Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 26381,
    "title": "Conversational expectations account for apparent limits on theory of mind use",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Theory of mind is a powerful cognitive ability: by the ageof six, people are capable of accurately reasoning about oth-ers’ beliefs and desires. An influential series of language un-derstanding experiments by Keysar and colleagues, however,showed that adults systematically failed to take a speaker’sbeliefs into account, revealing limitations on theory of mind.In this paper we argue that these apparent failures are in factsuccesses. Through a minimal pair of replications comparingscripted vs. unscripted speakers, we show that critical utter-ances used by Keysar and colleagues are uncooperative: theyare less informative than what a speaker would actually pro-duce in that situation. When we allow participants to naturallyinteract, we find that listener expectations are justified and er-rors are reduced. This ironically shows that apparent failuresof theory of mind are in fact attributable to sophisticated ex-pectations about speaker behavior—that is, to theory of mind.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Theory of mind; social cognition; pragmatics"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5039f0w6",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Robert",
            "middle_name": "X. D.",
            "last_name": "Hawkins",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Noah",
            "middle_name": "D.",
            "last_name": "Goodman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2016-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26381/galley/16017/download/"
        }
    ]
}