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Abstract

Until recently, Theory of Mind (ToM) – the ability to ascribe mental states to others – was assumed to develop around the age of 4 years. In the past, this capacity was tested using verbal false belief tasks. The last 1.5 decades provided data suggesting ToM abilities already before 2 years of age using non-verbal false belief tasks. Recent data indicates that verbal and non-verbal ToM abilities rely on different processing systems (Grosse Wiesmann et al., 2020), often referred to as implicit and explicit ToM. The system underlying implicit ToM, however, requires further investigation and a direct comparison to explicit ToM is missing.
We adapted an existing false belief task – the Sandbox task (Bernstein, 2011) – which yields a continuous measure for explicit ToM by measuring an egocentric bias in one’s judgement of another person’s false belief about an object location. In addition, we developed an implicit version of this task, which measures an altercentric bias in one’s own judgement of an object’s location. These two versions allow for explicit and implicit ToM to be measured within the same task.
We tested the implicit version with a real object Sandbox in the lab with 18 4-year old children before Covid-19 related lock-down. There was a trend for a difference between the false belief and true belief control conditions that points in direction of an altercentric bias (t(17)=-1,89, p=.08).
On this basis we created a tablet-version of the Sandbox task for an online study with children aged 2 to 7 years, data collection is ongoing.