A Parent Report to Measure Earlier Developments in Children’s Theory of Mind

Indianapolis, IN

Children's theory of mind is typically measured by using classic false belief tasks. We aim to expand our measurements of children's theory of mind by asking parents to complete the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS; Tahiroglu et al., under review). The CSUS asks parents to describe their children's behaviors, intellect, imagination, etc. to see if any earlier developments in their children's theory of mind ability correlate with implicit measures of theory of mind. We will use slideshows, which are a set of frames taken from a video that replicates the locations false belief task, as a nonverbal measurement of theory of mind that measure children's dwell times on slides that depict events that are either relevant or contrary to the character's mental states. The slideshows may reveal earlier developments of theory of mind that correlate with the components of the CSUS. We predict that scores from the belief and desire subscales of the CSUS will correlate with children's performance on the slideshows.