Neural Processing of Children’s Theory of Mind in a Naturalistic Story-Listening Paradigm

Abstract

The nature of the crucial, intertwined relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and language remains an unresolved issue in developmental psychology. To shed new light on this relationship, we implemented an innovative naturalistic story-listening paradigm to disentangle the neural substrates of ToM from language processing for the exact same stimulus. Children (N = 51; age range = 6-12 years) listened to a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland during functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging. Substantively, the findings revealed mostly divergent plus some convergent patterns of cortical activation for ToM and for language, demonstrating that ToM processing is domain-specific but requires language processing for its deployment and development. Methodologically, we showed the feasibility and utility of our ecologically valid paradigm, which can successfully capture the neural mechanisms of ToM in young children.