Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The goal of the present study was to demonstrate the potentialapplication of Item Response Theory (IRT) outside itstraditional use in assessing questionnaires by applying it todata from behavioural task. We did this by validating aperspective taking task called the Director Task used to assessTheory of Mind (ToM) abilities in young adults. IRT andconvergent validity analyses indicated that, contrary to ourhypotheses, the Director Task had an unduly narrow range ofresponding for measuring ToM. Furthermore, the DirectorTask did not correlate with other established measures ofToM. Our results suggest that the task should be used withcaution when assessing a young adult population.Furthermore, since convergent validity was not established, itis uncertain what specifically the task measures. Overall, weshow how IRT may serve as a useful tool in evaluatingbehavioural measures.