Abstract

Interest in eye movements as a window on social cognition has been sparked by recent eye-tracking studies using non-verbal false-belief tasks showing that infants as young as 13 months are able to keep track of other people’s beliefs. As ground-breaking as the use of eye-monitoring techniques has been in recent Theory of Mind research, earlier developmental studies using traditional false-belief tasks had already revealed children’s improved performance using eye-movement measures. In this talk, I will review eye-tracking research on perspective taking and false-belief reasoning both with children and adults, and discuss possible reasons why eye movements might reveal better results than other measures of false-belief understanding. I will also report the results of my own eye-tracking experiments and discuss those patterns of eye movements that could be interpreted as evidence of an ‘egocentric bias’. Finally, I will leave open for discussion and feedback some follow-up projects for the near future.