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Das Forschungsgebiet der intuitiven Alltagspsychologie („Theory of Mind“) beschäftigt sich damit, wie wir das Verhalten anderer Menschen erklären und vorhersagen, indem wir Personen nicht direkt beobachtbare mentale Zustände zuschreiben. Ein grundlegendes Konzept ist hierbei das der Intentionalität, im Sinne der Gerichtetheit mentaler Zustände . Referenz (ausgedrückt mit sprachlicher und/oder gestischen Mitteln) stellt eine intentionale Relation zwischen Person (Agent) und Objekt her. Eine Fülle empirischer Evidenz zeigt, dass Kinder gegen Ende des ersten Lebensjahres zunehmend in der Lage sind, solchen Referenz anzeigende Hinweise, wie Blickrichtung und Zeigegeste, zuverlässig folgen, sie aber auch aktiv zur Aufmerksamkeitslenkung einsetzen können. Referentielle Situationen stellen also einen guten Ansatzpunkt für die Untersuchung des sich entwickelnden Verständnisses des Zusammenhangs zwischen beobachtbaren Hinweisen auf der Verhaltensebene, zugrunde liegenden intentionalen Zuständen und, darauf aufbauend, möglich werdenden Handlungsvorhersagen dar. Primäres Anliegen der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, einen Beitrag zur Klärung der Frage zu leisten, wie und basierend auf welchen Hinweisen frühe intentionale Handlungserwartungen aufgrund referentieller Gesten, wie Zeigen und Blickrichtung, gebildet werden. Die in Teil I berichteten Studien dienten zunächst der Eingrenzung des Altersbereichs durch Klärung relevanter interaktiver und sozial-kognitiver Voraussetzungen, nämlich der Fähigkeit zum Verfolgen referentieller Gesten und der Enkodierung der Agent-Objekt Relation im Blickzeitparadigma nach Woodward (1998). Darauf aufbauend beschäftigten sich die in Teil II dargestellten Studien mit der Frage nach dem Status und der kurzfristigen Beeinflussbarkeit von Handlungserwartungen auf Basis zielgerichteter vs. referentieller Verhaltensweisen (Greifen, Zeigen, Anschauen), mit besonderem Fokus auf der Interpretation der Zeigegeste. Alle Studien verwendeten Varianten eines von Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke (2002) eingeführten Paradigmas, das hier sowohl inhaltlich als auch methodisch erweitert wurde. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Handlungserwartungen auf Basis aller untersuchten Verhaltensweisen gebildet werden, jedoch insbesondere für die Zeigegeste nicht resistent gegenüber kurzfristigen Störungen sind. Teil III schließlich diente der Untersuchung der relativen Bedeutung verschiedener Komponenten der beobachtbaren Hinweise, insbesondere der Kontrastierung referentieller Aufmerksamkeit und physischen Objektkontakts. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass mindestens die Subgruppe spontan blickfolgender Kinder zuverlässig Referenz auf Basis der Aufmerksamkeit, nicht salienter Objektannäherung oder Bewegung, Handlungserwartungen bildet. Die Diskussion konzentriert sich auf die Bedeutung der gefundenen Kompetenzen für die aktuelle theoretische Diskussion über die Mechanismen der frühen Entwicklung mentalistischen Handlungsverstehens.
One of the features that defines humans as extraordinarily social beings is their striking susceptibility to the gaze of others. The research reported in this dissertation was undertaken to advance our understanding of the role of gaze cues in low-level attentional and higher-order cognitive processes. In particular, effects of gaze were examined with regard to three aspects of human cognition: (1) social attention, (2) social interaction and (3) social understanding. Chapter 1 consists of three manuscripts that investigate the boundary conditions of attention capture by direct gaze and how gaze direction is integrated with facial context information. Manuscript 1 and 2 suggest two necessary requirements for attention capture by direct gaze: a meaningful holistic facial context and sharp foveal vision, respectively. Manuscript 3 shows approach/avoidance-congruency effects between gaze direction and emotion expression on attention. Chapter 2 of this dissertation explores the role of gaze in more naturalistic social scenarios. Manuscript 4 demonstrates that gaze behavior during a conversation shapes our perception of another person. Manuscript 5 builds on these findings by showing that these perceptions define our willingness to act in a prosocial way towards our interaction partner. Finally, chapter 3 adopts a broader perspective on social cognition research with a special focus on methodological aspects. Manuscript 6 is a review highlighting the significance of methodological aspects in social cognition research and stressing the importance of sophisticated decisions on task and stimulus materials. Manuscript 7 introduces a new instrument for the assessment of social understanding in adolescents. Initial application in a young sample group indicates that an understanding of another person’s mental states is a capacity that is still developing throughout adolescence. Both manuscripts of this final chapter include eye tracking data that suggest a relationship between gaze behavior and social understanding, a finding that further emphasizes the complex and multifaceted nature of social cognition. I conclude from the findings of this dissertation that research can benefit from adopting a broad view in terms of methodological as well as temporal aspects in order to capture human social cognition in its entirety.
Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are two core components of social understanding. The EmpaToM is a validated social video task that allows for independent manipulation and assessment of the two capacities. First applications revealed that empathy and ToM are dissociable constructs on a neuronal as well as on a behavioral level. As the EmpaToM has been designed for the assessment of social understanding in adults, it has a high degree of complexity and comprises topics that are inadequate for minors. For this reason, we designed a new version of the EmpaToM that is especially suited to measure empathy and ToM in youths. In experiment 1, we successfully validated the EmpaToM-Y on the original EmpaToM in an adult sample (N = 61), revealing a similar pattern of results across tasks and strong correlations of all constructs. As intended, the performance measure for ToM and the control condition of the EmpaToM-Y showed reduced difficulty. In experiment 2, we tested the feasibility of the EmpaToM-Y in a group of teenagers (N = 36). Results indicate a reliable empathy induction and higher demands of ToM questions for adolescents. We provide a promising task for future research targeting inter-individual variability of socio-cognitive and socio-affective capacities as well as their precursors and outcomes in healthy minors and clinical populations.
„Perspective-taking“ is the ability to put yourself into the place of somebody else. Psychological research distinguishes three kinds of perspective-taking, namely, perceptual (visuo-spatial), affective (empathy), and cognitive (theory of mind) perspective-taking. The last two kinds of perspective-taking are often summarized as “psychological perspective-taking”. This dissertation tackles the question of whether these three kinds of perspective-taking should be conceptualized as independent constructs or as facets of one and the same construct.
Prior research findings concerning this are equivocal. While some authors consider correlations between the different kinds of perspective-taking as too low for a unitary construct, others interpret correlations of the same magnitude as evidence for this. A less arbitrary way of deciding this would be to identify common mechanisms that underlie all kinds of perspective-taking and to examine whether manipulating these mechanisms in psychological experiments affects measures of perceptual, affective, and cognitive perspective-taking in parallel.
In accordance with this reasoning, the present dissertation assumes that the mental self-rotation of the body schema into the physical location of another person, the main mechanism of perceptual perspective-taking, is a common mechanism of all kinds of perspective-taking. Thus, contrary to previous research a unitary construct is not only justified on the grounds of a common central functionality of all kinds of perspective-taking, that is, overcoming one’s egocentrism in favor of an alternative (perceptual, affective or cognitive) point of view, but additionally on the grounds of a common psychological mechanism. From this, the simple hypothesis that inducing visuo-spatial perspective-taking also leads to psychological consequences is derived. This hypothesis was tested in 6 experiments.
In these experiments, participants first had to adopt the visual perspective of another person. To this end, they saw a person sitting at a table with two objects. During every trial, participants had to decide which hand the person would have to use in order to grab one of the two objects. Furthermore, the angular disparity between the participant and the target was manipulated in such a way that during half of the trials the target person was within the same visuo-spatial reference frame as the participant and thus no perspective-taking was necessary to solve the task correctly. During the remaining trials, the target person was sitting in another visuo-spatial reference frame so that the participants had to engage in perspective-taking to solve the task correctly. After every such trial, the target person was imbued with a mental state. This was done using an adapted paradigm for the investigation of the anchoring heuristic. Specifically, participants were asked to answer a trivia question and also saw what the target person from the visuo-spatial perspective-taking task was guessing.
In line with the hypothesis that visuo-spatial perspective-taking leads to psychological outcomes, too, it was found that participants adopted the thoughts of the target person more strongly after visuo-spatial perspective-taking. This was evident in the absolute size of the anchoring effect, as well as the differences between participant and target estimations. Further experiments ruled out sample and stimulus characteristics and task difficulty as alternative explanations for these effects. The last two experiments furthermore established that the effects were specific to constellations where an embodied self-rotation into the target’s perspective was necessary and that the adoption of the target’s thoughts was associated with feelings of similarity.
Taken together, these findings support the theoretically elaborated unitary view of perspective-taking and furthermore distinguish this construct from other related phenomena. In the general discussion, the significance of these findings for research on empathy, theory of mind, and perspective-taking, as well as practical implications are discussed.