Posted on Friday 14th June 2013
Work by Professor Ian Apperly and colleagues is highlighted in the cover feature of this week’s New Scientist magazine (see front cover, right). The article “Mind readers: how we get inside other people’s heads” describes research on social perspective-taking, to which Ian has made a significant contribution in the past decade. Among other things it describes a theory he has developed with Steven Butterfill which suggests that humans have two kinds of cognitive capacity for perspective-taking. One system develops in infancy, and enables fast and efficient judgements of simple perspectives. Another system develops throughout childhood, and enables more sophisticated but effortful judgements about what others think.