ArticlePDF Available

Theory of Mind in normal development and autism

Authors:
This paper appeared in Prisme, 2001, 34, 174-183.
Theory of mind in normal development
and autism
Simon Baron-Cohen
Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry,
University of Cambridge, Downing St,
Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK
2
Acknowledgments: SBC was supported by the Medical Research Council, the
McDonnell Pew Foundation, the Shirley Foundation, the Three Guineas Trust, and the
Isaac Newton Trust during the period of this work. Parts of this article are based on a
paper that appeared in the International Journal of Retardation.
3
A theory of mind remains one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human
(Whiten, 1993). By theory of mind we mean being able to infer the full range of mental
states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief,
having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s
minds. Difficulty in understanding other minds is a core cognitive feature of autism
spectrum conditions. The theory of mind difficulties seem to be universal among such
individuals. This paper describes some of the manifestations of this abnormality, and
emphasizes how developmentally appropriate tests are needed in order to reveal it.
Throughout the paper, the terms ‘theory of mind’, ‘mindreading’, and ‘understanding
other minds’ are used synonymously.
The mental-physical distinction
I start this review with the mental-physical distinction since many consider that
this distinction is a fundamental cornerstone of our theory of mind, and one that is not
explicitly taught by parents or teachers. The test for this distinction involves the child
listening to stories in which one character is having a mental experience (e.g., thinking
about a dog) whilst a second character is having a physical experience (e.g., holding a
dog). The experimenter then asks the subject to judge which operations the two
characters can perform (e.g., which character can stroke the dog?). Whilst 3-4 year old
normal children can easily make these judgments, thereby demonstrating their good grasp
of the ontological distinction between mental and physical entities and events (Wellman
& Estes, 1986), children with classic autism have been found to be significantly impaired
4
at making such judgments (Baron-Cohen, 1989a). This is despite having a mental age at
least equivalent to a 4 year old level.
Understanding of the functions of the brain
This test was also originally devised by Wellman and Estes, and involves asking
the child what the brain is for. They found that normal 3-4 year olds already know that
the brain has a set of mental functions, such as dreaming, wanting, thinking, keeping
secrets, etc., Some also knew it had physical functions (such as making you move, or
helping you stay alive, etc.). In contrast, children with autism (but who again had a
mental age above a 4 year old level) appear to know about the physical functions, but
typically fail to mention any mental function of the brain (Baron-Cohen, 1989a). In these
studies, mental age is usually assessed in terms of verbal abilities, since non-verbal
mental age tends, if anything, to be higher than verbal mental age. In this way, one is
able to check that the deficit is not due to insufficient mental age.
The appearance-reality distinction
Flavell and colleagues (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1986) found that children from
about the age of 4 years old normally are able to distinguish between appearance and
reality, that is, they can talk about objects which have misleading appearances. For
example, they may say, when presented with a candle fashioned in the shape of an apple,
that it looks like an apple but is really a candle. Children with autism, presented with the
5
same sorts of tests, tend to commit errors of realism, saying the object really is an apple,
or really is a candle, but do not capture the object’s dual identity in their spontaneous
descriptions (Baron-Cohen, 1989a). Given that to do this requires being able to
simultaneously keep track of what an object looks like, versus what it actually is - how
you perceive or think about it subjectively, versus how it is objectively - it is an
additional clue that in autism there is a deficit in the development of a theory of mind.
First-order false belief tasks
These tasks relate to the understanding that different people can have different
thoughts about the same situation. They are called first-order tests because they only
involve inferrring one person’s mental state. (See below for discussion of second-order
tests). Normal 4 year olds can keep track of how different people might think different
things about the world (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). We have similarly found that, when
interpreting well-known stories such as Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White, even 4
year olds will say things like “Little Red Riding Hood thinks that it’s her grandmother in
the bed, but really it’s the wicked wolf!”; or “Snow White thinks the old woman is
giving her a nice juicy apple. She doesn’t know that it’s really her wicked step-mother all
dressed up, and that the apple is poisoned!”. A large number of studies have
demonstrated that children with autism have difficulties in shifting their perspective to
judge what someone else might think, instead simply reporting what they themselves
know (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985; Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1986; Leekam
6
& Perner, 1991; Perner, Frith, Leslie & Leekam, 1989; Reed & Peterson, 1990;
Swettenham, 1996; Swettenham, Baron-Cohen, Gomez & Walsh, 1996).
"Seeing leads to knowing" tests
Another corner stone of typically developing children’s theory of mind is
understanding where knowledge comes from, so that they can work out who knows what,
and more importantly, who doesn’t know what. Typically developing 3 year olds can
understand the seeing-leads-to-knowing principle, in that when given a story about 2
characters, one of whom looks into a box and the other of whom touches a box, they can
infer that the one who looked, will know what’s in the box, whilst the other one will not
(Pratt & Bryant, 1990). In contrast, children with autism are virtually at chance on this
test, as likely to indicate one character as the other when asked “Which one knows what’s
in the box?” (Baron-Cohen & Goodhart, 1994; Leslie & Frith, 1988).
Tests of recognizing mental state words
By 4 years old, normally developing children can also pick out words from a
word list that refer to what goes on in the mind, or what the mind can do. These words
include "think", "know", “dream”, “pretend”, “hope”, “wish”, and "imagine”. These are
easily distinguished from other kinds of (non-mental) verbs like “jump”, “eat”, or
“move”. Children with autism have much more difficulty in making this judgment
(Baron-Cohen et al., 1994).
7
Tests of production of the same range of mental state words in their spontaneous
speech
The previous finding dovetails with reports that children with autism produce
fewer mental state words in their spontaneous descriptions of picture stories involving
action and deception, and in their conversational discourse, compared to their normal
counterparts (Baron-Cohen et al., 1986; Tager-Flusberg, 1992).
Tests of the production of spontaneous pretend play
Many studies have reported a lower frequency of pretend play in the spontaneous
play of children with autism (Baron-Cohen, 1987; Lewis & Boucher, 1988; Ungerer &
Sigman, 1981; Wing, Gould, Yeates & Brierley, 1977). This might reflect a failure to
reflect on one’s own imagination - a mindreading deficit (Leslie, 1987).
Tests of understanding more complex causes of emotion (such as beliefs)
Emotions can be caused by situations (such as falling over causes you to cry, or
being given a present causes you to feel happy). But emotions can also be caused by
mental states such as desires and beliefs (Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews & Cooke,
1989). Thus, you can be happy because you got what you wanted, or because you think
you are getting what you wanted. Harris and colleagues found that normal 4-6 year olds
8
understand all 3 types of emotional causation. In contrast, studies show that children with
autism with this mental age have difficulty with mental states as causes of emotion
(Baron-Cohen, 1991; Baron-Cohen, Spitz & Cross, 1993).
Tests of inferring from gaze-direction when a person is thinking, or what a person
might want
Why do we spend so much time looking at people’s eyes? We now know that
from gaze-direction, children as young as 4 years old can work out when someone is
thinking about something (e.g., gaze directed upwards and away, at nothing in particular,
strongly signifies the person is thinking (Baron-Cohen & Cross, 1992)). Gaze-direction
also allows young normal children to work out which of several objects a person wants,
or might be interested in, or might be referring to (Baldwin, 1991; Bruner, 1983;
Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991). Children with autism, in contrast, are relatively blind to
such information from gaze-direction, even though they can answer the explicit question
“What is Charlie looking at?” (Baron-Cohen, 1989c; Baron-Cohen, Baldwin & Crowson,
1997a; Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith, Grant & Walker, 1995; Baron-Cohen
& Cross, 1992; Hobson, 1984; Leekam, Baron-Cohen, Brown, Perrett & Milders, 1997).
Mentalistic interpretation of the eyes of another person does not seem to come naturally
to them.
Tests of being able to monitor one’s own intentions
9
We have covered a number of tests of understanding other people’s thoughts, but
another important class of mental states is intentions. Working out why people behave as
they do is all about keeping track of people’s intentions, since tracking actions alone
gives a description of what people do, but not why they do it. In a novel test of this, 4
year old normal children were asked to shoot a toy gun at one of six targets, stating their
intended target. Then, unbeknownst to the child the outcome was manipulated by the
experimenter, such that sometimes the child hits their chosen target, and sometimes they
did not. Normally developing 4 year olds could correctly answer the question “Which
one did you mean to hit?”, even when they did not get what they intended, but children
with autism often made the error of answering by reference to the actual outcome
(Phillips, Baron-Cohen & Rutter, 1998).
Tests of deception
Deception is relevant to understanding other minds simply because it involves
trying to make someone else believe that something is true when in fact it is false. In
other words, it is all about trying to change someone else’s mind. A number of studies
show that by the age of 4 years old the normally developing child is showing both an
interest in deception, and beginning to practice it (Sodian, Taylor, Harris & Perner,
1992). Children with autism, when studied under experimental conditions, have been
shown to have difficulties both in production of deception, but also in understanding
when someone else is deceiving them (Baron-Cohen, 1992; Sodian & Frith, 1992;
Yirmiya, Solomonica-Levi & Shulman, 1996).
10
Tests of understanding metaphor, sarcasm, jokes, and irony
Some studies have tested if children with autism understand figurative speech
through story comprehension. Figurative speech requires an understanding of the
speaker’s intentions, in order to move beyond the literal level of simply mapping words
onto their referents. Examples of figurative language include sarcasm (“How clean your
room looks today!”, uttered by an exasperated parent to her child), and metaphor (“she’s
got a sharp tongue!”). Results suggest that this more advanced mindreading test (pitched
at the level of a normal 8 year old) reveals the subtle mindreading deficits in individuals
with high-functioning autism. They may confuse the intentions of the speaker (Happe,
1994). A similar finding using a simpler test comes from a study of normal
preschoolers based on testing if they can understand someone’s intention to joke.
Children as young as 3 years old heard utterances like “This is a shoe”, spoken by the
experimenter whilst pointing at a cup, and were asked why the experimenter said that.
Whereas even normal children referred to the speaker “joking” and “pretending”, in their
explanation, children with autism tended to refer to the speaker having got it wrong (“it’s
not a shoe, it’s a cup” etc.,) (Baron-Cohen, 1997).
Tests of pragmatics
Understanding figurative speech and humour is just a subset of pragmatics, or the
use of language appropriate to the social context. Aspects of language in autism are
11
considered in more detail elsewhere (Tager-Flusberg, 1993), but pragmatics includes at
least the following:
tailoring one’s speech to a particular listener;
adapting the content of one’s speech to what your listener already knows or needs to
know;
respecting conversational maxims (Grice, 1975/1957) such as being truthful, relevant,
concise, and polite;
turn-taking appropriately so that there is space for both participants in the dialogue;
being sensitive to the other person’s contribution to the conversation;
recognizing what is the wrong or right thing to say in a particular context;
staying on topic; and
appropriately helping your listener to follow when a topic change is occurring.
Almost every aspect of pragmatics involves sensitivity to speaker and listener
mental states, and hence mindreading, though it is important to note that pragmatics also
involves using context. Two experimental studies of pragmatics in children with autism
have included (1) a test of whether the Gricean maxims of conversational relevance can
be recognized (Baron-Cohen, 1988; Tager-Flusberg, 1993), and a test of recognizing
when someone said the wrong thing (faux pas) (Baron-Cohen, O'Riordan, Stone, Jones &
Plaisted, 1999a). In the first task, the child has to work out which of two possible replies
would be an inappropriate answer to a question. In the second study, the child has to
identify if anyone said anything they should not have said, based on hearing a short story.
12
Both studies suggest that children with autism have difficulties in this area (Surian,
Baron-Cohen & Van der Lely, 1996).
Tests of imagination
We discussed the relevance of pretend play earlier, and this is one possible way
that imagination can be expressed. More broadly, imagination is relevant to theory of
mind since it involves an unreal world that exists purely in your mind, and being able to
reflect on this virtual world. The virtual world is the content of one’s mental state of
imagining. One study of children with autism investigated the ability to draw pictures of
unreal or impossible objects (such as two-headed people), and found that children with
autism were either reluctant or less able to produce such drawings (Scott & Baron-Cohen,
1996).
Correlation with real-life social skills
One might raise the concern that theory of mind tasks simply measure aspects of
social cognition under laboratory conditions, and as such have no relevance to social
impairment in the real world. For this reason, Frith and colleagues have examined the
correlation of theory of mind skills in children with autism in relation to real-world
behaviour, as measured by a modified version of the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scale
(Frith, Happe & Siddons, 1994). They report that these are indeed significantly
correlated, providing some measure of validity of the tests.
13
Second-order false belief tests
The universality of theory of mind deficits in autism have been questioned simply
because a proportion of children with autism or the related condition of Asperger
Syndrome pass first-order tests. First-order tests, including most of those reviewed above,
involve simply inferring one person’s mental state, e.g., what John thinks. Happe points
out that this need not challenge the universality claim, since there are no reported cases of
autism spectrum disorder who pass first order theory of mind tests at the right mental age.
Thus, an individual with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome, who by
definition has normal intelligence, should be able to pass such tests at 3-4 years of age.
Typically however, they are older than this when they pass such tests. In children with
autism, Happe finds that on average a verbal mental age of 9 years old is needed before
passing of such tests is seen, and that the youngest mental age of an individual with
autism passing such tests is 5.5 years (Happe, 1995).
As one might expect, as a result of a delay in acquiring first-order theory of mind
competence, these individuals often fail second-order false belief tests (Baron-Cohen,
1989b). Second-order tests involve considering embedded mental states, e.g., what John
thinks that Mary thinks. Whereas first-order tests correspond to a 4 year old mental age
level, second-order tests correspond to a 6 year old mental age level. Second-order tests
can be another way of revealing if there is a specific developmental delay in theory of
mind at a later point in development. However, some individuals with high-functioning
14
autism or Asperger Syndrome may pass even second-order false belief tests by their teens
(Bowler, 1992; Happe, 1993; Ozonoff, Pennington & Rogers, 1991). Those who can
pass such second-order tests however may have difficulties on the more advanced theory
of mind tests described earlier, such as inferring bluff and double bluff in story characters
- an 8 year mental age level test - (Happe, 1994), or in decoding complex mental states
from the expression in the eye-region of the face (Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore &
Robertson, 1997b; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright & Jolliffe, 1997c).
An even more dramatic demonstration of this is the deficit on this task reported in an
Oxbridge University Mathematics Professor with Asperger syndrome, who had won the
equivalent of the Nobel Prize (the Field Medal) (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stone &
Rutherford, 1999b).
Conclusions
Mindreading deficits in autism spectrum conditions appear to be early occurring
(from at least the end of the first year of life, if one includes joint attention1 deficits) and
universal (if one tests for these either at the right point in development, or in the case of
high-functioning, older subjects by using sensitive, age-appropriate tests). Parents of
children with autism spectrum conditions, may also show difficulties in attributing
1 Joint attention involves monitoring what you and another person are simultaneously attending to. It is
discussed elsewhere (Baron-Cohen, 1989c; Leekam et al., 1997).
15
mental states when just the eye-region of the face is available (Baron-Cohen & Hammer,
1997), suggesting that genetic reasons may underlie this.
The brain basis of the theory of mind deficit in autism is being investigated using
both functional neuroimaging and studies of acquired brain damage [Baron-Cohen, 1999
#1203;Happe, 1996 #1082;(Stone, Baron-Cohen & Knight, 1999; Stone, Baron-Cohen,
Young & Calder, submitted). These suggest that key neural regions for normal
mindreading are the amygdala, orbito-frontal cortex, and medial frontal cortex. Finally,
much of the basic research in this field may have clinical applications in the areas of
either intervention or early diagnosis (Baron-Cohen et al., 1996; Hadwin, Baron-Cohen,
Howlin & Hill, 1996; Howlin, Baron-Cohen & Hadwin, 1999)2.
2 This recent book reports materials used in a study to train mindreading skills, using explicit methods, in
children with autism. Results show training does improve performance, but with limited generalisation.
16
References
Baldwin, D. (1991). Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference.
Child Development, 62, 875-890.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1987). Autism and symbolic play. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 5, 139-148.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1988). Social and pragmatic deficits in autism: cognitive or
affective? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18, 379-402.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989a). Are autistic children behaviourists? An examination of
their mental-physical and appearance-reality distinctions. Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders, 19, 579-600.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989b). The autistic child's theory of mind: a case of specific
developmental delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 30, 285-298.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989c). Perceptual role-taking and protodeclarative pointing in
autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology., 7, 113-127.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1991). Do people with autism understand what causes emotion?
Child Development, 62, 385-395.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1992). Out of sight or out of mind: another look at deception in
autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 1141-1155.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Hey! It was just a joke! Understanding propositions
and propositional attitudes by normally developing children and children with autism.
Israel Journal of Psychiatry, 34, 174-178.
17
Baron-Cohen, S., Baldwin, D., & Crowson, M. (1997a). Do children with autism
use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy to crack the code of language? Child
Development, 68, 48-57.
Baron-Cohen, S., Campbell, R., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., & Walker, J.
(1995). Are children with autism blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes? British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 379-398.
Baron-Cohen, S., Cox, A., Baird, G., Swettenham, J., Drew, A., Nightingale, N.,
Morgan, K., & Charman, T. (1996). Psychological markers of autism at 18 months of age
in a large population. British Journal of Psychiatry, 168, 158-163.
Baron-Cohen, S., & Cross, P. (1992). Reading the eyes: evidence for the role of
perception in the development of a theory of mind. Mind and Language, 6, 173-186.
Baron-Cohen, S., & Goodhart, F. (1994). The "seeing leads to knowing" deficit in
autism: the Pratt and Bryant probe. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12,
397-402.
Baron-Cohen, S., & Hammer, J. (1997). Parents of children with Asperger
Syndrome: what is the cognitive phenotype? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 548-
554.
Baron-Cohen, S., Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., & Robertson, M. (1997b). Another
advanced test of theory of mind: evidence from very high functioning adults with autism
or Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38, 813-822.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a
'theory of mind'? Cognition, 21, 37-46.
18
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1986). Mechanical, behavioural and
Intentional understanding of picture stories in autistic children. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 4, 113-125.
Baron-Cohen, S., O'Riordan, M., Stone, V., Jones, R., & Plaisted, K. (1999a).
Recognition of faux pas by normally developing children and children with Asperger
Syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,
29, 407-418.
Baron-Cohen, S., Ring, H., Moriarty, J., Shmitz, P., Costa, D., & Ell, P. (1994).
Recognition of mental state terms: a clinical study of autism, and a functional
neuroimaging study of normal adults. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 640-649.
Baron-Cohen, S., Spitz, A., & Cross, P. (1993). Can children with autism
recognize surprise? Cognition and Emotion, 7, 507-516.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Jolliffe, T. (1997c). Is there a "language of
the eyes"? Evidence from normal adults and adults with autism or Asperger syndrome.
Visual Cognition, 4, 311-331.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Stone, V., & Rutherford, M. (1999b). A
mathematician, a physicist, and a computer scientist with Asperger Syndrome:
performance on folk psychology and folk physics test. Neurocase, 5, 475-483.
Bowler, D. M. (1992). 'Theory of Mind' in Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 877-895.
Bruner, J. (1983). Child's talk: learning to use language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
19
Butterworth, G., & Jarrett, N. (1991). What minds have in common is space:
spatial mechanisms serving joint visual attention in infancy. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 9, 55-72.
Flavell, J. H., Green, E. R., & Flavell, E. R. (1986). Development of knowledge
about the appearance-reality distinction. Society for Research in Child Development, 51.
Frith, U., Happe, F., & Siddons, F. (1994). Autism and theory of mind in
everyday life. Social Development, 3, 108-124.
Grice, H. P. (1975/1957). Logic and conversation. In R. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.),
Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, . New York: Academic Press.
Hadwin, J., Baron-Cohen, S., Howlin, P., & Hill, K. (1996). Can we teach
children with autism to understand emotions, belief, or pretence? Development and
Psychopathology, 8, 345-365.
Happe, F. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A
test of Relevance Theory. Cognition, 48, 101-119.
Happe, F. (1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of story
characters' thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal
children and adults. Journal of Autism and Development Disorders, 24, 129-154.
Happe, F. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task
performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66, 843-855.
Harris, P., Johnson, C. N., Hutton, D., Andrews, G., & Cooke, T. (1989). Young
children's theory of mind and emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 3, 379-400.
Hobson, R. P. (1984). Early childhood autism and the question of egocentrism.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 14, 85-104.
20
Howlin, P., Baron-Cohen, S., & Hadwin, J. (1999). Teaching children with autism
to mindread.: Wiley.
Leekam, S., Baron-Cohen, S., Brown, S., Perrett, D., & Milders, M. (1997). Eye-
Direction Detection: a dissociation between geometric and joint-attention skills in autism.
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 77-95.
Leekam, S., & Perner, J. (1991). Does the autistic child have a
metarepresentational deficit? Cognition, 40, 203-218.
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretence and representation: the origins of "theory of mind".
Psychological Review, 94, 412-426.
Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1988). Autistic children's understanding of seeing,
knowing, and believing. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 315-324.
Lewis, V., & Boucher, J. (1988). Spontaneous, instructed and elicited play in
relatively able autistic children . British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 325-
339.
Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B., & Rogers, S. (1991). Executive function deficits in
high-functioning autistic children: relationship to theory of mind. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 32, 1081-1106.
Perner, J., Frith, U., Leslie, A. M., & Leekam, S. (1989). Exploration of the
autistic child's theory of mind: knowledge, belief, and communication. Child
Development, 60, 689-700.
Phillips, W., Baron-Cohen, S., & Rutter, M. (1998). Understanding intention in
normal development and in autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 16,
337-348.
21
Pratt, C., & Bryant, P. (1990). Young children understand that looking leads to
knowing (so long as they are looking into a single barrel). Child Development, 61, 973-
983.
Reed, T., & Peterson, C. (1990). A comparative study of autistic subjects'
performance at two levels of visual and cognitive perspective taking. Journal of Autism
and Developmental Disorders, 20, 555-568.
Scott, F., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1996). Imagining real and unreal objects: an
investigation of imagination in autism. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 400-411.
Sodian, B., & Frith, U. (1992). Deception and sabotage in autistic, retarded, and
normal children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 591-606.
Sodian, B., Taylor, C., Harris, P., & Perner, J. (1992). Early deception and the
child's theory of mind: false trails and genuine markers. Child Development, 62, 468-483.
Stone, V., Baron-Cohen, S., & Knight, K. (1999). Frontal lobe contributions to
theory of mind. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 640-656.
Stone, V., Baron-Cohen, S., Young, A., & Calder, A. (submitted). Patients with
amygdalectomy show impairments in theory of mind. .
Surian, L., Baron-Cohen, S., & Van der Lely, H. (1996). Are children with autism
deaf to Gricean Maxims? Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 1, 55-72.
Swettenham, J. (1996). Can children with autism be taught to understand false
belief using computers? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 37, 157-165.
Swettenham, J., Baron-Cohen, S., Gomez, J.-C., & Walsh, S. (1996). What's
inside a person's head? Conceiving of the mind as a camera helps children with autism
develop an alternative theory of mind. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 1, 73-88.
22
Tager-Flusberg, H. (1992). Autistic children's talk about psychological states:
deficits in the early acquisition of a theory of mind. Child Development, 63, 161-172.
Tager-Flusberg, H. (1993). What language reveals about the understanding of
minds in children with autism. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen
(Eds.), Understanding other minds: perspectives from autism, : Oxford University Press.
Ungerer, J., & Sigman, M. (1981). Symbolic play and language comprehension in
autistic children. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 20, 318-337.
Wellman, H., & Estes, D. (1986). Early understanding of mental entities: a
reexamination of childhood realism. Child Development, 57, 910-923.
Whiten, A. (1993). Evolving a theory of mind: the nature of non-verbal mentalism
in other primates. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.),
Understanding other minds: perspectives from autism, : Oxford University Press.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and
constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.
Cognition, 13, 103-128.
Wing, L., Gould, J., Yeates, S. R., & Brierley, L. M. (1977). Symbolic play in
severely mentally retarded and in autistic children. Journal of Child Psychology and
psychiatry, 18, 167-178.
Yirmiya, N., Solomonica-Levi, D., & Shulman, C. (1996). The ability to
manipulate behaviour and to understand manupulation of beliefs: A comparison of
individuals with autism, mental retardation, and normal development. Developmental
Psychology, 32, 62-69.
... Debates over framing and conceptualization of SC phenomena continue [12]. Various approaches, 'Theory-theory (TT) [13,14,15], 'Simulation-theory' (ST) [16,17,18], empathy [19,20], theories of direct perception (DP) [21,22,23], have been proposed, though each has its particular limitations. The empathy concept, which in a basic sense, refers to seeing the other person as a 'you' as opposed to an 'it' [24], that is, someone with their own subjective cognitive and affective experience, is a starting point for looking at social perception of people who are marked as 'different'. ...
... This manifests an epistemic gap 6 which must be overcome by some perceptual or extra-perceptual mechanism. TT approaches have attempted to bridge this gap by working from an assumption that the attribution of mental states, comes via the application of an innate naïve theory of psychological states [13,14], or 'folk psychology' [15]. Beyond this assumption there is considerable debate over the specifics of TT. ...
... Beyond this assumption there is considerable debate over the specifics of TT. Some dispute whether ToM is innate and modularized in the brain [13,14] 7 , or is acquired in the way of ordinary scientific theories [37]. A criticism of TT is that it excludes the intuition that the experience of attributing mental states does not always seem to involve inference, except in more explicit cases where we try to reason about, or question, what the other person's intentions and affective states were. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Stigma is a universal social phenomenon of significant importance to our understanding of social cognition. Stigma, and in-group out-group distinctions , have been shown to affect perception of emotions, intentions, and actions of people marked as members of a stigmatized category. Noting the lack of literature that conceptually organizes the concepts of stigma and empathy this paper reviews the relevant literature and proposes an organizing principle. This principle is derived from the continuum of social understanding. This principle states that the amount, and type, of information available on each point of this continuum enables stigmatization and empathy, to greater or lesser degrees.
... ToM as a core function of social cognition is essential to predict, describe, and explain the behavior of others (Poletti et al. 2012). ToM plays an important role in social functioning, and impaired theory of mind is observed in numerous psychopathological conditions, such as autism (Baron-Cohen 2001;Tajmirriyahi et al. 2013), attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (Borhani and Nejati 2018), schizophrenia (Irani et al. 2006), and depression (Bora and Berk 2016;Nejati et al. 2012). ...
Article
Full-text available
Several cortical structures are involved in theory of mind (ToM), including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and the right temporo- parietal junction (rTPJ). We investigated the role of these regions in mind reading with respect to the valence of mental states. Sixty-five healthy adult participants were recruited and received transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (1.5 mA, 20 min) with one week interval in three separate studies. The stimulation conditions were anodal tDCS over the dlPFC coupled with cathodal tDCS over the vmPFC, reversed stimulation conditions, and sham in the first study, and anodal tDCS over the vmPFC, or dlPFC, and sham stimulation, with an extracranial return electrode in the second and third study. During stimulation, participants underwent the reading mind from eyes/voice tests (RMET or RMVT) in each stimulation condition. Anodal left dlPFC/cathodal right vmPFC stimulation increased the accuracy of negative mental state attributions, anodal rTPJ decreased the accuracy of negative and neutral mental state attributions, and decreased the reaction time of positive mental state attributions. Our results imply that the neural correlates of ToM are valence-sensitive.
... En este sentido, cabe indicar que algunos trabajos señalados anteriormente han demostrado que la competencia léxica y sintáctica es necesaria para el desarrollo de la competencia pragmática, tanto en el caso de las ICG (Pijnacker et al., 2009;Chevallier et al., 2010;Whyte & Nelson, 2015) como de las metáforas (Norbury, 2004(Norbury, , 2005aOakhill & Cain, 2012;Kasirer & Mashal, 2016). Asimismo, existen otras habilidades cognitivas como la capacidad metarepresentacional o la teoría de la mente (ToM) que son necesarias para procesar, como mínimo, la metáfora (Happé, 1993(Happé, , 1994Baron-Cohen, 2001;Rundblad & Annaz, 2010). ...
Article
Full-text available
Numerous studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have addressed metaphor comprehension and, since at least a decade, the understanding of scalar implicatures. The present study analyses the relation between, on the one hand, the comprehension of both original and conventionalised metaphors and, on the other, the understanding of generalised conversational implicatures (GCIs, types I, Q and M), and it does so in three groups of children (one on the spectrum and two neurotypical). The aim is to ascertain in which cases correlations can be established between the different implicit meanings. To this end, the three groups of children were administered tests assessing metaphor comprehension and the different types of GCI. The results of these tests were then used to establish correlations between the implicit meanings. This comparison allowed us to conclude that the degree of conventionalisation is strongly linked with comprehension, as evidenced by the results obtained in the ASD children. We were also able to detect when there may be influence from non-linguistic knowledge and skills.
Article
Modern theories of psychopathy are used to shed light on the behaviors of two characters in Minna Canth's late nineteenth-century dramas Anna-Liisa and Sylvi. The characters of Mikko and Sylvi are shown to display characteristics of psychopathy as manifested in men and women, respectively. Although Canth's characters accord well with modern understandings of the disorder, they are not well explained from the standpoint of nineteenth-century understandings. The study offers possible interpretations of Canth's literary agenda in representing such characters in her dramas.
Thesis
Full-text available
Shwachman-Diamond disease is a rare autosomal recessive disorder with a ubiquitous impact on the physiology, life, and autonomy of individuals, including functional and cognitive abnormalities, leading to academic and social difficulties.In general, how the nervous system of individuals with Shwachman-Diamond syndrome is affected has received relatively little attention compared to the large number of studies that have investigated the physiological and biomolecular characteristics of this clinical condition.The objectives of this doctoral work were multiple: first, to (i) characterize the impact of the SBDS mutation and Shwachman-Diamond syndrome on intellectual and cognitive functions; and (ii) to develop a differential diagnosis method to discriminate Shwachman-Diamond syndrome from other neurodevelopmental pathologies.The methodological approach adopted throughout the project was based on multidimensional analyses, first of all in the psychometric evaluation of cognitive functions on the intellectual, attentional-executive and social levels; but also through an ecological evaluation of pragmatic competences with the help of an original device developed specifically for the study; and also through an integrated interactive evaluation by algebraic analysis using the Topological and Kinetic model of Trognon (2TK), specifically developed in this doctoral work and applied to all the verbal materials observed during the thesis. The major originality of this work being the development of computational and algebraic tools, notably by machine-learning and deep-learning, and allowing to make use of all the collectable data in the field of human and social sciences and psychology in a combined way, in order to carry out clinical predictions or being able to be used as a dynamic tool of assistance to the clinical monitoring or the decision; and whose main strength is that all the tools developed have been tested beforehand on material from published archives, allowing us to verify that the tools developed allow (i) access to all the information highlighted in the original work and (ii) offer reading frameworks specific to the 2TK model and congruent with the models from which it originates; even before analyzing the first original data from this work.Our results suggest that Shwachman-Diamond syndrome primarily impacts the individual's integrative abilities, including difficulties in integrating local cues into a global context and selective difficulties in second-order theory of mind. More specifically, studies suggest that individuals with Shwachman-Diamond syndrome show a dissociated profile, with elementary cognitive functions (working memory, speed of information processing, first-order theory of mind) preserved; in contrast with integrated cognitive functions (perceptual reasoning, second-order theory of mind, pragmatic skills) impaired. They are thus congruent with data from the neuroscientific literature, which suggests that both computational centers of the central nervous system, the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, are affected in Shwachman-Diamond disease.Thus, these results challenge the current view of Shwachman-Diamond patients, which considered intellectual deficit as the cognitive feature of the disease. Indeed, we have shown that only integrative skills allow the diagnosis of Shwachman-Diamond disease by automated methods.
Article
Full-text available
p>The article presents an overview of the current understanding of the intellectual development of children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A review of research indicates a wide heterogeneity in the levels of intellectual development in autism (from severe intellectual disability to giftedness) and demonstrates a lack of specific cognitive and intellectual profiles. The assessment of "strengths" and "weaknesses" of individual cognitive abilities and/or subtests of the measures comes to the fore. At the same time, the incidence of ASD and intellectual disability is higher than in the general population (33% to 70% in the studies reported in this article), indicating that these conditions are comorbid. These rates vary according to the methodological design of the studies, especially the type of data used (administrative, medical, educational, etc.) and the instruments used to assess intellectual ability. For example, Wechsler tests may underestimate scores in children and adults with ASD because of the large number of verbal instructions that are difficult for people with severe communication difficulties. Comprehensive nonverbal intelligence tests (e.g., Leiter-3 or UNIT-2) are the most appropriate methods. Assessing the level of intellectual ability in people with autism spectrum disorders in Russia is complicated by the existing deficit of methods, the elimination of which is an important task that researchers face.</p
Article
هدفت الدراسة الراهنة إلى التعرف على القدرة على إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية، وعمه المشاعر، ومدى تأثير اضطراب إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية على حدوث عمه المشاعر لدى الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية مقارنة بالأطفال الأسوياء في المرحلة العمرية نفسها، كما هدفت إلى الكشف عن طبيعة العلاقة بين إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية، وعمه المشاعر (الألكسيثيميا) لدى الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية، واعتمدت الدراسة على المنهج الوصفي الارتباطي المقارن، وتكونت عينة الدراسة من 30 طفلًا من ذوي الإعاقة العقلية (15 ذكور، 15 أنثى)، بمتوسط 9,80، وانحراف معياري2,041، و30 طفلًا من الأسوياء (18 ذكور، 12 أنثى) بمتوسط 9,63، وانحراف معياري 1,959، واستخدم مقياس ستانفورد بينية للذكاء الصورة الخامسة، واختبار إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية (إعداد أحمد عمرو عبدالله)، واختبار عمه المشاعر للأطفال من إعداد الباحث، وأشارت نتائج الدراسة إلى أن الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية يعانون من صعوبة في إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية مقارنة بالأسوياء، كما لم تجد النتائج أي فروق بين الذكور والاناث من الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية في إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية، كما أظهرت النتائج أن الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية يعانون من عمه المشاعر مقارنة بالأطفال الأسوياء، ووجدت أيضًا أن هناك علاقة إيجابية عكسية، وتأثير كبير بين اضطراب إدراك التعبيرات الوجهية وعمه المشاعر لدى الأطفال ذوي الإعاقة العقلية. واستنادًا على الإطار النظري، ونتائج الدراسات السابقة، ونتائج الدراسة الحالية تم تقديم بعض التوصيات، والبحوث المقترحة.
Article
Full-text available
One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by pretense. If, as generally assumed, the child is just beginning to construct a system for internally representing such knowledge, why is this system of representation not undermined by its use in both comprehending and producing pretense? In this article I present a theoretical analysis of the representational mechanism underlying this ability. This mechanism extends the power of the infant's existing capacity for (primary) representation, creating a capacity for metarepresentation. It is this, developing toward the end of infancy, that underlies the child's new abilities to pretend and to understand pretense in others. There is a striking isomorphism between the three fundamental forms of pretend play and three crucial logical properties of mental state expressions in language. This isomorphism points to a common underlying form of internal representation that is here called metarepresentation. A performance model, the decoupler, is outlined embodying ideas about how an infant might compute the complex function postulated to underlie pretend play. This model also reveals pretense as an early manifestation of the ability to understand mental states. Aspects of later preschool development, both normal and abnormal, are discussed in the light of the new model. This theory begins the task of characterizing the specific innate basis of our commonsense "theory of mind.".
Article
Full-text available
Two cognitive anomalies have been found in autism: a superiority on the Embedded Figures Task and a deficit in "theory of mind." Using adult-level versions of these tasks, the present study investigated if parents of children with Asperger Syndrome might show a mild variant of these anomalies, as might be predicted from a genetic hypothesis. Significant differences were found on both measures. Parents were significantly faster than controls on the Embedded Figures Task and slightly but significantly less accurate at interpreting photographs of the eye region of the face in terms of mental states. The results are discussed in terms of the broader cognitive phenotype of Asperger Syndrome and in terms of their implications for cognitive neuroscientific theories of the condition.
Article
Article
In this study we establish that autistic children have severe and specific difficulty with understanding mental states. Even with a mental age of 7 years, these children mostly fail in tasks which are normally passed around age 3 and 4. We confirm previous results on the poor understanding of false belief but also find that autistic children's grasp of the notion of limited knowledge is grossly delayed. We rule out various other explanations for these results and further show that the autistic child's performance is not limited by failure to understand the causal notion of seeing. Likewise, memory failure cannot be blamed. Language delay can be ruled out as a cause of failure since a group of children with specific language impairment, matched for verbal mental age, performed at ceiling. We propose that autistic children are specifically impaired in their meta-representational capacity and that this impedes their construction of a ‘theory of mind’.
Article
High-ability autistic children were compared with low-ability Down's syndrome children and clinically normal preschool children on a picture sequencing task. When the sequences could be understood in terms of causal-mechanical or simply descriptive-behavioural criteria, the autistic children were at least as good as the controls and often showed superior performance. However, on sequences that evoked understanding in terms of psychological-Intentional criteria, the autistic children performed much worse than the others. This pattern was also seen in the language used by the children in narrating the stories afterwards. In contrast to the controls, the autistic children used causal and behavioural language, but hardly ever mental state language. This experiment confirms and extends a previous study of ours which also tested the hypothesis of a specific cognitive deficit which apparently prevents the development of a ‘theory of mind’ in the autistic child.
Article
In previous studies we have found that autistic children were severely impaired in conceptual role taking, that is, in their theory of mind. In this study we consider two possible precursors to this impairment, both of which are early interpersonal abilities. The first is perceptual role taking. A test of this revealed no impairment, ruling it out as related to the impairment in theory of mind. The second is pointing. This was shown to be abnormal, both in comprehension and production, relative to non-autistic controls. In particular, protodeclarative pointing was impaired whilst protoimperative pointing was not. The possibility that impaired protodeclarative pointing may be a precursor to autistic children's impaired theory of mind is discussed.
Article
To carry out his investigations, Bruner went to "the clutter of life at home," the child's own setting for learning, rather than observing children in a "contrived video laboratory." For Bruner, language is learned by using it. An central to its use are what he calls "formats," scriptlike interactions between mother and child in short, play and games. What goes on in games as rudimentary as peekaboo or hide-and-seek can tell us much about language acquisition.But what aids the aspirant speaker in his attempt to use language? To answer this, the author postulates the existence of a Language Acquisition Support System that frames the interactions between adult and child in such a way as to allow the child to proceed from learning how to refer to objects to learning to make a request of another human being. And, according to Bruner, the Language Acquisition Support System not only helps the child learn "how to say it" but also helps him to learn "what is canonical, obligatory, and valued among those to whom he says it." In short, it is a vehicle for the transmission of our culture."