Does implicit mentalising involve the representation of others’ mental state content? Examining domain-specificity with an adapted Joint Simon task: A Registered Report

Wong, Malcolm Ka Yu and Bazhydai, Marina and Wang, Jessica (2024) Does implicit mentalising involve the representation of others’ mental state content? Examining domain-specificity with an adapted Joint Simon task: A Registered Report. In: Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development 2024, 2024-01-04 - 2024-01-06.

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Abstract

Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness others’ perspectives. While crucial to successful social functioning and joint action, the domain specificity of implicit mentalising is debated. The Joint Simon task is often used to demonstrate implicit mentalising in the form of a Joint Simon Effect (JSE), in which a spatial compatibility effect is elicited more strongly in a Joint Simon versus an Individual go/no-go task. The JSE has been proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner’s frame-of-reference, which creates a spatial overlap between stimulus-response location in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. In the present registered report, we will investigate the content of co-representation by employing a novel variant of the Joint Simon task, where typical geometric stimuli will be replaced with two coloured sets of daistinct animal silhouettes. Each set will be assigned to either the participant themselves or their partner (self-/partner-assigned stimuli; or self-/not-assigned in the Individual task). Critically, a surprise image recognition task will be appended to the Simon task. This task will identify any partner-driven effects in incidental memory exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the individually conducted condition. If results indicate that participants in the Joint task recognise partner-assigned stimuli significantly better than participants in the Individual task recognise not-assigned stimuli, this suggests that participants form a representation of the content from their partner’s perspective during the shared task. Such a result implies that socially-specific processes are involved, hence provides support for the domain-specific account of implicit mentalising. Alternatively, a robust absence of this effect (supported by Bayesian statistics) would uphold the notion that domain-general processes underlie the JSE. Furthermore, the effect of interpersonal closeness on the JSE and recognition accuracy will be investigated.