Human cognitive strategy for understanding the behaviour of entities

Whether or not humans can construe the behaviours of entities depends on their psychological stance. The philosopher Dennett proposed human cognitive strategies (three stances) according to which humans construe the behaviour of other animated objects, including other humans, artifacts and physical phenomena. The three stances are `intentional´, `design´ and `physical´. In the present study, we propose a novel method for detecting the underlying stance adopted when humans construe the behaviour of entities. In our method, the subjects were asked to select the most suitable action sequence shown in three animations, each of which represents one of Dennett´s three stances. We then conducted an experiment to investigate which stance is adopted for different kinds of behaviour of various entities. Subjects were asked to select, from 60 short movies, the most suitable animation that represents the behaviour of an entity. The results indicate that the subjects did not focuse on their knowledge about the entity, but instead focused on motion characteristics per se, owing to the simple and typical motion of an abstractly shaped object.