Hide and seek: The theory of mind of visual concealment and search

Abstract

Researchers have investigated visual search behaviour for almost a century. During that time few studies have examined the cognitive processes involved in hiding items rather than finding them. To investigate this, we developed a paradigm that allowed participants to indicate where they would hide (or find) an item that was to be found (or hidden) by a friend or a foe. For friends, more than foes, participants selected (i) the popout item in the display and (ii) when the display was homogenous they selected nearby and corner items. These behaviours held for hiding and finding, although hide and find behaviours were not identical. For popout displays decision time was unusually long when hiding an item from a foe. These data converge on the conclusion that the principles of search and concealment are similar, but not the same. They also suggest that this paradigm will provide researchers a powerful method for investigating theory of mind in adults.

Arranging Objects in Space: Measuring Task‐Relevant Organizational Behaviors During Goal Pursuit

“…For example, Smilek, Weinheimer, Kwan, Reynolds, and Kingstone () have shown that participants asked to arrange search items to make search easy tend to centralize targets, group similar items, and arrange distractors in regular arrays. Similarly, Anderson, Foulsham, Nasiopoulos, Chapman, and Kingstone () report that individuals hiding an item for a friend (in contrast to hiding an item adversarially) tended to select a nearby, easy‐to‐reach location.…”

Position preference and position change of hiders in the game of hide-and-seek

“…The preference or avoidance for different places to hide objects is documented in Anderson et al (2014), Falk et al (2009), Legge et al (2012) and Talbot et al (2009). We asked ourselves whether the advent calendar creators show preference or avoid certain types of locations while placing Numbers 1, 2, .…”

“…This could be partly due to the differently shaped displays used in each study. For example, the interior squares of a 4 × 4 grid are avoided by hiders in a cooperative setting (Anderson et al, 2014) but not in a 5 × 5 grid (Falk et al, 2009) and generally preferred by these hiders in a certain L-shape display (Legge et al, 2012). Table 3 gives the correlation coefficients between pairs of the following tests: Test 1, distance between hiding places; Test 2, rates of spread with respect to 2 and 3 previous numbers; and Test 3, hit difference.…”

“…In some of these studies, the controlled environment was a real or virtual room (Legge et al, 2012; Talbot, Legge, Bulitko, & Spetch, 2009). In others, humans were asked to hide objects on an array, similar to the game of “Battleship” (Anderson, Foulsham, Nasiopoulos, Chapman, & Kingstone, 2014; Falk, Falk, & Ayton, 2009; Wilke et al, 2015). The subjects were often directed to hide according to a scenario which described their relationship with a potential seeker (e.g., “you want/don’t want someone to find it”; Anderson et al, 2014).…”

“…A real-life example of cooperative hiding is that of someone hiding a house key so that a housemate (but no one else) will find it. When hider and seeker are in a cooperative relationship, the hider tends to pick salient or “pop-up” places as hiding places (Anderson et al, 2014; Falk et al, 2009). Salience is a result of uniqueness in position (such as corners or a center) or distinctiveness of appearance.…”