Recent research has uncovered a developmental paradox within theory of mind. While spontaneous response measures indicate sensitivity to false beliefs in infants before their first birthday, tasks involving elicited response measures of false belief are only passed consistently from 4 years of age. In adults, it has been suggested that these spontaneous responses may result from a minimal theory of mind system, which allows rapid and automatic attribution of mental states to others.It has been proposed that the limitations of the minimal system in adults may resemble the limitations demonstrated by non-human animals in tasks thought to involve mental state attribution. Here we have adapted the specific satiety paradigm used with Eurasian jays to investigate adult humans’ anticipatory looking responses based on another individual’s specific satiety.Although no clear evidence was found for spontaneous desire attribution in this study, it is difficult to draw conclusions from these results given the small sample sizes available and the current replication failures of studies demonstrating spontaneous responses to false belief.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.