ABSTRACT

People often speak indirectly. For example, “It’s cold in here” might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders’ inferences about a speaker’s intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker’s mental states, that is, mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference and then ask the following: Is mentalizing recruited primarily for sampling mental state information or also for the deployment of that information for pragmatic inference? We find that the role of mentalizing is modulated by how explicitly a task involves knowledge. Mentalizing correlates with task performance when comprehenders are asked to sample and report mental state information (Experiment 1b) or when given mental state information explicitly and asked to make an inference (Experiment 2, Explicit); in contrast, mentalizing does not correlate with task performance, or correlates only weakly, when participants are given mental state information implicitly and asked to make a pragmatic inference (Experiment 1a and Experiment 2, Implicit). These results suggest that mentalizing is recruited flexibly, allowing comprehenders to construct meaning from underspecified input.

摘要

人们经常间接说话。例如，“这里很冷”不仅可以作为温度的注释，还可以作为打开加热器的请求。理解者对讲话者意图的推理如何通过他们对讲话者心理状态（即心理状态）进行推理的能力而得到的呢？我们介绍了一个机制框架，通过该框架可以进行实用主义推理的心理训练，然后提出以下要求：是否正在招募主要用于抽样心理状态信息或用于部署的心理训练这些信息用于实用推理？我们发现，心理思考的作用受任务涉及知识的明确程度的调节。当要求理解者采样和报告心理状态信息时（实验1b），或者当明确地给定心理状态信息并要求进行推理时（实验2，显式），心理状态与任务执行相关。相比之下，当参与者隐式地获得心理状态信息并要求他们进行务实的推断时，心理化与任务绩效不相关，或仅微弱相关（实验1a和实验2，隐含）。这些结果表明，可以灵活地招募思想家，从而使理解者能够从未明确说明的输入中构建含义。