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

心理理论（Theory of Mind，简称ToM）是一种思考他人所见、所知、所想、所想和所意图的能力，被认为是社会互动和沟通的基础。心理理论已经在幼儿和婴儿中得到了广泛的研究，最近它的认知和神经基础已经开始在成人中进行研究。当然，成年人无疑“拥有”心理理论能力，但人们对他们实际使用心理理论指导日常活动的能力知之甚少。这是社会认知和语言的基础心理学研究的一个重要问题，其中ToM能力经常被认为是至关重要的，并且有证据表明个体之间以及“西方”和“东方”文化之间的ToM使用存在显着差异。了解何时以及如何使用心理理论对于理解脑损伤后心理理论的损伤或神经发育障碍（如自闭症）也很重要。最后，随着越来越多的“社会化”的人机界面，这可能会使用虚拟代理谁说话，并与他们的用户进行交互，它是越来越重要的是要知道人类何时以及如何成功和失败，在他们使用的理论。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心理理论使用的基本问题，这将是感兴趣的，这些广大的观众。与他人沟通的反思导致了冲突的直觉，什么时候以及如何使用心理理论能力。从某个角度来看，沟通可以感觉相对轻松，这表明我在我们的谈话中对你的观点的考虑是认知效率和高度准确的。另一方面，我们可能会想到许多由于观点采择失败而导致沟通中断的例子。这让我们产生了一种直觉，即以适合听众的方式设计我们所说的话可能相当费力，而且确实容易出错。这种紧张关系反映在心理理论使用的科学文献中，其中关于成年人在解释说话者所说的话时考虑说话者的观点的能力的明显矛盾的发现导致了关于实验方法的有效性以及如何解释这些研究结果的激烈辩论。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：关于成年人是否在网上交流时使用他们的心理理论，没有简单的“是或否”的答案。相反，我们应该关注可能影响人们使用心理理论能力的因素，以及这些影响是如何产生效果的。为了做到这一点，我们将使用基于计算机的实验室方法，允许相关因素被操纵非常精确的控制，我们将研究这些发现如何推广到“现场”之间的互动扬声器和听众，以及这些因素在多大程度上可以解释儿童心理理论使用的发展和心理理论的个体差异，在成人中使用。我们的主要范例要求参与者遵循演讲者的指示，该演讲者并不完全分享他们对所讨论场景的视觉视角。批评性的指导有不同的含义，这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工作表明，成年人在遵循这些指令时经常会出现错误，而且这种困难也在更敏感的措施中观察到，这些措施是基于参与者在任务期间的眼球运动。通过调整这些任务，我们的研究结果将提供关于以下问题的见解：1）成年人使用心理理论的能力的程度和限制2）这些限制如何在不同文化（西方与中国）之间变化3）它们如何通过儿童成长为成年人而变化，以及4）善于使用心理理论的人是否具有更好的社会能力。

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.