A study of advanced abilities to attribute mental states to others in adolescents.
The overall objective of this research project is to study the development of advanced abilities to attribute mental states (intentions, beliefs, knowledge, etc.) to others during adolescence. These abilities, also known as theory of mind (ToM), play a fundamental role in our daily social interactions, such as conversations.
Being able to quickly assess a conversation partner’s mental states based on their characteristics (such as age) and the conversational context, and to rapidly adjust one’s own mental representations in response to that partner’s verbal feedback, represents an advanced form of ToM abilities not measured by the false belief tests traditionally used in developmental studies. The development of these abilities during adolescence remains poorly understood, as studies on this life stage are very rare.
The project aims to determine, in an innovative way, whether and when adolescents are capable of using their mental state attribution abilities appropriately in social interaction situations.
To this end, the project team measures their use of various linguistic markers (reference, prosody) while they play a collaborative game involving a conversation with a partner. Adolescents’ executive functioning will be taken into account in the experimental studies conducted.