Work on the project involved the research fellow training to become competent in the use of eye-tracking technology that they had not previously used and to become proficient in programming experiments involving eye-tracking. This training has led to further work investigating whether changes to webcam-based eye-tracking techniques could improve the performance of these techniques; this line of research was not originally planned and is due to be finished after the end of the project and presented at a conference.
To fully elucidate the different theoretical positions relating to performance on Theory of Mind tasks a literature review was conducted that resulted in a published scientific paper highlighting the main theoretical positions and the empirical evidence supporting each of them.
Some changes to the planned empirical work on the project was necessary due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The planned replications of experiments requiring in-person testing could not be done at the start of the project. Thus, work focused on investigating statistical practices and interpretations that could bias understanding of scientific results – this work involved the animal and infant cognition fields and highlighted the prevalence of formally incorrect reporting of statistical results. The work on this project has led to one of the collaborative teams receiving further funding to continue related projects.
Two further research projects were conducted. One project involved assessing the impact of the apparent dominance status of the characters presented within Theory of Mind tasks. The initial study did not detect a significant influence of dominance on performance and a follow-up study has been prepared to replicate the study prior to publication. A second project involved replicating a task that assessed Theory of Mind using anticipatory looking behaviour. This task was the basis of the original proposal but had since been found not to consistently replicate. To do this, we joined an international collaborative attempt to replicate this research. The full results of this international collaboration are still under analysis and are being prepared for publication.
In total, the project has resulted in the publication of two empirical papers, one editorial and one preprint. At least two more publications are planned. In addition, the results of the project have been presented at two international conferences; with a third poster presentation at a conference already accepted. The project has also led to the (co-)supervision of two Masters students and increased collaborations between different departments at the host institution.
