Reasoning about mental states under uncertainty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer the mental states of others, is integral to facilitating healthy social interactions. People can reason about the mental states of others even with limited or (sometimes) inconsistent information. However, little is known about how people make inferences about the mental states of others under uncertainty, and what features of information are important in aiding mental state reasoning. In the current study, we conducted three unique experiments that alter participant's uncertainty when engaging in ToM tests. In Experiment 1, we simultaneously manipulated both the amount and consistency of information available in social stimuli presented to 59 participants. In Experiments 2 and 3, we aimed to decipher which feature of social stimuli is more conducive to mental state reasoning. Experiment 2 manipulated only the amount of information available to 47 participants, while Experiment 3 manipulated only the consistency of information available to 46 participants. Using both frequentist and Bayesian statistics, results confirmed that manipulating the amount and consistency of information alters ToM performance. Exploratory analysis comparing the effects of the amount and consistency of information suggests that the effects of the consistency of information seem to be stronger than those of the amount of information. Taken together, all three experiments suggest that while both the amount and consistency of information are important features of social stimuli-the consistency of information available is more salient when inferring mental states of others. These findings are discussed in relation to information theory and have important implications for creating enriched social stimuli, which may enhance mental state reasoning in individuals with social deficits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".