What’s interesting about this experiment is that the only information that an individual can gather about the objects in the virtual world can only come from interacting with them. This provides a clean environment in which to measure social cognition, the situation when both individuals successfully find each other.

In this experiment, most people were indeed able to find other individuals, although they often confused the moving shadow object with the real person. Nevertheless, many cognitive psychologists conclude that this was a direct measure of social cognition.

This experiment, known as the perceptual crossing paradigm, generated huge interest, but it also generated significant criticism. At issue is whether the information produced by the experiment is the result of the interaction between the two minds involved, in other words social cognition, or independent of these minds, in which case not social cognition.

On the one hand is the idea that information from the virtual reality is processed in the minds of the participants before they make their decision about whether they’ve met another individual. Therefore it must be social cognition.

One the other hand is the idea that recognition of the other individual comes from repeated contact with that person, which would be easy to measure objectively. And since this can be determined without asking either of the minds involved, it is not social cognition.

What’s needed of course is a new experiment which closes this loophole and this is exactly what Ikegami and co have done. The basic set up of their virtual world is similar but with several important but subtle differences.

First, they give each type of object a different sound, allowing individuals to build up a stronger memory of their interaction with it.

Second, they asked the participants to find other individuals and team up with them to communicate. So everybody goes into the experiment thinking they are part of a co-operative game with the specific goal of communicating in some way.

Finally, they asked everybody to rate the quality of their decisions in a questionnaire afterwards.

These guys tested the new experiment on 34 individuals (ie 17 pairs) over 15 trials. And the results are significantly better than before.

Ikegami and co say the median clicking accuracy was 92 per cent and much more sensitive to contact with another player than in earlier tests.

But just as significantly, Ikegami and co say the questionnaires reveal that participants became jointly aware of each other and jointly experienced themselves as being engaged in a social interaction.

That’s important because it is not possible to get the same result from an objective measurement. It is clearly the result only of social cognition, an effect that appears greater than the sum of the parts.

That has important implications for how we think about what it means to be an individual. “These results challenge our folk psychological notions about the boundaries of mind,” say Ikegami and co.

There are clearly significant implications. “An extendible mind can partially offload the mechanisms of cognition into its environment and thereby augment its capacities,” they conclude.

By that way of thinking, we may need to revise how we evaluate are cognitive abilities. Ikegami and co finish with this: “Whereas cognitive scientists have traditionally assumed that we are fundamentally isolated within our own heads, we suggest that we are actually open to genuinely sharing our minds with the other people around us — as long as we mutually participate in the unfolding of our embodied interaction.”

There’s no telling where that kind of thinking will go.

Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4158 : Embodied Social Interaction Constitutes Social Cognition In Pairs Of Humans: A Minimalist Virtual Reality Experiment