What shape do people's mental models take? We hypothesize that people build causal models that are suited to the task at hand. These models abstract away information to represent what matters. To test this idea empirically, we presented participants with causal learning paradigms where some features were outcome-relevant and others weren't. In Experiment 1, participants had to learn what objects of different shape and color made a machine turn on. In Experiment 2, they had to predict whether blocks sliding down ramps would cross a finish line. In both experiments, participants made systematic errors in a surprise test that asked them to recall what they had seen earlier. The errors people made suggest that they had built mental models of the task that privileged causally relevant information. Our results contribute to recent efforts trying to characterize the important role that causal abstraction plays in human learning and inference.

Recent research has found evidence for implicit theory of mind, suggesting that humans quickly and involuntarily compute the mental states of others. One highly influential task within this literature, known as the Dot Perspective Task (DPT), purports to demonstrate implicit visual-perspective taking within adult subjects. However, some studies, consisting of variations of the DPT, have challenged these findings suggesting that the DPT does not demonstrate genuine perspective taking. Instead, they argue that these results are reflective of simple attentional cueing. Additionally, some researchers have argued that the DPT is sensitive to unintended attentional and intentional factors. We report the preliminary findings of an on-ongoing meta-analysis which analyzes participant-level data from 23 experiments and 1381 individual subjects. We find evidence for both directional cueing and implicit perspective taking within the DPT, although the effects of directional cueing are significantly larger. Additionally, we find that the effects of perspective taking are sensitive to attentional and intentional factors. These results cast doubt upon much of the evidence which has been taken to demonstrate implicit theory of mind. At the same time, they suggest that future work may utilize a carefully controlled version of the DPT in order to measure genuine implicit theory of mind more accurately.