The emergence of domain-specific implicit-mentalising

To mentalise is to understand others' mental states, such as belief, knowledge, perspective,
etc. This ability is crucial to an individual's navigation of the social world. From a young age, human
infants are sensitive to social cues such as other's eye gaze (Farroni et al., 2004). The ability to
understand what others can see-also known as level-1 visual perspective-taking (L1VPT)-is
fundamental to the eventual representation of others' beliefs and knowledge. L1VPT emerges as
early as 24 months of age (Moll & Tomasello, 2007), and becomes automatic around 6 years of age
(Surtees & Apperly, 2012). L1VPT is a form of implicit mentalising-non-verbal mentalising which
does not involve linguistically-mediated deliberation; contrasted with explicit mentalising-a slow
and effortful but flexible and intentional mentalistic reasoning (Low et al., 2016).
The current project will examine the signature features of implicit mentalising in children
and adults. It is debated whether implicit mentalising is domain-specific-involving cognitive
modules recruited specifically for mentalising in social situations, or domain-general-recruiting
cognitive mechanisms that are also recruited for general mental activities, and shared across social
and non-social situations, or as Heyes (2014) termed: submentalising. To date, evidence in favour of
domain-specific (Furlanetto et al., 2016) and domain-general accounts (Santiesteban et al., 2014)
have both narrowly focused on adults . However, this approach may have overlooked the ways in
which developmental samples could shed light on the origin of any domain-specific mechanisms.