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The Neural Bases of Theory of Mind: The Role of Language Profile
Poster Session E, Sunday, September 14, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Hannah G. Treadway1, Madeline O'Sullivan1, Zoe Ka Pui Cheung2, Ester Navarro3, Eleonora Rossi1; 1University of Florida, 2University of California, Santa Barbara, 3St. John's University
Theory of Mind (ToM), or the ability to felicitously assign mental states to others, has previously exhibited sensitivity to individual differences in verbal memory, working memory, executive control, and bilingual status. Though there is a robust literature on bilingual children exhibiting enhanced performance on tasks engaging ToM (Schroeder, 2018), recent studies reveal that these trends extend into adulthood; bilingual adults reliably outperform monolinguals on belief reasoning and director task trials in which an egocentric bias must be overcome (Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012; Navarro & Conway, 2021), a signature of ToM proficiency. However, it is yet unclear whether this is owing to domain-general cognitive efficiency that has variably been reported for bilinguals or increased perspective taking abilities as a result of sustained contact with multiple languages and, by extension, multiple cultures. Using EEG, the present study seeks to characterize the neural processes that underlie adult ToM performance and to discern how individual differences in language background and cognitive control contribute to the modulation of these processes. Early Spanish-English bilingual (current n=23) and English monolingual (current n=16) young adults completed a belief reasoning task (Guan et al., 2018) during EEG recording. Short vignettes in which visual scenes were accompanied by auditory narrations were presented. Critical trials depicted object-transfer scenarios; in false-belief (FB) trials, a transfer causing incongruence between the participant’s perspective and that of the vignette protagonist takes place, while true-belief (TB) trials feature a transfer that permits participant and protagonist perspectives to remain congruent. To explore individual differences in linguistic profile, all participants completed the Language History Questionnaire 2.0, allowing for the later extraction of language entropy measures (Gullifer & Titone, 2020). An adaptive flanker task during EEG recording was administered to explore individual differences in inhibitory control. In line with previous findings (Meinhardt et al., 2012), preliminary data reveal a sustained late (400–1350ms) centro-posterior positivity or Late Positive Complex (LPC) for the perspective disambiguation point of FB relative to TB trials, indexing a reorientation of resources from external observation to internal knowledge about another’s mental state. Though the LPC is attested for all participants, the component’s differential sensitivity to FB vs TB trials differs by language group. The difference in LPC amplitude between FB and TB conditions is largest for bilinguals, reflecting increased sensitivity to the FB trials. Additionally, the point at which the two conditions diverge in the ERP signal is also earlier for bilinguals, suggestive of efficiency in resource reallocation. These findings provide preliminary evidence that bilingual experience modulates the neural mechanisms underlying ToM, particularly during the processing of belief-incongruent scenarios. The enhanced, earlier LPC observed in bilinguals suggests not only greater sensitivity to others’ mental states but also increased efficiency in redistributing cognitive resources to disambiguate perspective conflicts. Future analyses will explore the roles of individual differences in language entropy and cognitive control in FB resolution to discern by which means language experience is modulatory of social-cognitive processing.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,