Toward Strategic Training on Reading the Mind in the Eyes

• Published in: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 2018-09, Vol.62 (1), p.1562-1566
• Main Authors: Ouverson, Kaitlyn M., Stonewall, Jacklin, Gilbert, Stephen B., Dorneich, Michael C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1541-9312; 1071-1813; 2169-5067
• DOI: 10.1177/1541931218621353

The Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test was originally developed to help distinguish between persons with and without autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). Recently the RME test has been shown to relate to a collective intelligence, defined as the ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks (Woolley et al., 2010). While these previous results may suggest that the RME measures a pre-determined ability it is an open question of whether RME test scores can be improved by strategically training participants to recognize the mental states of individuals from their faces. Preliminary work was done to develop training materials, specifically developing a set of RME-like practice questions. By documenting these efforts, this paper offers researchers an aide to developing their own materials related to the RME test. Future work will use these training materials to answer the question of whether RME scores can be improved through training, and how that may correlate with improved collective intelligence.