Perspective Taking is Stimulus Control: Conditional Control by the Presence or Absence of 'Person' Stimuli in a False-Belief Task

Abstract

Theory of Mind (ToM) has remained a prominent theory for explaining perspective taking as the ability of mental attribution. However, there has been methodological difficulty finding evidence that participants operate under the ability referred to as ToM when engaging in perspective-taking tasks. The difficulty appears to be rooted in misunderstanding of the importance of the stimulus-control aspect in discrimination learning, and the reduction of the explanation to a unitary construct serving as the controlling variable. In the current experiment, we adopted a strictly behavioral approach to explaining successful performance of participants on a non-verbal task analogous to the Sally-Anne task. The components of this task were stimuli and stimulus changes presented through the conditional-discrimination procedure that we hypothesized is responsible for accurate performance on the Sally-Anne task. Eighteen participants completed a series of training trials containing arbitrary stimuli, exposing them to stimulus changes and feedback corresponding with the concept that someone will look for something in the place that they last saw it. This training was interspersed with tests analogous to the Sally-Anne task. Demonstration of accurate performance in these tests would support our hypothesis that accurate performance in a common false-belief task can be explained with stimulus-control mechanisms. In Experiment 1, 61% of participants (50% in Experiment 2, prior to intervention) successfully discriminated the pattern of stimulus changes. In Experiment 2, the effectiveness of additional naming and story-making interventions were evaluated by prompting participants to use their verbal repertoires for self-generating supplemental stimuli to increase the accuracy of their responding. After the additional naming and story-making intervention, 88% of participants successfully discriminated the stimulus pattern. We demonstrated that correct responses to the traditional Sally-Anne task can be explained by a behavioral process known as conditional discrimination.

Keywords: Theory of mind, Sally-Anne task, false-belief attribution, conditional discrimination, stimulus control