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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.

Other related blog posts:

Imagine Eating 30 M&M Candies and Eat Less

Eating a food item, pasta for instance, typically leads to the person eating less of that food less for a while. This well studied phenomenon is known as habituation. However, intuitively we believe that imagining a food item increases its desirability and our subsequent consumption. Research has been showing that perception and mental imagery engage similar brain systems and have similar outcomes. This would suggest that imagining a food item would result in habituating to that food item. A team from Carnegie Mellon University set out to experimentally test what would happen.

Reported in the paper “Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption” published December 10, 2010 in Science.

The research team carried out a set of five experiments using M&M candies to see if repeated mental simulation of eating the M&Ms alone can result in habituation. Indeed, the results repeatedly showed that when individuals imagined eating 30 M&M candies they ate significantly fewer actual M&Ms than those who imagined eating just 3 candies. Their seems to be little difference between imagined food and real food to to the brain systems involved in habituation.

One of the most replicated results in psychological research shows that people who do well on one mental task tend to do well on most others. Technically, this is referred to as the g factor or general intelligence factor that takes into account a large chunk of the differences in intelligence amongst people. The new paper “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups” (published October 29, 2010 in Science) asked if there is a similar factor for groups of people that would define a group’s collective intelligence factor, the c factor, which would be distinct from individual general intelligence factors.

They found that a general collective intelligence factor exists in groups. They found that the c factor was distinct from (was not predicted by) the average individual intelligence of the group members. Also, group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction were not good predictors of the value of the c factor. Three factors were significant predictors of the value of the c factor: average social sensitivity, the equal distribution of conversational turn taking, and the proportion of females in the group. It turned out that the last factor, the number of females in the group, was due to the first, average social sensitivity. The females in the study scored higher than the males in social sensitivity and, in fact, there’s been a lot of research that suggests females are more socially sensitive.

If the c factor does exist as this research suggests, I wonder how the results of research published this past August may fit in. The study showed that when two people with different abilities collaborate, they perform worse as a team than the best performer would on their own (see my blog post “Two Minds Better Than One? Sometimes Worse!“).

Other related blog posts:

Two Minds Better Than One? Sometimes Worse!