Can a blind person guess the state of mind of someone they are talking with without seeing them?SAK-WERNICKA, JOLANTA. "EXPLORING THEORY OF MIND USE IN BLIND ADULTS DURING NATURAL COMMUNICATION." JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH J PSYCHOLINGUIST RES (2015): N. PAG. WEB.

Introduction

Social cues are very important when having a conversation, as is knowing the state of mind of who you’re talking with.

For example, if a person sounds angry, is it a joke or out of true anger?

Much of this information is given to us visually Could a blind person still guess at the state of mind of who they

are talking with based solely on the linguistic element?

Introduction

Past experiments have said that blind people could not guess as well as someone who could see, but these experiments may have been incomplete.

Experiment in 1995 – difference found in experiment was only in participants whose blindness was caused by neural causes, not ocular blindness. There was no difference with ocular blind subjects.

Experiment in 2000 – didn’t use real life situations to test, but rather scripted pictures. Not genuine speaking, so not genuine vocal clues.

Very few experiments that properly test the difference

Hypothesis

A blind person will be just as successful at recognizing a speaker’s mental state in a communicative situation as a person who is sighted.

Methods

Participants 39 adults between 19-67 years of age, average age of 38 years. Varying degrees of education 19 adults (8 women, 11 men) who were early-blind. 20 adults (10 women, 10 men) who were sighted

Methods

12 short recorded conversations overheard at bus stops, supermarkets, offices, or restaurants were presented.

All dialogues were 2 people conversing, and between 7 and 32 sentences.

After listening to a dialogue, a participant was asked a question about one of the speakers’ intentions, emotions, or beliefs.

The experimenter analyzed the answers and they were graded either correct or incorrect based on what the speaker was actually experiencing.

Results

Both groups performed slightly above chance level Sighted = 62% correct, Blind = 51% correct An independent-samples t test compared the groups. Revealed

significant differences between the two groups. p value =.048. Not likely to be a result of chance.

Results

They also tested to see if a specific mental state (intentions vs beliefs vs emotions/feelings) was harder to detect than a different mental state.

Found that scores for dialogues with beliefs were significantly lower than dialogues with feelings and intentions.

Discussion

Blind and sighted groups differed in how successful they were at guessing a speaker’s mental state.

Linguistic experience may not always compensate for the missing visual cues.

Though tone, pitch, and other elements of speech can be heard, important facial expressions, gestures and other non-verbal cues may be needed to properly infer the speaker’s mental state.

In some situations, providing a blind person with relevant sighted information may be needed for them to fully understand.

Some media developments have already begun to address this, such as live audio-description.

Discussion

Both groups were less successful at correctly identifying the speaker’s thoughts or beliefs than at identifying the speaker’s intentions or feelings.

More research is needed, but future experiments should differentiate on testing for thoughts or beliefs vs testing for intentions or feelings since they are different levels of difficulty.

Conclusion

Sighted people were significantly more successful at identifying the mental state of speaker than a blind person was.

The success results for both the sighted and blind participants overall were lower than expected, suggesting that when conversing a person focuses more on understanding the message the speaker is conveying, and only tries to analyze their state of mind when it is necessary out of confusion.