Attention in naïve psychology

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the flexibility of cultural learning has so far received little attention in terms of cognitive mechanisms. We argue that a key feature of the flexibility of cultural learning is that both the models and learners recruit cognitive mechanisms of action coordination to modulate their behavior contingently on the behavior of their partner, generating a process of mutual adaptation supporting the successful transmission of technical skills in diverse and fluctuating learning environments. We propose that the study of cultural learning would benefit from the experimental methods, results, and insights of joint-action research and, complementarily, that the field of joint-action research could expand its scope by integrating a learning and cultural dimension. Bringing these two fields of research together promises to enrich our understanding of cultural learning, its contextual flexibility, and joint action coordination.

Spontaneous attribution of underspecified belief of social partners facilitates processing shared information

The main question of Theory of Mind research is not only how we represent others' mental states, but also how these representations influence our first-person interaction with our surrounding environment. A novel theory of belief files proposes that we should think about belief tracking as an online, spontaneous, and effortless mechanism giving rise to structured representations, thus easing the use of beliefs in behavior selection. Beliefs are formed by two different sub mechanisms: (1) opening an empty placeholder belief file, for a particular intentional agent, and (2) filling it up with mental content attributed to the agent. This theory opens the possibility of exploiting theory of mind abilities even in situations when we can attribute only underspecified mental contents to others. The goal of the present study was to provide a proof of concept test: whether spontaneous belief tracking starts effortlessly even when we do not know a partner's actual belief content. We created an object detection paradigm, where the visual access of a virtual agent to the object to be detected by the participant was manipulated. The agent getting access to the information for processing always preceded the participant getting access to it, resulting in the need of attributing belief without specified content in it. Our results have shown that participants detected the object with a reduced reaction time when the observed agent had visual access to the object's expected place compared to when the participant watched the same scenario, but the object's location remained occluded for the observed agent and thus was revealed only for the participant. This suggests that the information processing of humans speeds up when another agent has access to a piece of information as well. Thus, we do track agents' potential beliefs without knowing its actual content. This study contributes to our understanding of the effect of spontaneous computation of others' mental states on first-person information processing.

The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration.