The scopes, limits and developmental foundations of implicit Theory of Mind

Abstract

How does our capacity to ascribe others subjective perspectives on the world, or “Theory of Mind” (ToM), develop? Traditional task using explicit measures produced comprehensive and converging evidence that only from age four children acquire a ToM. However, the last decade provided an impressive body of evidence on implicit ToM, suggesting that language and socialization play a marginal role in understanding others. That is, different non-verbal paradigms were established, such as violation-of expectation, anticipatory looking or interaction paradigms, which suggest that even very young infants ascribe false beliefs to other agents – the litmus test for understanding subjectivity. While each task itself might reflect a conceptual ToM capacity, for each local finding there might be alternative simpler explanations. In addition, we currently do not know how reliable findings on implicit ToM really are. In older children, numerous studies have shown unity and reliability of explicit ToM. For early implicit ToM, comparable systematic studies of reliability and cross-validations of findings are still lacking. While deflationary accounts would predict no unity, and hence unrelated performances, nativist and (to some degree) two-systems accounts would predict full unity and reliability. Further, for explicit ToM, longitudinal studies found language, executive functions, as well as socio-cognitive skills and socio-pragmatic experiences to be valid developmental predictors. In contrast, for implicit ToM, hardly anything is known to date concerning its developmental foundations. The current project aims at filling these gaps by investigating whether early ToM abilities reflect a robust and unitary ToM capacity in systematic cross-sectional studies, as well as the developmental determinants of early ToM in a longitudinal study.