Flexible Social Monitoring As Revealed by Eye Movements: Spontaneous Mental State Updating Triggered by Others’ Unexpected Actions

Successful interactions require not only representing others’ mental states but also flexibly updating them, whenever one’s original inferences may no longer hold. Such situations arise, for instance, when a partner’s behavior is incongruent with one’s expectations. Although these situations are rather common, the question whether people update others’ mental states spontaneously upon encountering unexpected behaviors and whether they use the updated mental states in novel contexts, has been largely unexplored. We addressed these issues in two experiments. In each experiment participants first performed an anticipatory looking task, reacting to a virtual ‘partner’, who categorized pictures based on their ambiguous or non-ambiguous color. Importantly, to perform the task participants did not have to track their partner’s perspective. Following a correct categorization phase, the ‘partner’ started to systematically miscategorize one of the ambiguous colors (e.g., as if she would now believe that the greenish blue is green). We measured how participants’ anticipatory looking preceding the partner’s categorization changed across trials. Afterward, we asked whether participants implicitly transferred their knowledge about the partner’s updated perspective to a new task. Finally, they performed an explicit perspective-taking task, to test whether they selectively updated the partner’s perspective, but not their own. Results revealed that correct anticipations started to emerge only after a few miscategorizations, indicating the spontaneous updating of the other’s perspective regarding the miscategorized color. Signatures of updating emerged somewhat earlier when the partner made similarity judgments (Experiment 2), highlighting the subjective nature of her decisions, compared to when following an explicit color-categorization rule (Experiment 1). In the explicit perspective-taking task of both experiments, roughly half of the participants could categorize items according to the partner’s (spontaneously updated) perspective and also used their partner’s updated perspective in the implicit transfer task to some degree, while they were the ones who displayed more pronounced anticipatory patterns as well. Such data provides strong evidence that the observed changes in anticipatory looking reflect spontaneous and flexible mental state updating. In addition, the findings also point to a high individual variability both in the updating of attributed mental states and the use of the updated mental state content.