Automatic belief-tracking in adults and
belief-tracking in infants are both subject to signature limits
associated with minimal theory of mind
(\citealp{wang:2015_limits,Low:2012_identity,low:2014_quack,mozuraitis:2015_privileged};
contrast \citealp{scott:2015_infants}).
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\includegraphics[width=0.25\textwidth]{fig/signature_limits_table.png}
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\includegraphics[width=0.3\textwidth]{fig/low_2012_fig.png}
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There is some evidence that this prediction is correct.
Jason Low and his collegaues set out to test it.
They have now published three
different papers showing such limits; and Hannes Rakoczy and others
have more work in progress on this.
Collapsing several experiements using different approaches,
the basic pattern of their findings is this ...
Take non-automatic responses first; in this case, communicative responses.
When you do a false-belief-identity task, you see the pattern you also
find for false-belief-locations tasks.
But things look different when you measure non-automatic responses ...
The non-automatic responses all show the signature limit of minimal
models of the mental.
This is evidence for the hypothesis that
Some automatic belief-tracking systems rely on minimal models of the mental.
I also hear that quite a few scientists have pilot data that speaks
against this signature limit.
One particular task for future research will be to examine whether other
automatic responses to scenarios involving false beliefs about identity,
such as response times and movement trajectories, are also subject
to this signature limit.
Windows light up, you will look in anticipation
Low et al, 2014 figure 2
Another experiment got similar results (rabbits quack):
this graph is nice because it illustrates how you can dissociate
the proactive gaze from the verbal response (make it uniformly good,
or uniformly bad)
Just say that you can do this with other stimuli and paradigms, and we
have done this with infants and would like to do it with adults.
These findings complicate the picture: is helping driven by automatic processes only?
If not, why do we predict that the signature limit of minimal theory of mind
is found in this case too?
Scott et al (2015, figure 2b)
Scott and colleagues \citep{scott:2015_infants} provided other evidence
suggesting that infants’ mindreading may be relatively sophisticated.
Specifically, 17-month-olds watched a thief attempt to steal a preferred
object (a rattling toy) when its owner was momentarily absent by substituting
it with a less-preferred object (a non-rattling toy). Infants looked longer
when the thief substituted the preferred object with a non-visually-matching
silent toy compared to when the thief substituted it with a visually-matching
silent toy. The authors postulated that infants can ascribe to the thief an
intention to implant in the owner a false-belief about the identity of the
substituted toy. The authors further suggested that infants make such ascriptions
only when the substitution involves a visually-matching toy and the owner will
not test whether the toy rattles on her return.
However, Scott et al.’s \citep{scott:2015_infants} explanations also
require postulating that infants take the thief to be strikingly inept;
despite having opportunity simply to pilfer from a closed box known to
contain at least three rattling toys, the thief engages in elaborate
deception which will be uncovered whenever the substituted toy is next
shaken and the thief, as sole suspect, easily identified. A further
difficulty is that factors unrelated to the thief’s mental states vary
between conditions, such as the frequencies with which toys visually matching
one present during the final phase of the test trial have rattled. These
considerations jointly indicate that further evidence would be needed to
support the claim that humans’ early mindreading capacity enables them to
ascribe intentions concerning false beliefs involving numerical identity.