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 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.