Neural processing of children’s theory of mind in a naturalistic story-listening paradigm

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to our understanding of people’s mental states. This ability develops in childhood and influences later social life. However, neuroimaging of ToM in young children often faces challenges in ecological validity and quality data collection. We developed and implemented an innovative naturalistic story-listening paradigm, which is child-friendly, engaging, and ecologically valid, to shed light on ToM neural mechanisms in childhood. Children (N = 51; age range = 6–12 years) listened to a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland during functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging. Methodologically, we showed the feasibility and utility of our paradigm, which successfully captured the neural mechanisms of ToM in young children. Substantively, our findings confirm and extend previous results by revealing the same ToM brain regions found in the adult and adolescent literature, including, specifically, the activations of the right temporoparietal junction. We further confirm that ToM processing has its own specialized neural profile, different from the left frontal and temporal activations found during language processing, with the language being independent of, but potentially supportive, of ToM deployment and development.