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PURE TEST - Adults Represent Others' Logical Inferences Even When It Is Unnecessary
No full textSuccessful social interactions require representing not only what others know, but also what they may deductively infer from evidence. For instance, to help deciding between two alternatives, we may just reveal the incorrect option, expecting others to draw the correct conclusion. Seemingly, we readily track others’ logical inferences if it is necessary for our goals. However, it is currently unknown whether we also track them when we do not have to, and whether these inferences affect our own conclusions. To address this, in four online experiments, we presented adults with scenarios where an agent could arrive at the same or different conclusions as the participant, based on what she witnessed (via excluding one or two out of three target locations). Participants rated the likelihood of an outcome from self or from the agent's perspective. We hypothesized that if participants track others’ inferences also when making self-perspective judgments, that is, when they could respond without even paying attention to the other, the spontaneous representation of the other's different conclusion may result in higher ratings for the outcome the agent (but not the participant) considers possible, compared to the one both consider impossible. In three experiments, we found such an altercentric bias in self-perspective judgments, suggesting that participants spontaneously encoded the conclusions the agent could draw (Experiments 1 and 2), even when this required multistep inferences (Experiment 4), although there were considerable individual differences and the bias was absent when task-demands were high (Experiment 3), implying a potentially resource-dependent use of the capacity
Discourse Referents in Infancy
No full textHuman infants connect conceptual descriptions to objects in the first year of their life. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture that supports this capacity. We propose that early in development, the connection from descriptions to objects is mediated by a representational format proprietary to human communication: discourse referents. Discourse referents, just like other object representations, represent entities, but instead of being maintained based on spatiotemporal characteristics, they are created and maintained in relation to communicative contexts. After establishing criteria for what it would mean for preverbal infants to entertain such discourse referents, we review the evidence from developmental psychology. We find support for the idea that, in communicative episodes, infants create representations of entities that are encoded from a shared discourse perspective and which can be displaced or entirely perceptually unavailable. We conclude that infants cannot only represent “entities at locations” but also “entities under discussion” and that conceptual descriptions early in development are primarily elicited by and applied to this latter format. In this framework, successful referential communication about perceptually available objects can be understood as involving correspondences between perceptually created object representations and discourse referents
Temporal construal in sentence comprehension depends on linguistically encoded event structure
No full textHow events are ordered in time is one of the most fundamental pieces of information guiding our understanding of the world. Linguistically, this order is often not mentioned explicitly. Here, we propose that the mental construal of temporal order in language comprehension is based on event-structural properties. This prediction is based on a central distinction between states and events both in event perception and language: In perception, dynamic events are more salient than static states. In language, stative and eventive predicates also differ, both in their grammatical behavior and how they are processed. Consistent with our predictions, data from seven pre-registered video-sentence matching experiments, each conducted in English and German (total N = 674), show that people draw temporal inferences based on this difference: States precede events. Our findings not only arbitrate between different theories of temporal language comprehension; they also advance theoretical models of how two different cognitive capacities - event cognition and language - integrate to form a mental representation of time
