Santiesteban Idalmis, Catmur Caroline, Hopkins Senan Coughlan, Bird Geoffrey, Heyes Cecilia
Department of Psychological Sciences.
Department of Psychology, University of Surrey.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2014 Jun;40(3):929-937. doi: 10.1037/a0035175. Epub 2013 Dec 30.
Previous studies using the dot perspective task have shown that adults are slower to verify the number of dots they can see in a picture when a human figure in the picture, an avatar, can see a different number of dots. This "self-consistency effect," which occurs even when the avatar's perspective is formally task-irrelevant, has been interpreted as evidence of implicit mentalizing; that humans can think about the mental states of others via dedicated, automatic processes. We tested this interpretation by giving participants 2 versions of the dot perspective task. In some trials, the avatar was presented as in previous experiments, and in other trials the avatar was replaced by an arrow with similar low-level features. We found self-consistency effects of comparable size in the avatar and arrow conditions, suggesting that self-consistency effects in the dot perspective task are due to domain-general processes such as those that mediate automatic attentional orienting.
以往使用点透视任务的研究表明，当图片中的人物（虚拟形象）能看到不同数量的点时，成年人在核实他们在图片中能看到的点数时会更慢。这种“自我一致性效应”，即使在虚拟形象的视角与正式任务无关时也会出现，已被解释为内隐心理化的证据；即人类可以通过专门的自动过程思考他人的心理状态。我们通过给参与者提供两个版本的点透视任务来测试这一解释。在一些试验中，虚拟形象的呈现方式与之前的实验相同，而在其他试验中，虚拟形象被具有相似低层次特征的箭头所取代。我们发现在虚拟形象和箭头条件下具有相当规模的自我一致性效应，这表明点透视任务中的自我一致性效应是由诸如介导自动注意力定向的那些领域通用过程所导致的。
