Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has found evidence for implicit theory of mind, suggesting that humans quickly and involuntarily compute the mental states of others. One highly influential task within this literature, known as the Dot Perspective Task (DPT), purports to demonstrate implicit visual-perspective taking within adult subjects. However, some studies, consisting of variations of the DPT, have challenged these findings suggesting that the DPT does not demonstrate genuine perspective taking. Instead, they argue that these results are reflective of simple attentional cueing. Additionally, some researchers have argued that the DPT is sensitive to unintended attentional and intentional factors. We report the preliminary findings of an on-ongoing meta-analysis which analyzes participant-level data from 23 experiments and 1381 individual subjects. We find evidence for both directional cueing and implicit perspective taking within the DPT, although the effects of directional cueing are significantly larger. Additionally, we find that the effects of perspective taking are sensitive to attentional and intentional factors. These results cast doubt upon much of the evidence which has been taken to demonstrate implicit theory of mind. At the same time, they suggest that future work may utilize a carefully controlled version of the DPT in order to measure genuine implicit theory of mind more accurately.