How do we reason about social partners during video chat interactions? - Preschoolers’ Theory of Mind performance in virtual space

How do we reason about our social partners in virtual environments? Virtual space is becoming increasingly popular, made all the more significant by the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly to adults, children are also increasingly prompted to operate in virtual environments and interact there with others, which raises the question of how they would apply their Theory of Mind (ToM) capacity in these special contexts. Abilities related to ToM develop rapidly during the early years of childhood, with children gradually progressing from the recognition of Diverse Desires to the interpretation of Real-Apparent Emotions, through the understanding of Diverse Beliefs and False Beliefs (Wellman and Liu, 2004). However, our understanding of how children follow and process others’ potential mental states in virtual space remains limited. We would like to examine whether 4-year-old children think differently about others’ knowledge and beliefs in virtual spaces in comparison to meeting them in person. We hypothesize that given the limited access to information about others for children in an online environment, children will consider this limitation, and thus their Theory of Mind attributions will be impacted (planned sample size n=66).