Ferguson, Heather J. and Breheny, Richard (2011) Eye movements reveal the time-course of anticipating behavior based on complex, conflicting desires. Cognition, 119 (2). pp. 179-196. ISSN 0010-0277.
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| Official URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.01.005 |
Abstract
The time-course of representing others’ perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a character’s basic preferences (e.g. Tom’s favourite colour is pink) and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to influence online expectations about subsequent behaviour. Participants’ eye movements around a visual scene were tracked while they listened to auditory narratives. While clear differences in anticipatory visual biases emerged between conditions in Experiment 1, post-hoc analyses testing the strength of the relevant biases suggested a discrepancy in the time-course of predicting appropriate referents within the different contexts. Specifically, predictions to the target emerged very early when there was no conflict between the character’s basic preferences and higher-order desires, but appeared to be relatively delayed when comprehenders were provided with conflicting information about that character’s desire to keep a secret. However, a second experiment demonstrated that this apparent ‘cognitive cost’ in inferring behaviour based on higher-order desires was in fact driven by low-level features between the context sentence and visual scene. Taken together, these results suggest that healthy adults are able to make complex higher-order ToM inferences without the need to call on costly cognitive processes. Results are discussed relative to previous accounts of ToM and language processing.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
| Divisions: | Faculties > Social Sciences > School of Psychology > Cognitive Psychology |
| Depositing User: | Heather Ferguson |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Apr 2011 14:01 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Nov 2011 13:32 |
| Resource URI: | http://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/26193 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes) |
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