Principles of belief acquisition. How we read other minds.

Reading other minds is a pervasive feature of human social life. A decade of research indicates that people can automatically track an agent's beliefs regardless of whether this is required. But little is known about the principles t guide automatic belief tracking. In six experiments adapting a false belief task introduced by Kovács et al. (2010), we tested whether belief tracking is interrupted by either an agent's lack of perceptual access or else by an agent's constrained action possibilities. We also tested whether such manipulations create interruptions when participants were instructed to track beliefs. Our main finding: the agent's lack of perceptual access did not interrupt belief tracking when participants were not instructed to track beliefs. Overall, our findings raise a challenge: some of the phenomena that have been labelled mindreading are perhaps not mindreading at all, or-more likely-they are mindreading but not as we know it.

Preventing action slows down performance in perceptual judgment.

Action and vision are known to be tightly coupled with each other. In a previous study, we found that repeatedly grasping an object without any visual feedback might result in a perceptual aftereffect when the object was visually presented in the context of a perceptual judgement task. In this study, we explored whether and how such an effect could be modulated by presenting the object behind a transparent barrier. Our conjecture was that if perceptual judgment relies, in part at least, on the same processes and representations as those involved in action, then one should expect to find a slowdown in judgment performance when the target object looks to be out of reach. And this was what we actually found. This indicates that not only acting upon an object but also being prevented from acting upon it can affect how the object is perceptually judged.