Xie Jiushu, Cheung Him, Shen Manqiong, Wang Ruiming
Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University.
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University.
Cogn Sci. 2018 May;42(4):1179-1206. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12594. Epub 2018 Feb 17.
This study examines the spontaneous use of embodied egocentric transformation (EET) in understanding false beliefs in the minds of others. EET involves the participants mentally transforming or rotating themselves into the orientation of an agent when trying to adopt his or her visuospatial perspective. We argue that psychological perspective taking such as false belief reasoning may also involve EET because of what has been widely reported in the embodied cognition literature, showing that our processing of abstract, propositional information is often grounded in concrete bodily sensations which are not apparently linked to higher cognition. In Experiment 1, an agent placed a ball into one of two boxes and left. The ball then rolled out and moved either into the other box (new box) or back into the original one (old box). The participants were to decide from which box they themselves or the agent would try to recover the ball. Results showed that false belief performance was affected by increased orientation disparity between the participants and the agent, suggesting involvement of embodied transformation. In Experiment 2, false belief was similarly induced and the participants were to decide if the agent would try to recover the ball in one specific box. Orientation disparity was again found to affect false belief performance. The present results extend previous findings on EET in visuospatial perspective taking and suggest that false belief reasoning, which is a kind of psychological perspective taking, can also involve embodied rotation, consistent with the embodied cognition view.
本研究考察了在理解他人心理中的错误信念时，具身自我中心转换（EET）的自发使用情况。EET 是指参与者在试图采取他人的视觉空间视角时，在脑海中对自身进行转换或旋转，使其处于该他人的方向。我们认为，诸如错误信念推理之类的心理视角采择可能也涉及 EET，因为具身认知文献中已有广泛报道，表明我们对抽象命题信息的处理往往基于具体的身体感觉，而这些感觉与高级认知并无明显关联。在实验 1 中，一名参与者将一个球放入两个盒子中的一个，然后离开。球随后滚出并移动到另一个盒子（新盒子）或回到原来的盒子（旧盒子）。参与者要决定他们自己或该参与者会从哪个盒子中试图找回球。结果表明，错误信念表现受到参与者与该参与者之间方向差异增大的影响，这表明具身转换的参与。在实验 2 中，同样诱导产生错误信念，参与者要决定该参与者是否会试图在一个特定盒子中找回球。再次发现方向差异会影响错误信念表现。目前的结果扩展了先前关于 EET 在视觉空间视角采择方面的研究发现，并表明错误信念推理作为一种心理视角采择，也可能涉及具身旋转，这与具身认知观点一致。
