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In the last 15 years, Theory of Mind research has been revolutionized by the development of new implicit tasks. Such tasks aim at tapping children’s and adults’ uninstructed, largely automatic mental state ascription, indicated in spontaneous looking behavior when observing agents who act on the basis of false beliefs. Studies with anticipatory looking, in particular, have suggested that basic ToM capacities operate from very early in life and remain in unconscious operation throughout the lifespan. Recently, however, systematic replication attempts of anticipatory looking measures have yielded a complex and puzzling mixture of successful, partial and non-replications. The present study aimed at shedding light on the question whether there is a system to this pattern. More specifically, in a set of three preregistered experiments, it was tested whether those conditions that could previously be replicated and those that could not differ in crucial conceptual respects such that the former do not strictly require ToM whereas the latter do. This was tested by the implementation of novel control conditions. The results were complex. There was generally no unambiguous evidence for reliable spontaneous ToM and no effect of the number of passed familiarization trials. Neither was there any unambiguous evidence that the previous mixed patterns of (non-)replications could be explained (away) by the sub-mentalizing account tested in the new control conditions. The empirical situation remains puzzling, and the question whether there is some such thing as implicit and spontaneous ToM remains to be clarified.
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Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to agents, has usually been measured with explicit verbal tasks and found to develop slowly during the preschool years. New implicit ToM measures have lately revolutionized the field by suggesting that ToM may be present much earlier in development. However, recent replication studies of implicit ToM present a complex pattern of failed, partial and successful attempts. The big challenge is to identify an underlying system to this pattern that can explain why some tasks replicate while others do not. The rationale of the present study was to address this challenge by investigating one potential factor that may explain patterns of (non-)replications of implicit measures, namely elements of verbal narration in anticipatory looking tasks. Sixty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children completed modified versions of two different anticipatory looking implicit false belief tasks which recently proved difficult to replicate. The main modification was that verbal narration was added to the original stimulus videos. Results revealed that original looking patterns could still not be replicated. There was no improvement in one task, while a slight improvement was observed in the other task. In conclusion, adding verbal narration does not necessarily improve the replicability of anticipatory ToM tasks, suggesting either that these measures might not be sufficiently sensitive to tap implicit ToM, or that other factors are crucial for successful replications.
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The commentary by Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate raises a number of crucial issues concerning the replicability and validity of measures of false belief in infancy. Although we agree with some of their arguments, we believe that they underestimate the replication crisis in this area. In our response to their commentary, we first analyze the current empirical situation. The upshot is that, given the available evidence, it remains very much an open question whether infants possess a rich theory of mind. We then draw out more general conclusions for future collaborative studies that have the potential to address this open question.
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In comparison to neutral faces, facial expressions of emotion are known to elicit attentional prioritization, mainly demonstrated by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Recent evidence indicated that such a preferential processing can also be gained by neutral faces when associated with increased motivational salience via reward. It remains, however, an open question, whether impacts of inherent emotional salience and associated motivational salience might be integrated. In the present study, participants (N=42) learned to categorize happy and neutral faces as reward- and zero-outcome-related via an associative learning paradigm. After successful learning, a consolidation phase followed to strengthen the learned associations. ERPs were recorded throughout the experiment. In the learning phase, happy faces boosted the face-sensitive N170 and the emotion-related EPN component, compared to neutral faces, whereas effects of associated motivational salience were absent. In the subsequent consolidation phase, happy faces again elicited enhanced N170 and EPN amplitudes, while reward-associated faces -- irrespective of their expressions -- amplified the LPC, a component linked to higher-order evaluations. Interactions between expressions and associated outcome conditions were absent in all ERP components of interest. The present study offers new evidence that acquired salience impacts stimulus processing but independent of the effects driven by happy facial expressions.
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Recently, theory-of-mind research has been revolutionized by findings from novel implicit tasks suggesting that at least some aspects of false-belief reasoning develop earlier in ontogeny than previously assumed and operate automatically throughout adulthood. Although these findings are the empirical basis for far-reaching theories, systematic replications are still missing. This article reports a preregistered large-scale attempt to replicate four influential anticipatory-looking implicit theory-of-mind tasks using original stimuli and procedures. Results showed that only one of the four paradigms was reliably replicated. A second set of studies revealed, further, that this one paradigm was no longer replicated once confounds were removed, which calls its validity into question. There were also no correlations between paradigms, and thus, no evidence for their convergent validity. In conclusion, findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief paradigms seem less reliable and valid than previously assumed, thus limiting the conclusions that can be drawn from them.
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The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners’ and speakers’ gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers’ gender had a significant impact on how listeners’ judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers’ gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners’ and speakers’ gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody.
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Face-to-face interactions characterize communication in social contexts. These situations are typically multimodal, requiring the integration of linguistic auditory input with facial information from the speaker. In particular, eye gaze and visual speech provide the listener with social and linguistic information, respectively. Despite the importance of this context for an ecological study of language, research on audiovisual integration has mainly focused on the phonologicallevel, leaving aside effects on semantic comprehension. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the influence of facial dynamic information on semantic processing of connected speech. Participants were presented with either a video or a still picture of the speaker, concomitant to auditory sentences. Along three experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the speaker's dynamic facial features (mouth and eyes) and compared the amplitudes of the semantic N400 elicited by unexpected words. Contrary to our predictions, the N400 was not modulated by dynamic facial information; therefore, semantic processing seems to be unaffected by the speaker's gaze and visual speech. Even though, during the processing of expected words, dynamic faces elicited a long-lasting late posterior positivity compared to the static condition. This effect was significantly reduced when the mouth of the speaker was covered. Our findings may indicate an increase of attentional processing to richer communicative contexts. The present findings also demonstrate that in natural communicative face-to-face encounters, perceiving the face of a speaker in motion provides supplementary information that is taken into account by the listener, especially when auditory comprehension is non-demanding.
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Knowing what makes a top gastronomy experience unique and retrievable in the long term is of interest for scientific and economic reasons. Recent attempts to isolate predictors of the hedonic evaluation of food have afforded several factors, such as individual and social attributes, or liking/disliking profiles. However, in these studies relevant variables have been examined in isolation without an integrative perspective. Here we investigated 80 guests enjoying a 23-course meal in a top gastronomy restaurant, in groups of four. Our main question concerned the factors driving the overall evaluation of the meal at its conclusion and after three months. To this aim we administered the Big Five Personality Inventory before the meal, dish-by-dish hedonic ratings, and a multi-dimensional Meal Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) at the end of the meal. Hedonic evaluations of the meal were collected immediately after the meal and three months later. Better immediate overall evaluations were predicted by both the number of peaks in dish-by-dish ratings and by positive ratings of the final dish. Both factors and the number of troughs were also critical for the long-term evaluation after three months. The MEQ dimensions overall interest, valence and distraction predicted immediate evaluations, while the long-term evaluations were determined by interest and high scores on the personality traits agreeableness and conscientiousness. High consistency of the hedonic ratings within quartets indicated the relevance of commensality for the meal experience. The present findings highlight the simultaneous relevance of food- and personality-related factors and commensality for a top gastronomy meal experience in the short and long-run. The uncovered relationships are of theoretical interest and for those involved in designing meals for consumers in various settings.
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Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, the recognition of emotions from spoken utterances and its physiological correlates such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) has received far less attention than other domains of emotion processing. Our study aimed at filling this gap by investigating autonomic activation in response to spoken utterances that were embedded into larger semantic contexts. Emotional salience was manipulated by providing information on alleged speaker similarity. We compared these autonomic responses to activations triggered by affective sounds, such as exploding bombs, and applause. These sounds had been rated and validated as being either positive, negative, or neutral. As physiological markers of ANS activity, we recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) and changes of pupil size while participants classified both prosodic and sound stimuli according to their hedonic valence. As expected, affective sounds elicited increased arousal in the receiver, as reflected in increased SCR and pupil size. In contrast, SCRs to angry and joyful prosodic expressions did not differ from responses to neutral ones. Pupil size, however, was modulated by affective prosodic utterances, with increased dilations for angry and joyful compared to neutral prosody, although the similarity manipulation had no effect. These results indicate that cues provided by emotional prosody in spoken semantically neutral utterances might be too subtle to trigger SCR, although variation in pupil size indicated the salience of stimulus variation. Our findings further demonstrate a functional dissociation between pupil dilation and skin conductance that presumably origins from their differential innervation.
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Motivation and attention constitute major determinants of human perception and action. Nonetheless, it remains a matter of debate whether motivation effects on the visual cortex depend on the spatial attention system, or rely on independent pathways. This study investigated the impact of motivation and spatial attention on the activity of the human primary and extrastriate visual cortex by employing a factorial manipulation of the two factors in a cued pattern discrimination task. During stimulus presentation, we recorded event-related potentials and pupillary responses. Motivational relevance increased the amplitudes of the C1 component at ∼70 ms after stimulus onset. This modulation occurred independently of spatial attention effects, which were evident at the P1 level. Furthermore, motivation and spatial attention had independent effects on preparatory activation as measured by the contingent negative variation; and pupil data showed increased activation in response to incentive targets. Taken together, these findings suggest independent pathways for the influence of motivation and spatial attention on the activity of the human visual cortex.
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Meals, especially when taken in company, may affect the diner’s mood. In line with findings that mood may alter cognitive control, a previous study by the authors found that after solitary meals, the Simon effect was diminished as compared to a premeal condition, whereas a social meal did not reduce the Simon effect. Here, we investigated whether this finding generalizes across different demands in cognitive control and, therefore, applied a flanker task. Obtained questionnaire data indicated differential effects in mood and relaxation of a social as compared to a solitary meal. Replicating our previous findings, the flanker compatibility effect decreased after a solitary meal but increased after a social meal. The present results support our previous findings with new evidence that a meal taken in a social context attenuates subsequent cognitive control processes compared with a solitary meal.
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The current study aimed at validating whether the face stimuli of the Goettingen Faces Database (GFD) are perceived as emotionally neutral. Two-hundred-eighty neutral GFD stimuli were presented together with face stimuli depicting emotional expressions, selected from other databases. The valence of each picture was rated by N=50 participants on a scale from -3 (negative) to 3 (positive). Findings show that the median rating of each GFD image was zero (exactly neutral) with 88% of mean ratings lying between -0.5 and 0.5. The findings provide a selection tool for stimuli for future research based on valence perception, with the majority of stimuli being perceived as neutral and therefore suitable as neutral stimuli for future research on face perception.
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Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent research labs that attempted to test the replicability and convergent validity (using correlation analyses) of the Southgate et al. (2007) and the Surian and Geraci (2012) paradigms. Results showed that the original findings can neither be replicated in children nor in elderly adults, and can only partially be replicated in adults. Furthermore, the two different paradigms did not correlate, which puts into question the convergent validity of these tasks as tapping the same capacity of an implicit Theory of Mind. In conclusion, the present studies suggest that the results from implicit Theory of Mind tasks should be treated with caution.
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Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent research labs that attempted to test the replicability and convergent validity (using correlation analyses) of the Southgate et al. (2007) and the Surian and Geraci (2012) paradigms. Results showed that the original findings can neither be replicated in children nor in elderly adults, and can only partially be replicated in adults. Furthermore, the two different paradigms did not correlate, which puts into question the convergent validity of these tasks as tapping the same capacity of an implicit Theory of Mind. In conclusion, the present studies suggest that the results from implicit Theory of Mind tasks should be treated with caution.
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The postgraduate community is far more complex and diverse both in its requirements and expectations of postgraduate courses than its undergraduate colleagues. This diversity of background and experience is addressed in this book, reflecting the differing needs and aspirations of postgraduate students. Each postgraduate student experiences their education with a set of challenges unique to them. The aim of Postgraduate Study in the UK: Surviving and Succeeding is to reflect some of these challenges through the lived experiences of others. The book highlights some of the difficulties that can occur when studying (such as having to interrupt due to bereavement) and offers advice on how to manage these situations. The authors use their own experiences but the advice is more general e.g. whatever your reason for interrupting, the process is explained and advice provided. Students feel they are not alone in their experiences, situations are therefore normalized and practical advice is provided on how to manage. The book is an honest account of real people s experiences, it is like asking a friend for advice knowing the response will be clear, useful and positive.
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The Fixation Shift Paradigm (FSP) measures infants’ ability to shift gaze from a central fixation stimulus to a peripheral target (e.g. Hood & Atkinson, 1993: Infant Behavior and Development, 16(4), 405–422). Cortical maturation has been suggested as crucial for the developing ability to shift attention. This study investigated the development of neural mechanisms by combining EEG with simultaneous eye tracking during FSP testing, in typically developing infants aged between 1 and 8 months. The most prominent neural response was a frontal positivity which occurred only in the hemisphere contralateral to the target in the youngest infants but became more ipsilateral with age. This changing lateralisation was associated with improving ability to shift attention (decreasing saccade latencies and fewer ‘sticky fixations’—failures to disengage attention from the central target). These findings suggest that the lateralisation of neural responses develops during infancy, possibly due to developing intracortical connections, allowing infants to shift attention more efficiently.
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This study measured changes in switches of attention between 1 and 9 months of age in 67 typically developing infants. Remote eye-tracking (Tobii X120) was used to measure saccadic latencies, related to switches of fixation, as a measure of shifts of attention, from a central stimulus to a peripheral visual target, measured in the Fixation Shift Paradigm. Fixation shifts occur later if the central fixation stimulus stays visible when the peripheral target appears (competition condition), than if the central stimulus disappears as the peripheral target appears (non-competition condition). This difference decreases with age. Our results show significantly faster disengagement in infants over 4 months than in the younger group, and provide more precise measures of fixation shifts, than behavioural observation with the same paradigm. Reduced saccadic latencies in the course of a test session indicate a novel learning effect. The Fixation Shift Paradigm combined with remote eye-tracking measures showed improved temporal and spatial accuracy compared to direct observation by a trained observer, and allowed an increased number of trials in a short testing time. This makes it an infant-friendly non-invasive procedure, involving minimal observational training, suitable for use in future studies of clinical populations to detect early attentional abnormalities in the first few months of life.
