Descriptions of phenomenal versus intentional mental states are differentially associated with gaze direction

Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judgments of others’ mental states be linked to dissociated judgments of others’ gaze direction, one of our earliest social cues from infancy? We presented adults (N = 600) and 6- to 8-year-old children (N = 200) with direct, definitional descriptions as well as descriptions of example phenomenal or intentional mental states and asked them to choose whether a face with averted or straight-ahead gaze better matched the character in each description. Adults and older children chose the averted-gaze face for the direct phenomenality description but the straight-ahead-gaze face for the direct intentionality description. Adults showed the same pattern of responses for the indirect descriptions, but children chose the straight-ahead-gaze face for both types of indirect descriptions. A link between straight-ahead gaze and phenomenality present from human infancy may thus impact children’s judgments of others’ gaze direction. But by adulthood, language may come to evoke particular contexts in which a character’s inner experience may be more strongly linked to averted gaze. If, in adulthood, our social concepts have indeed been built on such prelinguistic intuitions and language, then these intuitions may continue to affect our mature, linguistically driven social reasoning.