ArticlePloS one2019
Why can some implicit Theory of Mind tasks be replicated and others cannot? A test of mentalizing versus submentalizing accounts.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Verbal Behavior Analysis of Theory of Mind: Conceptual and Applied Implications.Perspectives on behavior science · 2026Article
- Pragmatic communication and Theory of Mind.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Deafness, Hearing Loss and the Development of Mental State Reasoning Skills: A Review.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Coregistration of EEG and eye-tracking in infants and developing populations.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Review
- Verbal Perceptual Prompts Facilitate Children's Sensitivity to False Beliefs.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Evaluative contexts facilitate implicit mentalizing: relation to the broader autism phenotype and mental health.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Projective Consciousness Model: Projective Geometry at the Core of Consciousness and the Integration of Perception, Imagination, Motivation, Emotion, Social Cognition and Action.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Mindreading by body: incorporating mediolateral balance and mouse-tracking measures to examine the motor basis of adults' false-belief tracking.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Article
- The Transdiagnostic Relevance of Self-Other Distinction to Psychiatry Spans Emotional, Cognitive and Motor Domains.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Naïve Theories of Biology, Physics, and Psychology in Children with ASD.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2021Article
- Infants' performance in the indirect false belief tasks: A second-person interpretation.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2021Review
- Implicit Theory of Mind under realistic social circumstances measured with mobile eye-tracking.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- God's mind on morality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Is implicit Theory of Mind real but hard to detect? Testing adults with different stimulus materials.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the last 15 years, Theory of Mind research has been revolutionized by the development of new implicit tasks. Such tasks aim at tapping children's and adults' uninstructed, largely automatic mental state ascription, indicated in spontaneous looking behavior when observing agents who act on the basis of false beliefs. Studies with anticipatory looking, in particular, have suggested that basic ToM capacities operate from very early in life and remain in unconscious operation throughout the lifespan. Recently, however, systematic replication attempts of anticipatory looking measures have yielded a complex and puzzling mixture of successful, partial and non-replications. The present study aimed at shedding light on the question whether there is a system to this pattern. More specifically, in a set of three preregistered experiments, it was tested whether those conditions that could previously be replicated and those that could not differ in crucial conceptual respects such that the former do not strictly require ToM whereas the latter do. This was tested by the implementation of novel control conditions. The results were complex. There was generally no unambiguous evidence for reliable spontaneous ToM and no effect of the number of passed familiarization trials. Neither was there any unambiguous evidence that the previous mixed patterns of (non-)replications could be explained (away) by the sub-mentalizing account tested in the new control conditions. The empirical situation remains puzzling, and the question whether there is some such thing as implicit and spontaneous ToM remains to be clarified.
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