Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The capacity for Theory of Mind (ToM) allows us to repre-sent others’ understanding of the world independently fromour own and then explain and predict their actions in terms oftheir understanding. Researchers have often focused on tryingto find evidence for an implicit theory of mind system: one thatemerges early in human ontogeny and operates mandatoriallyin adults. In this paper, we ask how the recent methodologi-cal push towards replication can be used as a tool that bearson a key theoretical distinction in implicit Theory of Mind,namely the distinction between factive and non-factive ToMrepresentation. Unlike other meta-analyses, our primary inter-est is not the overall replicability of theory of mind findings.Instead, we ask whether the replicability of implicit theory ofmind tasks depends in part on whether they measured factiveor non-factive ToM. We find that, to the extent that there isreplicable and robust evidence for implicit ToM, that evidencelargely comes from tests that investigated factive ToM repre-sentations. This analysis is a proof of concept of the broaderpotential for using replication attempts to ask theoretically mo-tivated questions.