Do Conversations and Mental States Independently Influence Theory of Mind Development in Primary School Children? A Training Study

This study aimed to disentangle the impact of group conversations and mental state content on children’s theory of mind (ToM) during middle childhood by independently manipulating these two factors with a training design. In total, 110 Italian children (Mage = 9.5 years; SD = 0.4) were assigned to one of the four training conditions: mental state conversations, mental state no-conversations, physical state conversations, and physical states no-conversations. Groups were equivalent at baseline for age, socio-economic status, vocabulary, inhibition, working memory, reading comprehension and ToM, all of which are known to influence ToM development and were included to control for potential confounding effects. Results showed a significant interaction between the time of testing and both the training’s content and the presence of conversation. Mental state training improved performance on both a trained and an untrained ToM task, while conversations only led to improvement on the trained ToM task. Providing children with mental content and engaging them in conversations are two independent and efficient strategies to increase their ToM.