Error rate on the director's task is influenced by the need to take another's perspective but not the type of perspective. Issue 8 (16th August 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Legg, Edward W.; Olivier, Laure; Samuel, Steven; Lurz, Robert; Clayton, Nicola S.
• Is Part Of: Royal Society open science. Volume 4:Issue 8(2017)
• Publication Date: 2017-08-16
• Subjects: theory of mind -- perspective-taking -- Level 2 perspective-taking -- director's task; Science -- Periodicals; 500
• DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170284
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2054-5703

Abstract

Abstract : 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. Crucially, if the inference process is error-prone, then higher error rates should be found when the perspective to be inferred is more complex. Here, we found that participants were no more error-prone when they had to judge how an item appeared (Level 2 perspective-taking) than when they had to judge whether an item could or could not be seen (Level 1 perspective-taking). However, participants were more error-prone in the perspective-taking variants of the task than in a version that only required them to follow a rule. These results suggest that having to represent another's perspective induces errors when following their instructions but that error rates are not directly linked to errors in inferring another's perspective.