TY - JOUR

T1 - Does implicit mentalising involve the representation of others’ mental state content? Examining domain-specificity with an adapted Joint Simon task

AU - Wong, Malcolm Ka Yu

AU - Bazhydai, Marina

AU - Hartley, Calum

AU - Wang, Jessica

PY - 2024/5/22

Y1 - 2024/5/22

N2 - Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness of others’ perspectives, but its domain-specificity is debated. The Joint Simon task demonstrates implicit mentalising as a Joint Simon Effect (JSE), proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner’s frame-of-reference in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. Here, we investigated the content of co-representation through a novel Joint Simon task where participants viewed a set of distinct images assigned to either themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task allowed us to identify partner-driven effects exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. We did not observe a significant JSE, preventing us from drawing confident conclusions about the effect’s domain-specificity. However, the recognition task results revealed that participants in the Joint task did not recognise their partner’s stimuli more accurately than participants in the Individual task. This implies that participants were no more likely to encode content from their partner’s perspective during the Joint task. Overall, this study pushes methodological boundaries regarding the elicitation of co-representation in the Joint Simon task and demonstrates the potential utility of a surprise recognition task.

AB - Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness of others’ perspectives, but its domain-specificity is debated. The Joint Simon task demonstrates implicit mentalising as a Joint Simon Effect (JSE), proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner’s frame-of-reference in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. Here, we investigated the content of co-representation through a novel Joint Simon task where participants viewed a set of distinct images assigned to either themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task allowed us to identify partner-driven effects exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. We did not observe a significant JSE, preventing us from drawing confident conclusions about the effect’s domain-specificity. However, the recognition task results revealed that participants in the Joint task did not recognise their partner’s stimuli more accurately than participants in the Individual task. This implies that participants were no more likely to encode content from their partner’s perspective during the Joint task. Overall, this study pushes methodological boundaries regarding the elicitation of co-representation in the Joint Simon task and demonstrates the potential utility of a surprise recognition task.

KW - implicit mentalising

KW - co-representation

KW - joint action

KW - domain specificity

KW - Joint Simon Effect

M3 - Journal article

JO - Royal Society Open Science

JF - Royal Society Open Science

SN - 2054-5703

ER -