Mental state attribution and the gaze cueing effect

Theory of mind is said to be possessed by an individual if he or she is able to impute mental states to others. Recently, some authors have demonstrated that such mental state attributions can mediate the “gaze cueing” effect, in which observation of another individual shifts an observer’s attention...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Attention, perception & psychophysics perception & psychophysics, 2015-05, Vol.77 (4), p.1105-1115
Main Authors: Cole, Geoff G., Smith, Daniel T., Atkinson, Mark A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Attention - physiology
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Beliefs
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive Psychology
Cues
Developmental Psychology
Eyes & eyesight
Female
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Humans
Interpersonal Relations
Observation
Orientation - physiology
Perspective Taking
Psychology
Reaction Time
Resistance (Psychology)
Schizophrenia
Social Cognition
Social Perception
Stimuli
Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind - physiology
Vision, Ocular - physiology
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Summary:Theory of mind is said to be possessed by an individual if he or she is able to impute mental states to others. Recently, some authors have demonstrated that such mental state attributions can mediate the “gaze cueing” effect, in which observation of another individual shifts an observer’s attention. One question that follows from this work is whether such mental state attributions produce mandatory modulations of gaze cueing. Employing the basic gaze cueing paradigm, together with a technique commonly used to assess mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals, we manipulated whether the gazing agent could see the same thing as the participant (i.e., the target) or had this view obstructed by a physical barrier. We found robust gaze cueing effects, even when the observed agent in the display could not see the same thing as the participant. These results suggest that the attribution of “seeing” does not necessarily modulate the gaze cueing effect.
ISSN:1943-3921
1943-393X
DOI:10.3758/s13414-014-0780-6