Theory of minds

• What is theory of mind?

  the ability to understand that other people may have different thoughts, feelings, ideas, attitudes or knowledge to their own
• how did meltzoff provide evidence for intentional reasoning in toddlers that they have an understanding of adult

  intentions when carrying out simple actions?

  Experimental condition: Adults spilled

  beads when trying to put them in a jar

  Control condition: Adults placed beads

  successfully into the jar
• What’s the point of a false belief task?

  Designed to test whether children can understand that people can believe something that is not

  true
• What are the main 3 areas that ASD are impaired?

  empathy, social communication, social imagination
• What was the procedure of Baron-Cohen et al false belief task?

  20 high functioning autistic children ( average age 12

  years) 14 children with Down’s syndrome (average age 12,lower mental age)

  27 with no diagnosis (average age 4)The children were then asked some control questions such as "Where is the marble really? just to check they had seen what happened. Finally, they were asked the 'belief' question about where Sally thought the marble was.
• What was the findings of Baron-cohen ?

  85% of children in the control group correctly

  identified where Sally would look

  The same was true for the children with Down’s

  syndrome

  Only 20% of children in the ASD group were able

  to successfully answer this
• What was the conclusion of baron-cohen false belief tasks?

  Baron-Cohen and his colleagues suggested that

  impairments in ToM might be an explanation for

  ASD.
• What was the later research that was conducted by Baron-cohen et al?

  This considered whether high functioning individuals on the autistic spectrum might have ToM

  Adults with autism tend to pass the Sally-Anne task. Therefore, to test ToM on adults his team created a new task, called The Eyes Task.This is where participants are shown pictures of people's eyes and asked to select one of two emotions that might be represented, for example, attraction versus repulsion, or relaxed or worried etc.
• What were the eyes task findings?

  Adults on the autistic spectrum had a mean

  score of 16.3 compared to ‘normal’ participants with a mean score of 20.3 (out of

  a maximum of 25)

  The ranges of scores were fairly similar;autism range 13-23; normal range 16-25,suggesting that individuals with autism demonstrated more challenges with identifying facial emotions in other people’s eyes
• What was the conclusion from the eyes task?

  ToM deficits might be the cause of ASD
• What was the aim of Baron-Cohen et al’s sally-Anne study?

  To compare the performance of children on the autism spectrum with controls on the Sally-anne task