Social Cognition Measurement and Analysis

Social Cognition Measurement and Analysis

• Social cognition is important for understanding how people make sense of their social lives and navigate social environments.
• The central question is how social cognition is measured, and whether these measures are truly measuring what they intend to.
• The study aimed to expose participants to a variety of social cognition tasks to observe how they correlate.
• Participants completed a questionnaire on their social ability and comfort with social interactions.
• It was hypothesized that scores on the questionnaire would correlate with performance on social cognition items but remain independent of control items.

Participant Feedback and Questionnaire Analysis

• Participants found the tasks engaging, although some interactions were perceived as strange and accents were challenging.
• Concerns were raised about whether the tasks, like the triangles task, genuinely measure theory of mind or are influenced by cultural factors such as familiarity with British culture.
• A questionnaire assessed enjoyment, conscientiousness, replicability beliefs (own and class results), measure quality, and surprise at replication on a scale of 0 to 100.
• The average response indicated positive engagement, conscientious participation, and the expectation that results would replicate, suggesting confidence in the measures' validity
• There was a correlation of 0.52 between individuals' belief in the replicability of their own results and the class results.
• This correlation illustrates the concept of naive realism.
• Naive realism describes that people who strongly believe their own results will replicate are more likely to believe that class results will also replicate

Individual Task Analysis: Video Interaction Tasks

• Participants engaged in two video interaction tasks.
• Strange Stories Film Task involved watching interactions between two people leading to an ambiguous statement, requiring interpretation based on context (theory of mind).
• Control questions were based on memory recall about specific details from the film
• Participants found memory-based control questions easier than theory of mind questions
• Difficulty understanding accents may have affected theory of mind scores, questioning whether it accurately measures theory of mind due to language barriers.

Interacting Triangles Task

• The interacting triangles task included videos depicting a big triangle and a little triangle interacting
• Interaction types included implied physical interaction, implied mental interaction, and random motion patterns
• Participants were to distinguish the types of interaction and infer the triangles' feelings
• Coordinated Movement for mental interactions happened around 33% of experiments
• Chance was measured around 33% where interaction was coordinated for the mental interactions
• Physical interactions were correctly identified around the 50th percentile
• Random motion patterns were easier to identify as non-interactive compared to mental or physical interactions.
• Mistakes in mental state interactions often led to reporting a physical interaction rather than randomness

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task

• Participants viewed cropped images of faces
• They responded to theory of mind tasks by choosing the correct affect word.
• Participants also answered a control question related to the person's age
• Participants scored better on theory of mind questions than age estimation questions
• The age estimation questions may have been more challenging due to the subtlety in discerning the ages depicted.

False Belief False Photograph Task

• False belief tasks were conveyed through short stories
• Participants responded to true or false questions about the stimuli.
• The task was to compare states using different controls such as object placement and satellite photographs comparisons before and after a volcanic eruption.
• Participants achieved an 80% correct performance rate showing that the control tasks were as hard as the false belief trials.

Correlation Analysis and Interpretation

• Self-reported social ability should correlate with theory of mind scores but not with control task scores
• Control tasks measured: photograph, age, and other control items
• Both theory of mind scores and control were reported to have statistically significant correlations, although negligibly differen
• This outcome deviated from the anticipated strong correlation, highlighting potential confounding factors.
• These tasks require facility or understanding of the video stimuli
• Language proficiency could have influenced performance, potentially affecting outcomes
• These tests are referred to as "dirty" because they are affected by other cognitive systems used to process the information
• Strong correlation of 0.40 was observed between average theory of mind score and average control task score.
• This suggests that performance may be influenced by conscientiousness during the experiment itself.
• Studies with real social interactions allow the social partner to gauge the interaction quality
• Culture is a factor in social interactions, as cultural differences can lead to unmet or unexpected expectations.
• Social cognition and control tasks depend on language skills, social experience, and attention

The study explores how social cognition is measured and whether these measures accurately reflect their intended targets. It involved participants completing various social cognition tasks and a questionnaire on social ability. The study aims to find correlations between questionnaire scores and task performance.