The paper reports an interesting study on the age-related differences in ToM ability. In a shift from traditional literature on this topic it uses an eye-tracking approach and examines the Asian population. I think that the study provides an important contribution to the literature and warrants publication. I do have, however, some comments that might help improve the paper.

In the introduction, the authors discuss the literature on older adults’ real-time perspective-taking studies (p.3) and then shift topics to discuss similarities and differences in the patterns of eye gaze between Western and Asian samples. I think readers would be interested to know if the studies reported on p.3 involved Western or Eastern population. This would also help to better situate the present study in the current literature. More generally, I think readers would find it interesting to know if age-related differences in ToM have been reported in the Asian population. Are there cross-cultural differences in older adults’ ToM?
More specifically, I think it would be interesting to know in what way, according to the authors, the patterns of eye gaze in Asian samples when looking at emotional expressions are relevant to the discussion on age-related differences in ToM. What conclusion do the authors derive from this body of literature that is relevant for the present study that examines ToM and not only emotion understanding?

The great majority of the revised literature discussed in the intro focuses on older adults’ pattern of eye gaze in relation to faces. This is really relevant for inferences on emotions; could authors discuss how this is also relevant for inferences on beliefs and intentions? I think this is maybe interesting to readers.

At the very end of the introduction authors briefly discuss age-related differences on non-face information processing. This is an important topic and should be discussed in more details: what measures have been used? What are the main findings? How do these findings relate to the present study?

The authors use the MASC to assess ToM. As they themselves note, the MASC presents four adult Caucasians (two males, two females) planning and subsequently spending an evening together. This meant that participants had to make inferences about people of a different ethnicity. This may be relevant in the light of the fact that the literature reports an in-out-group effect when it comes to mentalizing. Do authors think that this has affected their findings? I think that this issue should be addressed in the discussion of the revised manuscript. Do the authors think that this has affected their findings?

On p. 15, the authors present a very interesting explanation referring to a greater variance in older adults’ sample such that some older adults look a lot at relevant regions but fail to pick up the information, and other older adults look at relevant regions and successfully pick up information. This is interesting and raises the question of what makes some (but not all) older adults able to look a lot at relevant regions and make the correct inference. I am curious to know the authors view on this issue.

Minor points

Please check the grammar structure of the following sentence:

-abstract: “We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and to examine the links between …” perhaps “examined” instead of “to examine”?
-P. 4: “However in Bi and Han (2015) study, their results showed no emotional bias in the recognition task”
-p.9 We used independent t-test to compare for age differences for MASC accuracy and error types.

P.2 please get rid of one parenthesis in the following statement …”and written vignettes (e.g. (Happé, 1994; White et al., 2009), which are quite different from real-life social interactions that often involve the perception of subtle dynamic social cues.”

P. 2 Is there a reference for this statement “real-life interactions are likely to be more reliant on the understanding of rapid non-verbal cues interleaved with verbal cues in a complex manner”? Please add it.

Authors may be interested in reading this very recent paper that examines the issue of ToM in aging using a similar (not identical) approach: De Lillo, M., & Ferguson, H. J. (2023). Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

All my concerns have been addressed