Reduced egocentric bias when perspective-taking compared with working from rules.

Previous research has suggested that adults are sometimes egocentric, erroneously attributing their current beliefs, perspectives, and opinions to others. Interestingly, this egocentricity is sometimes stronger when perspective-taking than when working from functionally identical but non-perspectival rules. Much of our knowledge of egocentric bias comes from Level 1 perspective-taking (e.

Where was I? Taking alternative visual perspectives can make us (briefly) misplace our own.

How do we imagine what the world looks like from another visual perspective? The two most common proposals-embodiment and array rotation-imply that we must briefly imagine either movement of the self (embodiment) or movement of the scene (array rotation). What is not clear is what this process might mean for our real, egocentric perspective of the world. We present a novel task in which participants had to locate a target from an alternative perspective but make a manual response consistent with their own.

Mirror self-recognition and its relationship to social cognition in chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees and humans are capable of recognizing their own reflection in mirrors. Little is understood about the selective pressures that led to this evolved trait and about the mechanisms that underlie it. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees is the byproduct of a developed form of self-awareness that was naturally selected for its adaptive use in social cognitive behaviors.

Is Language Required to Represent Others' Mental States? Evidence From Beliefs and Other Representations.

An important part of our Theory of Mind-the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states-is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, thereby rendering the belief and either the photo or text false.

The unreliability of egocentric bias across self-other and memory-belief distinctions in the Sandbox Task.

Humans are often considered egocentric creatures, particularly (and ironically) when we are supposed to take another person's perspective over our own (i.e. when we use our theory of mind).

Egocentric bias across mental and non-mental representations in the Sandbox Task.

In the Sandbox Task, participants indicate where a protagonist who has a false belief about the location of an object will look for that object in a trough filled with a substrate that conceals the hidden object's location. Previous findings that participants tend to indicate a location closer to where they themselves know the object to be located have been interpreted as evidence of egocentric bias when attributing mental states to others. We tested the assumption that such biases occur as a result of reasoning about mental states specifically.

Chimpanzees gesture to humans in mirrors: using reflection to dissociate seeing from line of gaze.

There is much experimental evidence suggesting that chimpanzees understand that others see. However, previous research has never experimentally ruled out the alternative explanation that chimpanzees are just responding to the geometric cue of 'direct line of gaze', the observable correlate of seeing in others. Here, we sought to resolve this ambiguity by dissociating seeing from direct line of gaze using a mirror.

Error rate on the director's task is influenced by the need to take another's perspective but not the type of perspective.

Adults are prone to responding erroneously to another's instructions based on what they themselves see and not what the other person sees. Previous studies have indicated that in instruction-following tasks participants make more errors when required to infer another's perspective than when following a rule. These inference-induced errors may occur because the inference process itself is error-prone or because they are a side effect of the inference process.

I know you see it wrong! Children use others' false perceptions to predict their behaviors.

Research on children's ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties.

Smoke and mirrors: Testing the scope of chimpanzees' appearance-reality understanding.

The ability to make appearance-reality (AR) discriminations is an important higher-order cognitive adaptation in humans but is still poorly understood in our closest primate relatives. Previous research showed that chimpanzees are capable of AR discrimination when choosing between food items that appear, due to the effects of distorting lenses, to be smaller or larger than they actually are (Krachun, Call, & Tomasello, 2009). In the current study, we investigated the scope and flexibility of chimpanzees' AR discrimination abilities by presenting them with a wider range of illusory stimuli.

How to solve the distinguishability problem: Triangulation without explicit training.

Heyes's (1998) triangulation approach to distinguishing a "theory" of mind (ToM) from a "theory" of behavior (ToB) in chimpanzees fails. The ToB theorist can appeal to the explicit training sessions and analogical reasoning to explain/predict the chimpanzees' behaviors. An alternative triangulation experiment is sketched, demonstrating how the removal of such training sessions paves the way toward solving the distinguishability problem.