Reading experiments on higher-order social reasoning

Viegen, E.L. van (2014) Reading experiments on higher-order social reasoning. Master's Thesis / Essay, Artificial Intelligence.

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Abstract

The ability to reason about other people's knowledge, belief, and intentions is called the theory of mind (ToM). To understand ToM better, two reading experiments were done. In the first experiment, participants were presented with stories about everyday situations. They were asked to memorize the story and afterwards answer higher order knowledge questions about them. The first experiment indicated some interesting non-significant trends. Supposedly, this was due to a ceiling effect. Therefore, a second experiment was designed with a higher cognitive load. The cognitive load was increased by adding a higher/lower-game to the experimental setup. Now participants needed to memorize a number as well as the story while answering the questions. The results of this second experiment indicated that the order of knowledge (OoK) influenced the total reaction times to the questions. However, a division of the total reaction times in a reading part and a decision part showed that OoK did neither influence the reading times or the decision times. The reading times were mainly influenced by the length of the questions. The decision times were influenced by the length of the question as well as by the self-reflexivity. The self-reflexivity is true whenever the question concerns the knowledge of another character about the participants' knowledge.

Item Type:	Thesis (Master's Thesis / Essay)
Degree programme:	Artificial Intelligence
Thesis type:	Master's Thesis / Essay
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2018 07:59
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2018 07:59
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/12180

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