Figure 5. Illustration of an alien’s state space trajectory.

Aliens experienced four mental states, each reflected as a location within color space (blue, green, orange, or pink). States transitioned either to a ‘within cluster’ state (e.g., blue to green) with high probability or to a ‘between cluster’ state (e.g., blue to pink) with low probability. The location of the eye at each time point was determined by a combination of “gravitational” attraction to the currently active state color, momentum along its prior trajectory, and Gaussian noise. Each point in the diagram illustrates the alien’s true latent location in CIELAB space in one frame of one stimulus video. The x- and y-axes represent the a and b parameters of CIELAB space, respectively. Each point is colored as its position in this 3d space. The locations and colors of the “L”s and “R”s reflect the colors of the alien’s left and right eyes, as observed by participants. These colors are noisy indicators of the alien’s true latent position in the state space at the same timepoint (indicated by the circle linked to each “L” and “R” by a dashed grey line). The observable eye colors were semi-randomly displaced from the latent coordinates with their own set of independent dynamics. Arrows indicate the direction of the alien movement in state space from one frame to the next.