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, example descriptions, but children chose the straight-ahead-gaze face for both types of indirect descriptions. Descriptions of either phenomenal or intentional mental states might be intuitively associated with straight-ahead gaze, perhaps originating in infants’ understanding of straight-ahead gaze as communicating either mutual social engagement or general visible accessibility for goal-directed action. The association between phenomenality descriptions and averted gaze may, by contrast, arise only after learning that certain phenomenal contexts involve inner experiences with averted gaze (e.g., someone is looking at a particular emotion-evoking stimulus or looking “into their own mind”). If, in adulthood, our social concepts have indeed been built on prelinguistic intuitions that can be evoked by language, then these intuitions may continue to affect our mature, linguistically driven social reasoning.