Research has shown that thoughts of events can have similar effects on brain processes as events themselves (for an example see my blog post “Imagine Eating 30 M&M Candies and Eat Less“). Could other peoples’ beliefs have similar effects on our brain processes as do our own beliefs? The new paper “The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others’ Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults” (published December 24, 2010 in Science) examines this question in 7 month old infants and adults.
The authors reason that if our abilities to infer what others believe are an innate social sense then these inferences should be spontaneous and automatic and the beliefs of others should be “computed online and effortlessly, just as we compute representations of what we perceive in the environment.” If this is indeed the case then the “representations about others’ beliefs” should affect our behavior.
The research team used an object detection task to investigate the following two questions:
- Are belief computations automatically triggered by the mere presence of an agent [with its own beliefs] in adults and in infants as young as 7 months, even when the [agent’s] beliefs are entirely irrelevant to the task participants have to perform?
- Are beliefs about others’ beliefs stored in a format sufficiently similar to our own representations about the environment that both types of representations can affect our behavior?
The results of their experiments suggest that both 7 month old infants and adults automatically compute and store the beliefs of others. Also, the beliefs of others appear to be similarly accessible to our own beliefs. Once a belief is computed, it seems to remain active even in the absence of the person who was thought to hold the belief. It’d be interesting to image brain function using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) during the same tasks carried out by human subjects in this investigation.