tom-task-selector

Theory of Mind Task Selector

Purpose

This skill encodes expert knowledge for selecting, administering, and interpreting Theory of Mind (ToM) assessments. It provides a construct taxonomy, task selection decision trees, age-appropriate recommendations, psychometric properties, and guidance on confounds. A general-purpose programmer would not know which ToM tasks are appropriate for which populations, the developmental sequence of ToM abilities, or the psychometric limitations of common measures.

When to Use This Skill

• Selecting a ToM measure for a developmental, clinical, or adult study
• Matching a ToM task to the target population (children, adults, ASD, brain injury, aging)
• Designing a comprehensive ToM assessment battery
• Evaluating the psychometric properties of a proposed ToM measure
• Identifying confounds (language, executive function, IQ) that may affect ToM task performance
• Interpreting ceiling/floor effects in ToM data

Research Planning Protocol

Before executing the domain-specific steps below, you MUST:

1. State the research question -- What specific question is this analysis/paradigm addressing?
2. Justify the method choice -- Why is this approach appropriate? What alternatives were considered?
3. Declare expected outcomes -- What results would support vs. refute the hypothesis?
4. Note assumptions and limitations -- What does this method assume? Where could it mislead?
5. Present the plan to the user and WAIT for confirmation before proceeding.

For detailed methodology guidance, see the research-literacy skill.

⚠️ Verification Notice

This skill was generated by AI from academic literature. All parameters, thresholds, and citations require independent verification before use in research. If you find errors, please open an issue.

ToM Construct Taxonomy

Developmental Hierarchy

ToM develops in a predictable sequence (Wellman & Liu, 2004). Tasks should be matched to the expected level:

Construct Dimensions

Task Selection Decision Tree

By Age Group

What is the participant's age?
 |
 +-- Infants (6-24 months)
 | --> Implicit ToM tasks only
 | --> Anticipatory looking (Southgate et al., 2007)
 | --> Violation-of-expectation (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005)
 |
 +-- Preschoolers (3-5 years)
 | --> Wellman & Liu (2004) scale (5 tasks)
 | --> Sally-Anne / Change of location (Wimmer & Perner, 1983)
 | --> Unexpected contents / Smarties task (Gopnik & Astington, 1988)
 |
 +-- School-age (6-12 years)
 | --> Second-order false belief (Perner & Wimmer, 1985)
 | --> Faux pas stories (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999)
 | --> Strange Stories (Happe, 1994) -- simplified versions
 |
 +-- Adolescents and Adults
 --> Strange Stories (Happe, 1994)
 --> RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001)
 --> Director task (Keysar et al., 2003)
 --> Faux pas test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999)
 --> Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC; Dziobek et al., 2006)

By Population

What is the target population?
 |
 +-- Typically developing children
 | --> Wellman & Liu (2004) scale (most validated)
 | --> Standard false belief tasks
 |
 +-- Autism spectrum (children)
 | --> Sally-Anne (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985)
 | --> Unexpected contents (Perner et al., 1989)
 | --> Happe Strange Stories (if verbal)
 | |
 | NOTE: Many autistic individuals pass standard false
 | belief tasks by age 6-8. Use advanced tasks to
 | avoid ceiling effects (Happe, 1994).
 |
 +-- Autism spectrum (adults)
 | --> RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001)
 | --> Faux pas test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999)
 | --> MASC (Dziobek et al., 2006)
 | --> Director task (Keysar et al., 2003)
 |
 +-- Brain injury / neurological
 | --> Faux pas test (Stone et al., 1998)
 | --> Strange Stories (Happe, 1994)
 | --> RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001)
 | --> Yoni task (Shamay-Tsoory & Aharon-Peretz, 2007)
 |
 +-- Aging / dementia
 --> Faux pas test (Gregory et al., 2002)
 --> RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001)
 --> Strange Stories (Happe, 1994)
 --> Note: control for processing speed and working memory

By Construct

What ToM construct are you targeting?
 |
 +-- Belief attribution
 | --> False belief tasks (Sally-Anne, unexpected contents)
 | --> Second-order false belief
 |
 +-- Emotion recognition
 | --> RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001)
 | --> Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery
 |
 +-- Social reasoning / pragmatics
 | --> Faux pas test
 | --> Strange Stories
 |
 +-- Visual perspective-taking
 | --> Director task (Keysar et al., 2003)
 | --> Flavell Level 1/2 tasks
 |
 +-- Implicit / spontaneous ToM
 --> Anticipatory looking paradigms
 --> Dot-perspective task (Samson et al., 2010)

Key Tasks with Parameters

First-Order False Belief: Sally-Anne Task

Unexpected Contents (Smarties Task)

Second-Order False Belief

RMET (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test)

Faux Pas Test

Strange Stories (Happe, 1994)

Director Task (Visual Perspective-Taking)

See references/task-database.md for the full task list with administration protocols.

Psychometric Considerations

Reliability Summary

Validity Concerns

1. Ceiling effects: Standard false belief tasks show ceiling by age 5-6 in typical children. Use Wellman & Liu scale or advanced tasks (Wellman & Liu, 2004).
2. Floor effects: RMET and faux pas tests may show floor effects in clinical populations with severe deficits. Consider graded scoring.
3. Ecological validity: Structured ToM tasks may not predict real-world social behavior (German & Hehman, 2006).
4. Task purity: No ToM task measures only ToM. All tasks involve language, memory, executive function, and attention.

Confounds and Controls

Language

Executive Function

Recommended Control Measures

For any ToM study, include at minimum:

1. Verbal ability: Receptive vocabulary (e.g., PPVT) or verbal IQ subscale
2. Inhibitory control: Age-appropriate inhibition task
3. Working memory: Forward/backward digit span or equivalent
4. Non-ToM comprehension: Physical causality control stories (for Strange Stories and faux pas)

Task Combination Recommendations

Comprehensive Battery by Population

Minimum Battery (2-3 tasks)

If time is limited, prioritize:

1. One false belief task (for belief attribution)
2. Faux pas or Strange Stories (for advanced ToM / social reasoning)
3. RMET (for emotion/mental state recognition -- if construct-relevant)

Common Pitfalls

1. Using a single task as the sole ToM measure: ToM is multidimensional. Single tasks have low reliability and capture only one construct. Use a battery (Wellman & Liu, 2004).
2. Ignoring ceiling/floor effects: Standard false belief tasks ceiling by age 5-6. The RMET has modest reliability. Check for restricted range.
3. Not controlling for language: Most ToM tasks have substantial verbal demands. Group differences in ToM may reflect language differences, especially in ASD (Milligan et al., 2007).
4. Confounding ToM with executive function: False belief tasks require inhibitory control. Include EF measures and control statistically or use low-EF-demand tasks (Carlson & Moses, 2001).
5. Age-inappropriate task selection: Giving first-order false belief to adults (ceiling) or faux pas to 4-year-olds (floor). Match task to developmental level.
6. Treating the RMET as a pure ToM measure: The RMET has low reliability (alpha ~ 0.60-0.70) and may measure emotion recognition more than mental state inference (Olderbak et al., 2015).
7. Assuming failed performance = absent ToM: Implicit/anticipatory looking studies suggest infants may have ToM understanding that explicit tasks fail to capture (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005). Distinguish competence from performance.
8. Not including control stories: For faux pas and Strange Stories, physical/non-mental-state control stories are essential to rule out general comprehension deficits.

Minimum Reporting Checklist

• ToM construct(s) targeted (belief, desire, emotion, perspective-taking)
• Task(s) used with full citation and version
• Administration method (live, video, computerized)
• Scoring criteria and inter-rater reliability (for open-ended tasks)
• Control questions included and pass rates
• Confound measures included (language, EF, IQ)
• Ceiling/floor analysis: report distribution of scores, not just means
• Age and developmental level of participants
• Clinical classification criteria (if clinical population)
• Effect sizes and confidence intervals for group comparisons

References

• Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a "theory of mind"? Cognition, 21(1), 37-46.
• Baron-Cohen, S., O'Riordan, M., Stone, V., Jones, R., & Plaisted, K. (1999). Recognition of faux pas by normally developing children and children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 29(5), 407-418.
• Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test revised version. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(2), 241-251.
• Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. Child Development, 72(4), 1032-1053.
• Dumontheil, I., Apperly, I. A., & Blakemore, S. J. (2010). Online usage of theory of mind continues to develop in late adolescence. Developmental Science, 13(2), 331-338.
• Dziobek, I., Fleck, S., Kalbe, E., Rogers, K., Hassenstab, J., Brand, M., ... & Convit, A. (2006). Introducing MASC: A movie for the assessment of social cognition. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(5), 623-636.
• Fernandez-Abascal, E. G., Cabello, R., Fernandez-Berrocal, P., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2013). Test-retest reliability of the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43(9), 2220-2223.
• German, T. P., & Hehman, J. A. (2006). Representational and executive selection resources in "theory of mind." Psychological Science, 17(2), 130-132.
• Gopnik, A., & Astington, J. W. (1988). Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief. Child Development, 59(1), 26-37.
• Gregory, C., Lough, S., Stone, V., Erzinclioglu, S., Martin, L., Baron-Cohen, S., & Hodges, J. R. (2002). Theory of mind in patients with frontal variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 72(6), 752-756.
• Happe, F. G. (1994). An advanced test of theory of mind. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24(2), 129-154.
• Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. J. (2003). Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition, 89(1), 25-41.
• Milligan, K., Astington, J. W., & Dack, L. A. (2007). Language and theory of mind: Meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development, 78(2), 622-646.
• Olderbak, S., Wilhelm, O., Olaru, G., Geiger, M., Brenneman, M. W., & Roberts, R. D. (2015). A psychometric analysis of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Assessment, 22(6), 798-806.
• Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(5719), 255-258.
• Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5(2), 125-137.
• Perner, J., & Wimmer, H. (1985). "John thinks that Mary thinks that..." Attribution of second-order beliefs. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39(3), 437-471.
• Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Braithwaite, J. J., Andrews, B. J., & Bodley Scott, S. E. (2010). Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of Experimental Psychology: HPP, 36(5), 1255-1266.
• Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., & Aharon-Peretz, J. (2007). Dissociable prefrontal networks for cognitive and affective theory of mind. Neuropsychologia, 45(13), 3054-3067.
• Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587-592.
• Stone, V. E., Baron-Cohen, S., & Knight, R. T. (1998). Frontal lobe contributions to theory of mind. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10(5), 640-656.
• Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655-684.
• Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks. Child Development, 75(2), 523-541.
• Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103-128.

See references/ for the full task database with administration protocols and scoring rubrics.