Omniscience errors in mental state reasoning

Young children make systematic mistakes when reasoning about what other agents know and believe -- mature mental state reasoning emerges around late childhood. We describe a novel class of errors that adult reasoners make when considering information about the mental states of others. Participants in two studies reasoned about common conditional reasoning inferences couched in terms of an agent’s knowledge or belief, e.g., Alia knows that if it’s rainy then the café is closed; It’s rainy. What follows? They generated their responses using a novel sentence construction interface. Many participants spontaneously generated responses such as, Alia knows that the café is closed. This pattern reflects an “omniscience” error, i.e., one in which reasoners erroneously impute knowledge of a deductive consequence to an agent. We discuss the results in the context of recent proposals on epistemic inference.

幼儿在推理其他智能体所知所信时存在系统性错误，而成熟的心理状态推理大约在童年晚期出现。本研究描述了成年推理者在考虑他人心理状态信息时所犯的一种新型错误。在两项研究中，参与者针对基于智能体知识或信念的常见条件推理进行推理，例如，阿里亚知道如果下雨咖啡馆就关闭；现在正在下雨。接下来会发生什么？他们使用一种新颖的句子构造界面生成他们的回答。许多参与者自发地产生了诸如“阿里亚知道咖啡馆关闭”的回答。这种模式反映了“全知全能”错误，即推理者错误地将演绎后果的知识归因于智能体。我们将在最近关于认识推理的提议的背景下讨论这些结果。