Inferring subjective states through the observation of actions
By D. Patel, Stephen M. Fleming, James M. Kilner. 2012
82 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Estimating another person's subjective confidence is crucial for social interaction, but how this inference is achieved is unknown. Previous research has demonstrated that the speed at which people make decisions is correlated with their confidence in their decision. Here, we show that (i) subjects are able to infer the subjective confidence of another person simply through the observation of their actions and (ii) this inference is dependent upon the performance of each subject when executing the action. Crucially, the latter result supports a model in which motor simulation of an observed action mediates the successful understanding of other minds. We conclude that kinematic understanding allows access to the higher-order cognitive processes of others, and that this access plays a central role in social interactions.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology
How researchers see this paper
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Nathaniel D. Daw
- Stephen M. Fleming
- Peter S. Dayan
- R. J. Dolan
- Yael Niv
- Kent C. Berridge
- John P. O'Doherty
- Michael J Frank
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, neutral): “Therefore some authors have linked motor predictions to social predictions via the idea of “mirror neurons,” or shared motor representations for one’s own and others’ actions (Brown and Brüne, 2012; Kilner and Frith, 2008; Patel et al., 2012).”
- Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “Indeed, individuals have been shown to take action kinematics into consideration when judging the confidence of another individual (Patel et al., 2012), and the specifics of action planning impacts upon error-related brain activity (Bernstein, Scheffers, & Coles, 1995; Torrecillos, Albouy,…”