Katheryn Edwards

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Plymouth Marjon University

Little is known about whether human beings' automatic mindreading is computationally restricted to processing a limited kind of content, and what exactly the nature of that signature limit might be. We developed a novel object-detection paradigm to test adults' automatic processing in a Level 1 perspective-taking (L1PT) context (where an agent's be...

Understanding food preference among animals in human care can support improvements to welfare through training and day-to-day care (e.g., diet management). Little has been published about food preference in zoo-housed meerkats. Assessing meerkat food preference would be useful, not only for the welfare of that species, but also for developing appro...

Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent’s actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others’ beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability...

Cognitive developmental changes in belief understanding, particularly how and when children come to first appreciate false beliefs, occupy the bulk of research on human mindreading. Given apparently conflicting evidence from direct and indirect false‐belief tasks, there is much debate over whether there is a major conceptual breakthrough in belief...

The commentary by Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate raises a number of crucial issues concerning the replicability and validity of measures of false belief in infancy. Although we agree with some of their arguments, we believe that they underestimate the replication crisis in this area. In our response to their commentary, we first analyze the...

The interpretations of infants’ non-verbal responses in violation-of-expectation (VOE) false belief scenarios are subject to intense theoretical debate. In Experiment 1, adults provided online narratives for VOE scenarios meant to tap understanding of false beliefs about object location, perception and identity. Adults provided cognitively-oriented...

Human beings are able to quickly step into others’ shoes to predict peoples’ actions. There is little consensus over how this cognitive feat might be accomplished. We tested the hypotheses that an efficient, but inflexible, mindreading system gives rise to appropriate reaction time facilitation in a standard unexpected transfer task, but not in a t...