Cohen Adam S, German Tamsin C
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106-9660, USA.
Cognition. 2009 Jun;111(3):356-63. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.03.004. Epub 2009 Apr 18.
Under what conditions do people automatically encode and track the mental states of others? A recent investigation showed that when subjects are instructed to track the location of an object but are not instructed to track a belief about that location in a non-verbal false-belief task, they respond more slowly to questions about an agent's belief, suggesting that belief information was not encoded or tracked automatically [Apperly, I. A., Riggs, K. J., Simpson, A., Samson, D., & Chiavarino, C. (2006). Is belief reasoning automatic? Psychological Science, 17, 841-844]. In the current experiments, we show that if belief probes occur closer in time to the events that signal the content of the agent's false belief, responses to those probes are faster than responses to probes about reality, and as fast as responses to probes about belief when instructed to track them, suggesting (i) beliefs may get encoded automatically in response to certain cues and (ii) that belief information rapidly decays unless it is maintained via 'top-down' instructions.
在何种条件下人们会自动对他人的心理状态进行编码和追踪？最近一项调查表明，在一项非言语错误信念任务中，当受试者被要求追踪一个物体的位置，但未被要求追踪关于该位置的信念时，他们对有关主体信念的问题回答得更慢，这表明信念信息并未被自动编码或追踪[阿珀利，I. A.，里格斯，K. J.，辛普森，A.，萨姆森，D.，& 基亚瓦里诺，C.（2006年）。信念推理是自动的吗？《心理科学》，17，841 - 844]。在当前的实验中，我们表明，如果信念探测在时间上更接近那些表明主体错误信念内容的事件，对这些探测的反应比对关于现实的探测的反应更快，并且与在被要求追踪信念时对信念探测的反应一样快，这表明（i）信念可能会因某些线索而被自动编码，以及（ii）除非通过“自上而下”的指令进行维持，信念信息会迅速衰减。
