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

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