The director task: A test of Theory-of-Mind use or selective attention?
Over two decades, the director task has increasingly been employed as a test of the use of Theory of Mind in communication, first in psycholinguistics and more recently in social cognition research. A new version of this task was designed to test two independent hypotheses. First, optimal performance in the director task, as established by the standard metrics of interference, is possible by using selective attention alone, and not necessarily Theory of Mind. Second, pragmatic measures of Theory-of-Mind use can reveal that people actively represent the director's mental states, contrary to recent claims that they only use domain-general cognitive processes to perform this task. The results of this study support both hypotheses and provide a new interactive paradigm to reliably test Theory-of-Mind use in referential communication.
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 43 Vassar St., Building 46, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, USA. prubio@mit.edu.|Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, Blindernveien 31, Oslo, 0371, Norway. prubio@mit.edu.
Paula
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1622-0967
P
Rubio-Fernández
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D012919:Social Behavior; D056345:Theory of Mind
Automatic pragmatic inferences; Mentalizing vs. submentalizing; Perspective taking and perspective updating; Selective attention; Suspicion; Task demands