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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impaired mentalizing skills, specifically in understanding intentions. They have difficulty understanding social situations with multiple cues due to their limited ability to perceive subtle social contextual cues. Studies that used comic strips and the strange stories as intention attribution tests found that individuals with ASD exhibit a reduced ability in attributing intentions compared to inferring causal consequences. This study aims to use static photographs of social scenes taken in everyday settings to investigate the ability of adolescents with ASD to infer intentions in social contexts, and to explore how intention inference relates to working memory and basic attention, including sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. The results show that the physical causal inference ability of adolescents with ASD is comparable to typically developing adolescents, whereas intention inference is notably weaker. Furthermore, working memory predicts physical causal inference and divided attention predicts intention inference in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impaired mentalizing skills, specifically in understanding intentions. They have difficulty understanding social situations with multiple cues due to their limited ability to perceive subtle social contextual cues. Studies that used comic strips and the strange stories as intention attribution tests found that individuals with ASD exhibit a reduced ability in attributing intentions compared to inferring causal consequences. This study aims to use static photographs of social scenes taken in everyday settings to investigate the ability of adolescents with ASD to infer intentions in social contexts, and to explore how intention inference relates to working memory and basic attention, including sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. The results show that the physical causal inference ability of adolescents with ASD is comparable to typically developing adolescents, whereas intention inference is notably weaker. Furthermore, working memory predicts physical causal inference and divided attention predicts intention inference in ASD.

Abstract Background Despite autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and mentalization being two words often associated in the literature, the assessment of this ability in individuals with ASD in the clinical setting is still limited. Indeed, there are no standardized Theory of Mind (ToM) tests that are adaptable to different cognitive profiles, such as individuals with language poverty, and intellectual or memory impairments. This study proposes a non-verbal test (Intentions Attribution-Comic Strip Test; IA-CST) to evaluate the ability to infer the intentions of others, a basic component of ToM, in the clinical setting. Method In Study 1, the test was administered to 261 healthy individuals and we performed structural validation using Exploratory Graph Analysis. In Study 2, the final version of the test was administered to 32 individuals with ASD to assess the known group validity of the measure by comparing their scores with a sample of IQ-matched controls. Moreover, we performed logistic regression and ROC curve to preliminarily assess the diagnostic performance of the IA-CST. Results The IA-CST resulted in a 3-dimension measure with good structural stability. Group comparison indicated that the ASD group shows significantly lower performance in intention attribution but not in inferring causal consequences. The test demonstrated known group validity and that, preliminarily, it is suitable for implementation within the clinical practice. Conclusions The results support the IA-CST as a valid non-verbal task for evaluating intentions attribution in the clinical setting. Difficulties in ToM are early and relevant in ASD, so assessing these aspects is valuable for structuring individualized and evidence-based interventions.

Background: Despite autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and mentalization being two words often associated in the literature, the assessment of this ability in individuals with ASD in the clinical setting is still limited. Indeed, there are no standardized Theory of Mind (ToM) tests that are adaptable to different cognitive profiles, such as individuals with language poverty, and intellectual or memory impairments. This study proposes a non-verbal test (Intentions Attribution-Comic Strip Test; IA-CST) to evaluate the ability to infer the intentions of others, a basic component of ToM, in the clinical setting. Method: In Study 1, the test was administered to 261 healthy individuals and we performed structural validation using Exploratory Graph Analysis. In Study 2, the final version of the test was administered to 32 individuals with ASD to assess the known group validity of the measure by comparing their scores with a sample of IQ-matched controls. Moreover, we performed logistic regression and ROC curve to preliminarily assess the diagnostic performance of the IA-CST. Results: The IA-CST resulted in a 3-dimension measure with good structural stability. Group comparison indicated that the ASD group shows significantly lower performance in intention attribution but not in inferring causal consequences. The test demonstrated known group validity and that, preliminarily, it is suitable for implementation within the clinical practice. Conclusions: The results support the IA-CST as a valid non-verbal task for evaluating intentions attribution in the clinical setting. Difficulties in ToM are early and relevant in ASD, so assessing these aspects is valuable for structuring individualized and evidence-based interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to infer intentions from observed behavior and predict actions based on this inference, known as intention attribution (IA), has been hypothesized to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The underlying neural processes, however, have not been conclusively determined. The aim of this study was to examine the neural signature of IA in children and adolescents with ASD, and to elucidate potential links to contextual updating processes using electroencephalography. Results did not indicate that IA or early contextual updating was impaired in ASD. However, there was evidence of aberrant processing of expectation violations in ASD, particularly if the expectation was based on IA. Results are discussed within the context of impaired predictive coding in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans care about having a positive reputation, which may prompt them to help in scenarios where the return benefits are not obvious. Various game-theoretical models support the hypothesis that concern for reputation may stabilize cooperation beyond kin, pairs or small groups. However, such models are not explicit about the underlying psychological mechanisms that support reputation-based cooperation. These models therefore cannot account for the apparent rarity of reputation-based cooperation in other species. Here, we identify the cognitive mechanisms that may support reputation-based cooperation in the absence of language. We argue that a large working memory enhances the ability to delay gratification, to understand others' mental states (which allows for perspective-taking and attribution of intentions) and to create and follow norms, which are key building blocks for increasingly complex reputation-based cooperation. We review the existing evidence for the appearance of these processes during human ontogeny as well as their presence in non-human apes and other vertebrates. Based on this review, we predict that most non-human species are cognitively constrained to show only simple forms of reputation-based cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot.

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is “the thought that counts.” However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated. Such contradictory findings have prompted debate about the development of moral reasoning. Here, we examine extant research on early moral evaluation and propose that differences in the way that task procedures present intention and outcome information can (1) support or preclude young children’s intention attribution and (2) alter the relative saliency or predominance of each kind of information. In turn, these differences would influence the frequency and degree to which young children generate intention-oriented moral evaluations.

Highlights • We investigated how belief in free will (BFW) shapes social perception. • Hypothesis: BFW correlates with perceived intentionality (PI). • Study 1a & 1b: BFW correlates with PI of soccer players committing handball. • Study 2: Results replicate even when observing very abstract geometrical shapes. • Conclusion: BFW may change the way individuals interpret others' behavior. Abstract The question of whether free will actually exists has been debated in philosophy for centuries. However, how belief in free will shapes the perception of our social environment still remains open. Here we investigate whether belief in free will affects how much intentionality we attribute to other people. Study 1a and 1b demonstrate a weak positive relation between the strength of belief in free will and the perceived intentionality of soccer players committing handball. This pattern even holds for behavior that is objectively not intentional (i.e., when the player touches the ball accidentally). Going one step further, in Study 2 we find a weak correlation between belief in free will and perceiving intentions in very abstract geometrical shapes. These findings suggest that whether individuals believe in free will or not changes the way they interpret others' behavior, which may have important societal consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research indicates that we tend to over-attribute intention when interpreting the actions of others. This ‘intentionality bias’ is explained by a dual-process model of intention attribution (Rosset, 2008). However, it is currently unclear whether individual differences exist in the intentionality bias, and specifically whether cognitive and/or affective empathy skills are associated with hyper-intentionality. In the current study, we adopted Rosset's (2008) ambiguous sentence paradigm to test whether individual differences in the intentionality bias are associated with self-reported perspective taking, online simulation, emotion contagion, proximal responsivity and peripheral responsivity. Regression analyses revealed that cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, significantly predicted the proportion of intentional judgements when participants were asked to interpret ambiguous sentences that were prototypically accidental. Moreover, greater perspective taking skills predicted a higher proportion of intentional over accidental judgements of ambiguous actions. The implications of these findings for understanding prosocial behaviour and ‘shared intentionality’ among humans are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the im-mediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. However, as vision deteriorates, links be-tween deictic signs and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and it becomes increasingly difficult for partici-pants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people have addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent pro-tactile movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to their referential prob-lems. Drawing on analyses of 120 hours of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during twelve months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I show how DeafBlind peo-ple are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and how this pro-cess is aligning language with context in novel ways. I propose two mechanisms that can account for this process: deictic integration and embedding in the social field. I argue that together, these interactional and social mechanisms yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention-attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds.

This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the immediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. As vision deteriorates, however, links between deictic signs (such as pointing) and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and as a result, it becomes increasingly difficult for participants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent "pro-tactile" movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to these referential problems. Drawing on analyses of 120 h of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during 12 months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I argue that DeafBlind people are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and this process is aligning language with context in novel ways. I discuss two mechanisms that can account for this process: embedding in the social field and deictic integration. I argue that together, these social and interactional processes yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discerning intentional from unintentional actions is a key aspect of social cognition. Mental state attribution tasks show that autistic people are less accurate than neurotypicals in attributing an agent's intention when there is clearly a right answer. Little is known about how autistic people judge the intentionality of ambiguous actions (i.e., actions that are neither clearly intentional nor clearly unintentional). This study sought to find out whether autistic individuals differ in their interpretation of ambiguous action compared to neurotypical controls. 20 autistic and 20 neurotypical adults completed an ambiguous action and theory of mind task. Autistic traits, verbal reasoning and non-verbal perceptual reasoning ability were measured. Results show that intentionality endorsement scores for ambiguous but prototypically accidental actions were higher in autistic participants than controls. Theory of Mind (ToM) scores did not correlate with intentionality endorsement scores in either group therefore group differences could not be explained by ToM ability. Autistic participants had a tendency to over-attribute intention compared to neurotypicals, which could not be explained by ToM ability. Studying ambiguous action is important with respect to ecological validity, given that we often face ambiguous actions during social encounters. • Little is known about how autistic people process ambiguous actions. • Autistic participants tended to judge ambiguous actions to be intentional. • Group differences could not be explained by theory of mind ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is a neural region involved in assessing the goals and intentions underlying the motion of social agents. Recent research has identified visual cues, such as chasing, that trigger animacy detection and intention attribution. When readily available in a visual display, these cues reliably activate the pSTS. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined if attributing intentions to random motion would likewise engage the pSTS. Participants viewed displays of four moving circles and were instructed to search for chasing or mirror-correlated motion. On chasing trials, one circle chased another circle, invoking the percept of an intentional agent; while on correlated motion trials, one circle’s motion was mirror reflected by another. On the remaining trials, all circles moved randomly. As expected, pSTS activation was greater when participants searched for chasing vs correlated motion when these cues were present in the displays. Of critical importance, pSTS activation was also greater when participants searched for chasing compared to mirror-correlated motion when the displays in both search conditions were statistically identical random motion. We conclude that pSTS activity associated with intention attribution can be invoked by top–down processes in the absence of reliable visual cues for intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research investigated how children would weigh moral acts pitted against intent, across different moral domains. Twenty primary school children were recruited from an existing database and evaluated a set of acts (good-bad) on the basis of intent (good-bad) across three domains (harm, fairness, and social convention) on a 7-point Likert scale. The study found that children took into account the intention of an agent. Interestingly, intent has a differential effect on the evaluation of acts; it was more pronounced for good acts, but less so for bad acts. For the evaluation of bad acts, children placed greater weight on the intrinsic nature of the act rather than the protagonist's intent. Conversely, whether the intent is good or bad influenced the evaluation of good acts to a greater extent. These findings not only lend support to the domain-specific view of moral reasoning but also show that children do not attribute intent in a unitary manner within theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intentionality plays a fundamental part in human social interactions and we know that interpretation of behaviours of conspecifics depends on the intentions underlying them. Most of the studies on intention attribution were undertaken with primates. However, very little is known on this topic in animals more distantly related to humans such as birds. Three hand-reared African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) were tested on their ability to understand human intentional actions. The subjects’ attention was not equally distributed across the conditions and their behavioural pattern also changed depending on the condition: the parrots showed more requesting behaviours (opening of the beak and request calls) when the experimenter was unwilling to give them seeds, and bit the wire mesh more that represented the obstacle when the experimenter was trying to give them food. For the first time we showed that a bird species, like primates, may be sensitive to behavioural cues of a human according to his intentions. Keywords: Grey parrots; intention attribution; theory of mind [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Humans permanently monitor others'' behaviour and reason about their goals and intentions. Recent studies provided evidence suggesting that a very simple mechanism might underlie these functions. When observing stereotypic actions of others, goal inference seems to work through internal simulation of these actions in the self. However, less is known about the functional mechanisms and brain areas that are involved in inferring goals from others'' actions when these actions are not stereotypic. Here we investigated the neural processes that are involved in goal inference processing of simple, non-stereotypic actions using functional brain imaging. We developed a paradigm in which we compared four simple finger lifting movements that differed in plausibility and intentionality as varied by action context. We found three regions that seem to be involved in goal inference processing of non-stereotypic implausible actions: (1) The superior temporal sulcus, (2) the right inferior parietal cortex, at the junction with the posterior temporal cortex (TPJ), and (3) the angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobule. In line with teleological reasoning accounts of action understanding, inferring others'' goals from non-stereotypic actions seems to be the outcome of context-sensitive inferential processing. In agreement with previous findings, we found the mirror system to be more strongly activated for intentionally produced actions [Iacoboni, M., Molnar-Szakacs, I., Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta, J.C., Rizzolatti, G., 2005. Grasping the intentions of others with one''s own mirror neuron system. PLoS Biol. 3, e79.], indicating an involvement of the IFG in representing intentional actions. Our findings support the idea that goal inference processing for non-stereotypic actions is primarily mediated by reasoning about action and context rather than by a direct mapping process via the mirror system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Converging evidence has shown that action observation and execution are tightly linked. The observation of an action directly activates an equivalent internal motor representation in the observer (direct matching). However, whether direct matching is primarily driven by basic perceptual features of the observed movement or is influenced by more abstract interpretative processes is an open question. A series of behavioral experiments tested whether direct matching, as measured by motor priming, can be modulated by inferred action goals and attributed intentions. Experiment 1 tested whether observing an unsuccessful attempt to execute an action is sufficient to produce a motor-priming effect. Experiment 2 tested alternative perceptual explanations for the observed findings. Experiment 3 investigated whether the attribution of intention modulates motor priming by comparing motor-priming effects during observation of intended and unintended movements. Experiment 4 tested whether participants' interpretation of the movement as triggered by an external source or the actor's intention modulates the motor-priming effect by a pure instructional manipulation. Our findings support a model in which direct matching can be top-down modulated by the observer's interpretation of the observed movement as intended or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Past research indicated that belief in free will increases the perception of criminal offenders. • However, this research ignored the perception of the victims. • We filled this gap by conducting three studies. • All studies find that belief in free will correlates with the tendency to blame victims. The more people believe in free will, the harsher their punishment of criminal offenders. A reason for this finding is that belief in free will leads individuals to perceive others as responsible for their behavior. While research supporting this notion has mainly focused on criminal offenders, the perspective of the victims has been neglected so far. We filled this gap and hypothesized that individuals' belief in free will is positively correlated with victim blaming—the tendency to make victims responsible for their bad luck. In three studies, we found that the more individuals believe in free will, the more they blame victims. Study 3 revealed that belief in free will is correlated with victim blaming even when controlling for just world beliefs, religious worldviews, and political ideology. The results contribute to a more differentiated view of the role of free will beliefs and attributed intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot., (Copyright © 2020 Abubshait and Wykowska.)

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is "the thought that counts." However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated. Such contradictory findings have prompted debate about the development of moral reasoning. Here, we examine extant research on early moral evaluation and propose that differences in the way that task procedures present intention and outcome information can (1) support or preclude young children's intention attribution and (2) alter the relative saliency or predominance of each kind of information. In turn, these differences would influence the frequency and degree to which young children generate intention-oriented moral evaluations.