Overview:
Thank you for asking me to review this interesting paper regarding ageing effects on the Theory of mind (ToM) in Asian people and applying eye-tracking techniques to explore the underlying mechanism. I’m very pleased to see and welcome this topic being awarded and investigated. Although the ToM has been extensively studied, the effects of ageing on ToM are not entirely clear in different cultures, this study is a good attempt for this purpose. While there are a number of strengths to this study, please find some weaker areas below that need addressing.
Comments:
In the abstract, it would be helpful to justify the rationale for focusing the current study on Asian older adults and choosing the MASC task. It’s not straightforward how this dynamic task would answer the question raised at the beginning.
It might cause confusion when directly quoting the experimental conditions’ names, like ‘no-ToM’ and ‘under-mentalizing’, please refer to the corresponding cognitive/perceptual processes.
“Older people with good ToM ability (‘socially engaged’) can better adjust to the process of ageing” vs. “Aging effects on ToM may compromise life quality” are relevant but different ideas. I’d encourage the authors to use them appropriately to justify the aims of the study.
Four main topics were included in the introduction but were less connected with each other, please integrate them together to better serve the aims of the study. More importantly, there is existing literature exploring older adults’ gaze patterns in ToM tasks which is not mentioned or discussed.
It’s not very clear why the Asian population was focused in the current study. The authors suggested recruiting ‘a diverse Asian sample’, but the second aim explored whether Asian people show a different gaze pattern compared with Western people.
Please specify the difference between the current study and Lecce et al. (2018), as the task and sample age were the same. If the first aim was replicating Lecce et al., please make that clear and justify the rationale.
It’s very sensible to exclude any participants who have an autism diagnosis, but screening for AQ might indicate this group of older people had particularly good ToM ability.
Given multiple comparisons correction was applied for t-tests, the same correction may also apply to the correlational analyses.
The inconsistent results between the current study and Lecce et al. (2018) need to be further explained. The authors considered the sample differences, then What’s the difference between the two studies in terms of the sample characteristics?
It’s very positive to use the accuracy in the young group to justify the absence of a cross-race effect between the Caucasian actors and Asian participants in the MASC task performance, may also be worth discussing the effect in eye-tracking data, as the cross-race effect has been observed in face processing in the literature.
Two minor points. On page 15, the abbreviation OA was not defined. Supplementary Figure S1 is not available, but the description in text is clear.
There are a few inconsistencies in grammar and punctuation, but still understandable, would be benefit from proofreading.

Thank you for inviting me to review the manuscript titled "Effects of age on behavioural and eye gaze on Theory of Mind using Movie for Social Cognition". I have completed my second review of the manuscript and am impressed with the attention the authors have paid to the reviewers' comments and criticisms. After careful consideration, I have no further comments to add. The authors have addressed the concerns raised in my initial review satisfactorily. I believe the manuscript is now ready for publication and recommend it for acceptance.