Viewers Actively Extract and Maintain Spontaneous Theory of Mind Representations in Dramatic Irony Scenes

Abstract

Understanding others’ mental states is a cornerstone of human cognition, yet how spontaneous belief attribution operates in complex, naturalistic perception remains underexplored. Dramatic irony (DI)—a narrative device through which viewers are aware of information unknown to characters—provides a controlled but naturalistic context to examine these processes. Using a curated DI film corpus, we combined eye‐tracking with (a) self‐paced and (b) video viewing to investigate how Spontaneous Theory of Mind shapes real‐time processing. Across two experiments, participants viewed edited Harold Lloyd silent film excerpts that either provided privileged information (Installation condition) or aligned viewer and character knowledge (Control condition), reflecting false‐ and true‐belief scenarios. Clips were either presented as a self‐paced static series of frames (Experiment 1) or dynamic film clips (Experiment 2). We analyzed narrative comprehension, reaction times, and eye‐tracking measures indexing cognitive effort. Results showed that, relative to the Control condition, the Installation condition yielded longer viewing times at moments of representational conflict, indicating increased cognitive demands associated with maintaining and applying false‐belief representations. In Experiment 1, these effects emerged at discrete moments and were accompanied by longer fixation durations in the Installation condition. In Experiment 2, longer fixation durations in the Installation condition were again observed, alongside reduced fixation rates and saccade amplitudes, consistent with more sustained local processing. These findings indicate that viewers spontaneously construct and maintain false‐belief representations during DI, which modulate real‐time processing during scene comprehension, providing a tractable framework for investigating social reasoning in dynamic visual contexts.