Abstract
The presence of conspecifics may affect one’s cognitive processing in a variety of ways. Most effects fall beyond simple social facilitation: we are not only faster in performing a task when we do it with others, but also take into consideration their internal mental states, what they see, know or believe. While there may be clear benefits of taking the perspective of another agent for behavioral predictions, serving social coordination, or defeating competitors, it seems that we generate assumptions about others’ mental states even if the situation does not require it. Current debates target how spontaneous these processes are, and whether they are best described with higher- or lower-level mechanisms. Despite the intensity of the debate, however, we have scarce knowledge regarding the nature of these processes and the influence they exert over our first-person interpretations and inferential commitments. Here we propose that another agent’s presence triggers not only considering and sustaining multiple perspectives on the world, but may also influence the level of description that will be prioritized. To illustrate this point, we analyze examples involving linguistic quantification. Specifically, we discuss whether the perspective of others may (i) foster a more fine-grained retention of episodic information when assessing quantified abstractions, which do not presuppose the consideration of these details, and (ii) lead young learners to widen their semantic commitments when interpreting ambiguous statements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The discrepancy between the type of data efficient hypothesis testing requires and the data infants are actually exposed (e.g. the absence of negative evidence, such as corrective feedback, Bowerman, 1988; Braine, 1971; Marcus, 1993; Pinker, 1990) suggests that infants must be prepared to acquire their linguistic repertoire based on positive evidence only. The semantic subset principle was suggested to be a solution to this problem. According to this proposal the learner first has to test the narrowest possible hypothesis about a grammar compatible with the evidence observed. Then based on the examples that fall beyond the initial hypotheses, this can be updated.
References
Apperly, I. A., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009). Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review, 116(4), 953–970.
Bowerman, M. (1988). The “no negative evidence” problem: How do children avoid an overly general grammar? In J. Hawkins (Ed.), Explaining language universals. Basil Blackwell.
Braine, M. D. S. (1971). On two types of models of the internalization of grammars. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium (pp. 153–186). Academic Press.
Buttelmann, F., & Buttelmann, D. (2017). The influence of a bystander agent’s beliefs on children’s and adults’ decision-making process. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 153, 126–139.
Butterfill, S. A., & Apperly, I. A. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind & Language, 28(5), 606–637.
Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind & Language, 28(2), 141–172.
Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing, and modularity. Perspectives on Sentence Processing, 443–467.
Creem-Regehr, S. H., Gagnon, K. T., Geuss, M. N., & Stefanucci, J. K. (2013). Relating spatial perspective taking to the perception of other’s affordances: Providing a foundation for predicting the future behavior of others. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 596.
Elekes, F., Varga, M., & Király, I. (2016). Evidence for spontaneous level-2 perspective taking in adults. Consciousness and Cognition, 41, 93–103.
El Kaddouri, R., Bardi, L., De Bremaeker, D., Brass, M., & Wiersema, J. R. (2019). Measuring spontaneous mentalizing with a ball detection task: Putting the attention-check hypothesis by Phillips and colleagues (2015) to the test. Psychological Research, 1–9.
Forgács, B., Gervain, J., Parise, E., Csibra, G., Gergely, G., Baross, J., & Király, I. (2020). Electrophysiological investigation of infants’ understanding of understanding. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 100783.
Forgács, B., Parise, E., Csibra, G., Gergely, G., Jacquey, L., & Gervain, J. (2019). Fourteen‐month‐old infants track the language comprehension of communicative partners. Developmental Science, 22(2), e12751.
Freundlieb, M., Kovács, Á. M., & Sebanz, N. (2016). When do humans spontaneously adopt another’s visuospatial perspective? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(3), 401–412.
Freundlieb, M., Kovács, Á. M., & Sebanz, N. (2018). Reading your mind while you are reading—Evidence for spontaneous visuospatial perspective taking during a semantic categorization task. Psychological Science, 29(4), 614–622. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617740973.
Freundlieb, M., Sebanz, N., & Kovács, Á. M. (2017). Out of your sight, out of my mind: Knowledge about another person’s visual access modulates spontaneous visuospatial perspective-taking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(6), 1065–1072. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000379.
Gweon, H., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Schulz, L. E. (2010). Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(20), 9066–9071.
Jouravlev, O., Schwartz, R., Ayyash, D., Mineroff, Z., Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E. (2019). Tracking colisteners’ knowledge states during language comprehension. Psychological Science, 30(1), 3–19.
Király, I., Oláh, K., Csibra, G., & Kovács, Á. M. (2018). Retrospective attribution of false beliefs in 3-year-old children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(45), 11477–11482.
Kovács, Á. M. (2016). Belief files in theory of mind reasoning. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7(2), 509–527.
Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.
Lidz, J., Pietroski, P., Halberda, J., & Hunter, T. (2011). Interface transparency and the psychosemantics of most. Natural Language Semantics, 19(3), 227–256.
Marcus, G. F. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition, 46(1), 53–85.
Pinker, S. (1990). Language acquisition. In D. N. Osherson & H. Lasnik (Eds.), Language: An invitation to cognitive science (Vol. 1). MIT Press.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526.
Rakoczy, H. (2012). Do infants have a theory of mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 59–74.
Rueschemeyer, S. A., Gardner, T., & Stoner, C. (2014). The Social N400 effect: How the presence of other listeners affects language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22(1), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0654-x.
Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Braithwaite, J. J., Andrews, B. J., & Bodley Scott, S. E. (2010). Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(5), 1255–1266.
Schneider, D., Bayliss, A. P., Becker, S. I., & Dux, P. E. (2012). Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others’ mental states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 433–438.
Seow, T., & Fleming, S. M. (2019). Perceptual sensitivity is modulated by what others can see. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(6), 1979–1990.
Shenhav, A., Musslick, S., Lieder, F., Kool, W., Griffiths, T. L., Cohen, J. D., & Botvinick, M. M. (2017). Toward a rational and mechanistic account of mental effort. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 40, 99–124.
Simpson, A., & Todd, A. (2017). Intergroup visual perspective-taking: Shared group membership impairs self-perspective inhibition but may facilitate perspective calculation. Cognition, 166, 371–381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.003.
Surtees, A., Apperly, I., & Samson, D. (2016). I’ve got your number: Spontaneous perspective-taking in an interactive task. Cognition, 150, 43–52.
Szymanik, J. (2016). Quantifiers and cognition: Logical and computational perspectives (Vol. 96). Springer.
van der Wel, R. P., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2014). Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a Continuous Measure. Cognition, 130(1), 128–133.
Ward, E., Ganis, G., & Bach, P. (2019). Spontaneous vicarious perception of the content of another’s visual perspective. Current Biology, 29(5), 874-880.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.01.046.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme ERC Grant 639840 PreLog. We thank Csaba Pléh for the extensive insightful discussions over many years and for his invaluable support in promoting science and in guiding many of us when most needed: at the beginning of our research adventures.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fischer, P., Madarász, L., Téglás, E., Kovács, Á.M. (2022). Consequences of Perspective Taking: Some Uncharted Avenues. In: Gervain, J., Csibra, G., Kovács, K. (eds) A Life in Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66174-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66175-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)