British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
How Egocentric Are We? Or Rather, How Good Are We at Taking Somebody Else's Perspective?
Dr Paula Rubio Fernández
Theory of Mind or our capacity to mind-read other people (i.e. to take their perspective and represent their beliefs and intentions, especially when they are different from our own) develops around 3-4 years of age. Before that time and even later in cases of autism, children have difficulties conceiving other perspectives different from their own.
In the classic Sally-Ann task, for example, Sally moves Ann's chocolate from the blue box to the red box when Ann is away. Young children have difficulty understanding that, when Ann comes back, she will look for her chocolate in the empty blue box where she left it. When asked about Ann's next move, young children and autistic individuals tend to respond that Ann will look for her chocolate in the red box, where they know it is.
Normal adults have no problem with false-believe tasks like the Sally-Ann task. However, the use of new techniques to record eye movement has allowed researchers to tap on early automatic processes that might reveal an initial egocentric phase. For example, adult participants may look first at the red box (where they know Ann's chocolate is) before responding that Ann will look for her chocolate in the blue box (where she left it).
Dr Rubio's latest research investigates to what extent our Theory of Mind works as a correction mechanism of our own egocentric perspective by applying modern eye-tracking techniques to classic false-belief and referential communication tasks.
Dr Paula Rubio undertook an MA in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Reading and an MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge University. She completed her PhD on Experimental Pragmatics at Cambridge. Dr Rubio has spent the last two years of her British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Psychology Department in Princeton University, combining a research project funded by the Marie Curie Foundation with her work at University College London.