The scope and development of implicit Theory of Mind: The interplay of cognition, language, and the brain

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It was long assumed that Theory of Mind (ToM) emerges slowly over the preschool years, based on central cognitive and linguistic resources. New research, however, has revealed surprising competence in implicit ToM tasks even in infancy. A big challenge of developmental cognitive neuroscience is how to characterize this early competence, its relation to explicit ToM and central cognitive and linguistic resources, and its neural foundations. Our project addresses this challenge by studying the ontogenetic trajectories, cognitive and neural foundations of implicit ToM in relation to the development of language and domain-general cognition. In the first funding period, we conducted a longitudinal study in order to relate implicit ToM at 2 and 3 years to influences of previous linguistic experience or the development of general cognitive capacities. To establish reliable and sensitive outcome measures, we focused on typical implicit ToM tasks that study infants’ expectations how an agent will act on the basis of a false belief. Surprisingly, our findings revealed poor replicability and no converging validity of these tasks – in line with recent evidence from numerous labs worldwide that together cast serious doubts on the suitability of these tasks.We are currently testing in a longitudinal study whether these implicit tasks, though failing to document competence at the group level, still tap individual variation that can be explained by foregoing influence of linguistic experience and domain-general cognitive capacities on implicit ToM.In the second funding period, we will take a novel and comprehensive approach focusing on implicit ToM from a new angle by investigating the phenomenon of altercentric interference. This is the robustly observed phenomenon that in their own judgments, subjects are influenced by the perspective of other agents that they automatically co-represent. For example, participants are slower to detect and count objects when another agent is present who has an incongruent perspective on these objects. Altercentric interference tasks have a number of crucial advantages: they supply fine-grained measures of implicit ToM, allow tight experimental control of linguistic and executive task demands and minimal contrasts of explicit and implicit task formats, which makes them perfectly suited for use in neuroimaging studies.Combining behavioral and neuroscientific approaches allows us to analyze the cognitive and neural bases of different forms of ToM across development and gain crucial insights into the underlying processes of implicit ToM and their relation to language and domain-general cognitive capacities.Overall, the project will help to better understand the nature and foundations of implicit ToM, and through close cooperation with other projects of CROSSING it will contribute to a better understanding of the interplay of linguistic, domain-general, and domain-specific cognitive development and the brain.