Figure 1.

Design of the Social/Nonsocial Why/How Task. Each block is formed by pairing a yes/no question that is either attributional (Why) or factual (How) with 9 target photographs. In an independent sample of respondents, 5 photographs in every block elicited a consensus response of ‘yes’, while the remaining 4 elicited a consensus response of ‘no’. Participants have 2500 ms to respond to each photograph. Once the participant responds, the task advances. Given this, block durations were contingent on response times. However, total task duration was not, as block onsets were fixed. Finally, between each photograph is a brief reminder of the question for that block. The diagram below displays the first two trials of an attribution block for each of the three stimulus categories. The same photographs were used to create the factual question blocks. See Table 1 for a list of all questions.