Mentalizing or submentalizing in a communication task? Evidence from autism and a camera control

Santiesteban, Idalmis; Shah, Punit; White, Sarah; Bird, Geoffrey; Heyes, Cecilia

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0716-0

Cited by 53 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In this respect, the present results are consistent with Santiesteban et al's (2015) claim that participants may use nonmentalizing strategies in performing the DT.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…As they had predicted, Santiesteban et al (2015) observed similar performance with both the director and the camera, in both neurotypical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorders, and interpreted their results as supporting evidence that Badults use mentalizing sparingly in psychological experiments and in everyday life^(p. 844). Before reaching these conclusions, Santiesteban et al argued against the possibility that participants may have mentally represented that both the director and the camera were able to see, and therefore treated them equally for that reason.…”

Section: The Director Task In Social Cognition Researchsupporting

confidence: 65%

“…This pattern of results would challenge Santiesteban et al's (2015) claim that participants engaged in the DT only submentalize. In other words, if participants failed to use their Theory of Mind in this new DT, they would not be able to question what the director knows; therefore, the use of domain-general cognitive mechanisms (along the lines suggested by Santiesteban et al and by Heyes, 2014) would not produce positive results in this version of the DT.…”

Section: Aims and Scope Of The Dtmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…However, those researchers defending the view that interlocutors do not always use their Theory of Mind in communication have treated the DT as a representative test of referential communication, drawing conclusions that go well beyond the specific demands of this experimental paradigm and extend to everyday communication (e.g., Apperly & Butterfill, 2009;Apperly et al, 2010;Converse et al, 2008;Keysar et al, 2000;Keysar et al, 2003;Lin et al, 2010;Santiesteban et al, 2015). Moreover, most of these studies failed to account for the large number of studies that have reliably shown perspective taking in communication using the DT and other paradigms (e.g., Brown-Schmidt, 2009, 2012Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004;Heller, Gorman, & Tanenhaus, 2012;Heller et al, 2008;Kuhlen & Brennan, 2010;Lockridge & Brennan, 2002;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it has been shown that using confederates, instead of pairs of naive participants, may compromise the reliability of experimental pragmatics studies (Kuhlen & Brennan, 2010;Lockridge & Brennan, 2002). Recent social-cognition studies have disregarded these earlier studies by using computer versions of the DT, in which participants have to pretend that a static human figure depicted behind a grid is the director (e.g., Apperly et al, 2010;Dumontheil, Küster, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2010;Santiesteban, Shah, White, Bird, & Heyes, 2015;Symeonidou, Dumontheil, Chow, & Breheny, 2016;Wang, Ali, Frisson, & Apperly, 2016). Apperly et al admitted that this setup may not be a naturalistic test, but they nonetheless concluded that their results support Keysar et al's view that adults are rather poor at using Theory-of-Mind inferences in language interpretation.…”

Section: The Director Task In Social Cognition Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The director task: A test of Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?

Rubio-Fernández

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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Over two decades, the director task has increasingly been employed as a test of the use of Theory of Mind in communication, first in psycholinguistics and more recently in social cognition research. A new version of this task was designed to test two independent hypotheses. First, optimal performance in the director task, as established by the standard metrics of interference, is possible by using selective attention alone, and not necessarily Theory of Mind. Second, pragmatic measures of Theory-of-Mind use can reveal that people actively represent the director's mental states, contrary to recent claims that they only use domain-general cognitive processes to perform this task. The results of this study support both hypotheses and provide a new interactive paradigm to reliably test Theory-of-Mind use in referential communication.

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“…In this respect, the present results are consistent with Santiesteban et al's (2015) claim that participants may use nonmentalizing strategies in performing the DT.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: The Director Task In Social Cognition Researchsupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Aims and Scope Of The Dtmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Director Task In Social Cognition Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The director task: A test of Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?

Rubio-Fernández

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

et al. 2018

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One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production, that is, providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker's perspective to interpret verbal reference. A critical limitation of all interpretation studies is that comprehension of another's verbal reference required the participant to represent only the other's visual perspective. Yet, many everyday interpretations of verbal reference require knowledge of social perspective (i.e., a consideration of which experiences one has shared with which interlocutor). We investigated whether 22 5;0-7;11-year-old children with ASD and 22 well-matched typically developing (TD) children used social perspective to comprehend (Study 1) and produce (Study 2) verbal reference. Social perspective-taking was manipulated by having children collaboratively complete activities with one of two interlocutors such that for a given activity, one interlocutor was Knowledgeable and one was Naïve. Study 1 found no between-group differences for the interpretation of ambiguous references based on social perspective. In Study 2, when producing referring terms, the ASD group made modifications based on listener needs, but this effect was significantly stronger in the TD group. Overall, the findings suggest that high-functioning children with ASD know with which interlocutor they have previously shared a given experience and can take this information into account to steer verbal reference. Nonetheless, they show clear performance limitations in this regard relative to well-matched controls. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1366-1375. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: No one had studied if young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could take into account previous collaboration with particular conversation partners to drive how well they communicate with others. In both their language understanding and spoken language, we found that five to 7-year-olds with ASD were able to consider what they had previously shared with the conversation partner. However, they were impaired when compared to typically developing children in the degree to which they tailored their spoken language for a specific listener.

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Socio‐cognitive processing in people with eating disorders: Computerized tests of mentalizing, empathy and imitation skills

Corsi

Cardi

Sowden

et al. 2021

Intl J Eating Disorders

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Objective: Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses characterized by extreme eating behaviors, such as sustained food restriction or loss of control over eating. Symptoms are thought to be maintained by a variety of mechanisms, one of which may be the socio-cognitive impairments associated with eating disorders. While some previous work has addressed socio-cognitive impairments in eating disorders, this work has relied mostly on self-report data.Method: Here we employed computerized tests of (a) mentalizing (ability to infer the mental states of others); (b) empathy (the degree to which the emotional states of others can be identified and the degree to which the states of others impact one's own emotional state); and (c) imitation (the degree to which observation of another's actions prompts the performance of those actions); in a group of 78 women with an eating disorder and a matched control group of 66 healthy women.Results: People with eating disorders showed both hyper-and hypo-mentalizing and reduced accuracy of emotional and cognitive mental state inference. They displayed less imitation of observed actions, but no differences in empathy compared to

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Mentalizing or submentalizing in a communication task? Evidence from autism and a camera control

Cited by 53 publications

References 20 publications

The director task: A test of Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?

The director task: A test of Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

Socio‐cognitive processing in people with eating disorders: Computerized tests of mentalizing, empathy and imitation skills

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