LAUSR

ABSTRACT People often speak indirectly. For example, “It’s cold in here” might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders’ inferences about a speaker’s intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker’s mental states, that is, mentalizing? We introduce a mechanistic framework by which mentalizing might be recruited for pragmatic inference and then ask the following: Is mentalizing recruited primarily for sampling mental state information or also for the deployment of that information for pragmatic inference? We find that the role of mentalizing is modulated by how explicitly a task involves knowledge. Mentalizing correlates with task performance when comprehenders are asked to sample and report mental state information (Experiment 1b) or when given mental state information explicitly and asked to make an inference (Experiment 2, Explicit); in contrast, mentalizing does not correlate with task performance, or correlates only weakly, when participants are given mental state information implicitly and asked to make a pragmatic inference (Experiment 1a and Experiment 2, Implicit). These results suggest that mentalizing is recruited flexibly, allowing comprehenders to construct meaning from underspecified input.