Denna rapport handlar om hur spelare kommer fram till beslut i fightingspel: om de använder kunskap eller om de förutser vad motståndaren ska göra. Bakgrunden behandlar termen ”mindreading” och vad fightingspel är samt vilka skickligheter som används i fightingspel. En förundersökning gjordes med erfarna fightingspelsspelare för att undersöka vilka faktorer som skulle kunna vara viktiga. Rapportens frågeställning är om det är spelmekaniken eller förmågan till mindreading som är viktigast för framgång i ett spel med frekventa Yomi-situationer såsom fightingspel. Ett enkelt rundbaserat fightingspel togs fram för att användas i undersökningen. Sex par försökspersoner spelade spelet och samtidigt fick de tala högt om sina tankeprocesser. Analysen av spelomgångarna och spelarnas kommentarer indikerade att beslut baserade på spelmekanik var mer framgångsrika än beslut baserade på mindreading. Denna rapport bygger på en undersökning med dataspelare som dock inte var specialiserade på fightingspel. En kommande undersökning skulle kunna göras med mer erfarna spelare.

Expected mindreading is the belief that romantic partners should know one’s needs and feelings without overt communication. This dysfunctional belief is predicted to undermine relationship satisfaction, yet previous research provides mixed support. In two studies, I test my prediction that individuals higher in expected mindreading would be more reactive to misunderstandings by assessing relationship quality and attributions after participants imagined feeling understood or misunderstood by their romantic partner. In Study 1 (introductory psychology students), participants who felt misunderstood and were higher in expected mindreading were more likely to attribute misunderstandings to their partner’s lack of love than those who felt understood or were lower in expected mindreading. In Study 2 (community sample), satisfaction was lower for individuals who felt misunderstood and were higher in expected mindreading, compared to those who felt understood and were lower in expected mindreading. These findings have important implications for relationship counseling. / October 2016

no / This research explores the possibility that a person's (perceiver's) prospects of making a correct inference of another person's (target's) inner states depends on the personal characteristics of the target, potentially relating to how readable they are. Twenty-seven targets completed the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and were classified as having low, average or high EQ. They were unobtrusively videoed while thinking of an event of happiness, gratitude, anger and sadness. After observing targets thinking of such a past event, fifty-two perceivers (participants) in Study 1 were asked to infer what the target was thinking, and fifty perceivers in Study 2 were asked to rate the target's expression – positive or negative. Results suggested that (1) perceivers' accuracy in detecting targets' thoughts depended on which EQ group the target belonged to, and (2) target readability is not a proxy measure for level of target expressiveness. In other words, something about EQ status renders targets more or less easy to read in a way that is not simply explained by expressive people being more readable. We conclude with discussion of the importance of the target's trait as well as situation they experience in determining how accurately a perceiver might infer their inner states.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder featuring severe social and communicative deficits. Cognitive impenetrability is the inability of systems to be affected by an individual’s beliefs and desires. Individuals with autism have delayed performance on "mindreading" tasks. Mindreading is the interpretation of others which enables successful social interactions. This task performance is not correlated with "everyday" social function in autism. These deficits are in contrast with general intelligence and reasoning abilities within the normal range, resistant to cognitive behavioral training, and partially attributable to atypical social predispositions. This suggests individuals with autism perform social tasks differently than typicals. I argue that this mindreading deficit is cognitively impenetrable, then position this deficit within a theoretical framework, enactivism, emphasizing cognitive embodiment and inseparability of social comprehension and action. This framework helps explain the cognitive impenetrability of these social deficits by "locating" failure to penetrate in individuals' failure to properly interact with the environment.

Mindreading es la capacidad de atribuir estados mentales, y de predecir y explicar el comportamiento y el pensamiento propio y ajeno, a partir de tales atribuciones. Una de las cuestiones principales en el estudio de mindreading es la indagación por los procesos subyacentes a esta capacidad. En el debate teoría-simulación se ha planteado una dicotomía. O bien subyacen procesos de tipo ricos en información, o bien procesos de tipo simulacional. Recientemente, se han propuesto enfoques híbridos que postulan el involucramiento de ambos tipos de procesos en mindreading. El propósito general de esta investigación es elucidar algunas de las similitudes y diferencias entre los enfoques híbridos de teoría y simulación de mindreading, con el objetivo de proponer una hipótesis híbrida enriquecida con los hallazgos empíricos. Así, esta investigación se inscribe en el ámbito de la filosofía de la ciencia cognitiva siguiendo la idea de que podemos obtener respuestas satisfactorias a preguntas filosóficas en relación a la mente al vincularlas con el trabajo empírico en psicología y neurociencias. Los objetivos particulares son: (a) desarrollar una propuesta sobre cuáles serían los requisitos de mínima de un enfoque híbrido de teoría y simulación de mindreading, (b) analizar los alcances y límites explicativos, en función de los requisitos de mínima establecidos en (a), de algunas propuestas teóricas en las que se adoptan posturas híbridas de teoríasimulación sobre mindreading; y (c) desarrollar los lineamientos generales de un enfoque híbrido que cumpla con los requisitos de mínima y atienda a los hallazgos empíricos en neurociencias. La presente investigación aborda los enfoques híbridos que postulan la intervención de procesos de simulación y, a la vez, de bases de información para realizar atribuciones de estados mentales. Para ello, en primer lugar se analizan los enfoques puros de teoría y simulación con el objetivo de establecer las razones que motivan la adopción de enfoques híbridos de teoría-simulación. En segundo lugar, se establecen los requisitos de mínima para una propuesta híbrida sobre la capacidad de atribución mentalista. Tercero, se evalúan las ventajas y limitaciones explicativas de las propuestas híbridas de teoría-simulación en función de los requisitos de mínima. Y cuarto, se desarrollan los lineamientos generales de un enfoque híbrido que cumpla con los requisitos de mínima y atienda a los hallazgos empíricos en neurociencias. De esta manera, me propongo seguir una línea metafilosófica en ciencias cognitivas que pone en evidencia la importancia del estudio interdisciplinario de la capacidad de atribución mentalista. / Mindreading is the capacity to attribute mental states and to predict and explain the behavior and thinking of self and others, based on such attributions. One of the main issues in the study of mindreading is the inquiry about the underlying processes of this capacity. In the early days of the simulation/theory-theory debate, the issue was characterized as dichotomous. Either mindreading derives from a theory or from simulation. Recently, the hybrid approaches postulate the involvement of both types of processes in mindreading. The general purpose of this research is to elucidate the similarities and differences between the hybrids approaches of mindreading, with the aim of proposing a hybrid hypothesis enriched with empirical findings. This research falls within the scope of the philosophy of cognitive science following the idea that we can get satisfactory answers to philosophical questions about the mind, by linking them with empirical research in psychology and neuroscience. The specific objectives are: (a) to develop a proposal for what would be the minimum requirements that a hybrid theory of mindreading needs to accommodate, (b) to analyze, based on the minimum requirements set out in (a), the explanatory scope and limits of some approaches in which hybrid positions on the simulation/theory-theory debate in mindreading are adopted; and (c) to develop the broad outlines of a hybrid approach that meets the minimum requirements and attends the empirical findings in neuroscience. This research addresses the hybrid approaches that postulate the intervention of simulation processes and, at the same time, information-rich processes to make attributions of mental states. To do this, first the pure theory and the pure simulation approaches are analyzed in order to establish the reasons for the adoption of hybrid theory-simulation approaches. Second, minimum requirements for a hybrid theory of mindreading are established. Third, the scope and limits of some hybrid approaches are evaluated based on the minimum requirements. And fourth, the general outlines of a hybrid approach that meets the minimum requirements and attend the empirical findings in neuroscience are developed. Thus, I propose to follow a metaphilosophical line of inquiry in cognitive science that demonstrates the importance of the interdisciplinary study of mindreading.

Yes / Can adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) infer what happened to someone from their emotional response? Millikan has argued that in everyday life, others' emotions are most commonly used to work out the antecedents of behavior, an ability termed retrodictive mindreading. As those with ASD show difficulties interpreting others' emotions, we predicted that these individuals would have difficulty with retrodictive mindreading. Sixteen adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome and 19 typically developing adults viewed 21 video clips of people reacting to one of three gifts (chocolate, monopoly money, or a homemade novelty) and then inferred what gift the recipient received and the emotion expressed by that person. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they viewed the videos. Results showed that participants with ASD were only less accurate when inferring who received a chocolate or homemade gift. This difficulty was not due to lack of understanding what emotions were appropriate in response to each gift, as both groups gave consistent gift and emotion inferences significantly above chance (genuine positive for chocolate and feigned positive for homemade). Those with ASD did not look significantly less to the eyes of faces in the videos, and looking to the eyes did not correlate with accuracy on the task. These results suggest that those with ASD are less accurate when retrodicting events involving recognition of genuine and feigned positive emotions, and challenge claims that lack of attention to the eyes causes emotion recognition difficulties in ASD. / University of Nottingham, School of Psychology

Caruthers argues that the mindreading capacity and the introspective capacity are in fact one and the same capacity. This single capacity relies on the same sub-personal "interpretive" mechanism that takes sensory information as input and produces attitudes as output. I use neuroscience research to show that if the “interpretive mechanism” exists, and moreover that it operates in accordance to Caruthers’ description in mindreading tasks, (e.g. detecting external cues and paying attention to others’ behavior), then this operation would have to be handled or implemented at the neural level by the Task Oriented Neural Network. On the other hand, it is well known that self-referential thought, including introspective thought is handled by the Default Mode Network. This consequence is problematic for the view that self and other attitude attributions are done by the same mechanism. The same cognitive operation can not be implemented by two distinct neural networks that are in competition with one another. Moreover, the Default Mode neural network and the Task Oriented networks implement such different types of thinking that they oppose and interrupt one another’s functioning. If the only difference between the two networks were that one simply handles a larger quantity of information than the other, then they wouldn’t be in competition. It appears that there is indeed something special about the very nature of self-referential information such that it determines the type of operations involved in its processing. / text

No description available.

Language is arguably one of the most salient features that distinguish humans from other animal species. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical research, there is currently no consensus as to why language emerged exclusively in the human species or how it evolved its unique communicative structure. In this thesis, I therefore take a multi-pronged approach to analysing and testing several different hypotheses for the biological function and evolution of language. In Chapter I, I review the evidence and theoretical arguments for each of these proposals and provide, in place, a synthetic perspective which integrates or eliminates each of these ostensibly competing hypotheses for the biological function of language. In Chapter II, I employ the first experimental test of the interdependence hypothesis: the unique proposal offered to explain the emergence and potential coevolution of language and cooperation in the human species. In pursuit of this experiment, I employed a cooperative social foraging task using small and large groups to determine what factors enable individuals to make sense of information from others and converge upon a group consensus. In Chapter III, I take an experimental approach to determine whether aspects of human language can be characterised in terms of honest signalling theory. In this respect, I test several different proposals predicted by the sexual selection and deception hypotheses for human language function. In Chapter IV, I divert attention away from biological function to focus more closely on language structure. More specifically, I take an experimental approach to the problem of how and indeed whether recursive syntax evolved to be a consistent feature of human language. In pursuit of this experiment, I utilized the Imposing Memory Task (IMT) and a recursive syntax measure, to determine relative performance on each of these cognitive tasks, thereby testing whether recursive syntax may have evolved in tandem with higher-order intentionality (also known as embedded mindreading). Finally, in Chapter V, I discuss the results and implications of these experiments, and possible suggestions for future studies.

Yes / Recent research has shown that adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty interpreting others' emotional responses, in order to work out what actually happened to them. It is unclear what underlies this difficulty; important cues may be missed from fast paced dynamic stimuli, or spontaneous emotional responses may be too complex for those with ASD to successfully recognise. To explore these possibilities, 17 adolescents and adults with ASD and 17 neurotypical controls viewed 21 videos and pictures of peoples' emotional responses to gifts (chocolate, a handmade novelty or Monopoly money), then inferred what gift the person received and the emotion expressed by the person while eye movements were measured. Participants with ASD were significantly more accurate at distinguishing who received a chocolate or homemade gift from static (compared to dynamic) stimuli, but significantly less accurate when inferring who received Monopoly money from static (compared to dynamic) stimuli. Both groups made similar emotion attributions to each gift in both conditions (positive for chocolate, feigned positive for homemade and confused for Monopoly money). Participants with ASD only made marginally significantly fewer fixations to the eyes of the face, and face of the person than typical controls in both conditions. Results suggest adolescents and adults with ASD can distinguish subtle emotion cues for certain emotions (genuine from feigned positive) when given sufficient processing time, however, dynamic cues are informative for recognising emotion blends (e.g. smiling in confusion). This indicates difficulties processing complex emotion responses in ASD.