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When and why do humans fail to use their "theory of mind"?

人类何时以及为何无法运用他们的“心智理论”？

基本信息

批准号：
ES/J012238/1
负责人：
I A Apperly
金额：
$ 40.26万
依托单位：
University of Birmingham
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2013 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FJ012238%2F1
关键词：
When why do humans fail

项目摘要

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to think about what others see, know, think, want and intend, and is thought to be a fundamental basis of social interaction and communication. ToM has been widely studied in young children and infants, and more recently its cognitive and neural basis has begun to be studied in adults. Of course, adults undoubtedly "have" ToM abilities, but their ability to actually use ToM to guide everyday activities is poorly understood. This is an important question for fundamental psychological research on social cognition and language, where ToM abilities are frequently believed to be critical, and where there is evidence of significant variation in ToM-use both between individuals and between "Western" and "Eastern" cultures. Understanding when and how ToM is used is also important for understanding impairments in ToM following brain injury, or in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. Finally, with increasing "socialisation" of human-computer interfaces, which may use virtual agents who speak and interact with their users, it is increasingly important to know when and how humans succeed and fail in their use of ToM. Only by doing so will it be possible to optimise such systems for their human users. The current project will investigate fundamental questions about ToM-use that will be of interest to these broad audiences.Reflection on communication with others leads to conflicting intuitions about when and how ToM abilities are used. Viewed one way, communication can feel relatively effortless, suggesting that my consideration of your perspective during our conversation is cognitively efficient and highly accurate. On the other hand, we can probably think of many instances where communication is disrupted because of a failure of perspective-taking. This feeds an intuition that designing what we say in a way that is appropriate for the audience may be rather effortful, and indeed error-prone. This tension is reflected in the scientific literature on ToM-use, where apparently contradictory findings about adults' abilities to take account of a speaker's perspective when interpreting what they say have led to heated debate both about the validity of experimental methods and about how the findings from these studies should be interpreted. The guiding hypothesis for the proposed work is that the polarisation of this debate may be an error: There will be no simple "yes or no" answer about whether adults use their ToM online during communication. Instead we should pay attention to the factors that may influence people's ability to use ToM, and how it is that these influences have their effect. To do this we will use both computer-based laboratory methods that allow relevant factors to be manipulated with very precise control, and we will examine how these findings generalise to "live" interactions between speaker and listener, and the degree to which these same factors might explain development of ToM-use in children and individual differences in ToM-use in adults.Our main paradigm requires participants to follow instructions from a speaker who does not fully share their visual perspective on the scene under discussion. Critical instructions have different meanings depending on whether or not participants successfully take the speaker's perspective into account. Previous work by the applicants, our collaborator at the University of Chicago, and others, shows that adults frequently show errors when following such instructions, and such difficulty is also observed in more sensitive measures, based on participants' eye movements during the tasks. By adapting these tasks, our findings will provide insights about 1) the extent and limits of adults' abilities to use their ToM 2) how these limits vary between cultures (Western versus Chinese) 3) how they change through children's development into adults, and 4) whether people who are good at ToM-use have generally better social abilities.

心理理论（ToM）是一种思考他人所见、所知、所想、所想和意图的能力，被认为是社会互动和沟通的基本基础。在幼儿和婴儿中对ToM进行了广泛的研究，最近在成人中开始研究其认知和神经基础。当然，成年人无疑“拥有”ToM能力，但他们实际使用ToM来指导日常活动的能力却鲜为人知。这对于社会认知和语言的基础心理学研究来说是一个重要的问题，在这些研究中，ToM能力经常被认为是至关重要的，并且有证据表明，在个体之间以及在“西方”和“东方”文化之间，ToM的使用都存在显著差异。了解何时以及如何使用ToM对于理解脑损伤或神经发育障碍（如自闭症）后ToM的损伤也很重要。最后，随着人机界面的日益“社会化”（可能使用虚拟代理与用户交谈和交互），了解人类在何时以及如何成功和失败地使用ToM变得越来越重要。只有这样，才有可能为人类用户优化这些系统。目前的项目将调查有关tom使用的基本问题，这些问题将引起广大受众的兴趣。对与他人沟通的反思导致了对何时以及如何使用ToM能力的冲突直觉。从一个角度来看，沟通相对来说是不费力的，这表明我在我们的谈话中对你的观点的考虑是有效的和高度准确的。另一方面，我们可能会想到许多由于换位思考失败而导致沟通中断的例子。这让我们产生了一种直觉，即以一种适合观众的方式来设计我们所说的内容可能相当费力，而且确实容易出错。这种紧张关系反映在有关ToM-use的科学文献中，其中关于成年人在解释说话人的观点时考虑说话人观点的能力的明显矛盾的研究结果导致了关于实验方法有效性和这些研究结果应该如何解释的激烈辩论。这项工作的指导假设是，这场辩论的两极分化可能是一个错误：对于成年人是否在交流时使用ToM，不会有一个简单的“是或否”的答案。相反，我们应该关注可能影响人们使用ToM能力的因素，以及这些影响是如何产生影响的。为了做到这一点，我们将使用基于计算机的实验室方法，允许通过非常精确的控制来操纵相关因素，我们将研究这些发现如何推广到说话者和听者之间的“现场”互动，以及这些相同的因素在多大程度上可以解释儿童使用汤姆tom的发展和成人使用汤姆tom的个体差异。我们的主要范例要求参与者遵循演讲者的指示，而演讲者并不完全分享他们对正在讨论的场景的视觉视角。关键的指示有不同的含义取决于参与者是否成功地考虑到说话者的观点。申请人、我们在芝加哥大学的合作者和其他人之前的研究表明，成年人在遵循这些指示时经常会出现错误，这种困难也可以通过更敏感的方法观察到，基于参与者在任务中的眼球运动。通过调整这些任务，我们的研究结果将提供以下方面的见解：1)成年人使用智能手机的能力的范围和限制；2)这些限制在不同文化（西方与中国）之间的差异；3)它们如何在儿童成长为成年人的过程中发生变化；4)擅长智能手机使用的人是否通常具有更好的社交能力。