-tracking is limited to relational, rather than propositional attitudes.  A second conjecture is that representations underpinning efficient belief-tracking either do not specify agents’ locations or do not specify objects’ orientations. This leads to the prediction that efficient belief-tracking alone will not yield expectations about agents’ perspectives. In a novel object-detection paradigm, Experiments 3 to 5 tested the extent to which adults efficiently tracked the belief of a passive bystander in two closely-matched but conceptually distinct tasks. In a task involving homogenous objects, reaction times were involuntarily influenced by the presence of the bystander. By contrast, in a second task in which the object could be differently perceived depending on where the agent was located in relation to that object, the presence of the agent did not influence adults’ response times, supporting the second conjecture.</p>