The nature and extent of adults' egocentric bias when reasoning about what others see and believe.

作为成年人，我们经常通过描述他人的心理状态来预测和解释他们的行为，比如那个人能看到什么，他们相信什么，他们想要什么：例如，一个女孩打开冰箱，因为她想要一个冰激凌，她相信冰箱里有冰淇淋。这种能力被称为“心理理论”，因为成年人会对他人的心理状态和行为做出预测。然而，尽管成年人能够预测他人的心理状态，但他们在做出这些预测时容易出错。这个项目将测试成年人为什么会犯这些错误，以及这些错误是否更频繁地发生，这取决于所做预测的类型和性质。为了调查成年人所犯的错误，该项目关注的是成年人在考虑他人观点时所犯的错误，因为这种能力也是推理他人信仰所必需的。因此，观点采纳中的错误尤其有用，因为它们很可能导致其他形式的心理状态归因的错误。因此，该项目将涉及对成年人进行一系列视角采择任务的测试，以调查他们错误的性质和潜在的认知过程。第一个目标是测试成年人在视角采择任务中犯的错误数量是否受到所需视角采择类型的影响。视角选择有两个层次，我们的目标是比较这两个层次的成年人的表现。一种简单的视角思考包括考虑到另一个人能看到什么(第一层次的视角思考)。一种更复杂的透视思考方式涉及到考虑到别人对某事的看法可能与你对某事的看法不同(例如，吉尔可能会看到滤色器后面的一个白色球，就像它是一个蓝球一样；第二级透视思考)。这一点很重要，因为比较每种视角采择所犯的错误将表明错误是否与视角采择的复杂程度有关。第二个目标是测试成年人在透视采择任务中所犯的错误是否仅限于视觉视角采择。之前的研究只测试了成年人在推理别人能看到的东西时是否会出错。目前还不清楚成年人在对别人听到的东西进行推理时是否会出错。测试错误是否局限于一种感觉，对于告诉我们这些错误的性质是至关重要的。此外，我们的测试将为当前的假设提供非常必要的验证，即成年人在对视觉透视进行推理时所表现出的错误通常是关于透视采取的信息。第三个目标是测试成年人犯的错误是否是关于精神状态的推理所独有的。为了解决这一问题，我们将向成年人提供不需要对心理状态进行归因的任务，但这些任务反映了采取观点任务的特定认知要求。观点采择任务的两个组成部分可能会导致成年人的错误。首先，参与者被要求忽略自己的观点。其次，参与者需要代表另一个人的视角所代表的东西(元表征)。因此，我们的目的是检验成年人的错误是由于对心理状态的推理，还是由于这两个认知过程中的错误，这两个认知过程是心理状态归因任务所固有的，但对心理状态归因并不是特别需要的。通过对这三个目标的测试，我们希望能够全面了解成年人在视角采择任务中的错误，从而了解这些错误的性质。这将对对心理理论感兴趣的学术界产生重要影响，并可能对测试脑损伤患者是否有心理理论缺陷以及需要采取观点的职业产生实际影响。

As adult humans we regularly predict and explain others' actions by describing their mental states such as what that person can see, what they believe and what they want: e.g., the girl opened the fridge because she wanted an ice cream and believed there was an ice cream in the fridge. This ability is called a 'theory of mind' because adults generate predictions about others' mental states and behaviours. However, while adults are capable of predicting others' mental states they are prone to errors when making these predictions. This project will test why adults make these errors and whether these errors occur more often depending on the type and nature of the prediction being made. To investigate the errors made by adults' the project focuses on the errors made by adults when taking into account another's perspective because this ability is also required for reasoning about another's belief. Consequently, errors in perspective taking are particularly informative because they are likely to lead to errors in other forms of mental state attribution. Thus, the project will involve testing adults on a range of perspective taking tasks to investigate the nature and the cognitive processes underlying their errors.The first objective is to test whether the number of errors made by adults during perspective taking tasks is influenced by the type of perspective taking required. There are two levels of perspective taking and we aim to compare adults' performance between these two levels. A simple form of perspective taking involves taking into account what another person can see (level 1 perspective taking). A more complicated form of perspective taking involves taking into account that how another person sees something can differ to how you see it (for instance, Jill may see a white ball behind a colour filter as if it were a blue ball; level 2 perspective taking). This is important because a comparison between the errors made on each type of perspective taking would indicate whether errors are linked to how complex the perspective taking is.The second objective is to test whether errors made by adults during perspective taking tasks are limited to visual perspective taking. Previous research has only tested whether adults make errors when reasoning about what other people can see. It is yet unclear whether adults make errors when reasoning about what others hear. Testing whether errors are limited to one sense is crucial in informing us about the nature of these errors. Moreover, our tests will provide highly needed validation of the current assumption that the errors shown by adults when reasoning about visual perspective are informative about perspective taking in general. The third objective is to test whether the errors made by adults are unique to reasoning about mental states. To address this we will present adults with tasks that do not require attributing a mental state but that reflect specific cognitive requirements of perspective taking tasks. Two components of perspective taking tasks may be leading to adults' errors. Firstly, participants are required to ignore their own perspective. Secondly, participants need to represent what is represented in another person's perspective (meta-representation). Consequently, we aim to test whether adults' errors are due to reasoning about mental states or due to errors in these two cognitive processes which are inherent in mental state attribution tasks but which are not specifically required for mental state attribution.By testing all three objectives we hope to achieve a comprehensive understanding of adults' errors in perspective taking tasks that will inform us about the nature of these errors. This will have important implications for the academic community interested in theory of mind and may have practical ramifications both for testing whether patients with brain injuries have deficits in theory of mind and for the professions that require perspective taking