Social Cognition & Theory of Mind

• Theory of Mind

  • aims to account for social deficits in ASD (Levy, 2007; Schroeder et al., 2010)
  • ToM ability -> infer that one’s behaviour is based on their beliefs and current knowledge and not necessarily on reality, and thus, accurately predicting their behaviour (Frith & Frith, 2005; Leslie & Frith,1988)
  • relies on the ability to form second-order representations or meta-representations (Pylyshyn, 1978, as cited in Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Leslie, 1987)
  • It appears and develops from the age of 2
• Theory of Mind – False Belief

  • A child leaves the class for a while
  • Another child hides their pencil
  • The rest of the children should be able to infer that, when the first child returns he/she will not know where to look for the pencil (false belief; Frith & Frith, 2005
• Social perspective

  
• Theory of Mind tests

  
• Theory of Mind tests

  
• Second-Order False belief

  
• Reading the mind in the eyes test.. And in the voice