Theory of mind

• TOM is not a theory like Piaget’s theory but a personal theory or belief about what other people know, are feeling or thinking. It is tested via different methods depending on age.
• Intentional Reasoning

  Meltzoff allowed children to observe adults placing beads into a jar.

  • Experimental condition - adults appeared to struggle with this and dropped some of the beads outside the jar.
  • Control condition - adults successfully placed the beads into the jar.

  In both conditions toddlers successfully placed the beads in the jar, suggesting that they were imitating what the adult intended to do rather than what they actually did, demonstrating TOM.
• False Belief Task

  Wimmer and Perner told 3-4 year-olds a story in which:

  • Maxi left his chocolate in a blue cupboard in the kitchen.
  • After Maxi's mother had used some of the chocolate in her cooking she placed the remainder in a green cupboard.

  The children had to say where Maxi would look for his chocolate. Most 3-year-olds incorrectly said that Maxi would look in the green cupboard whilst most 4-year-olds correctly identified the blue cupboard, demonstrating ToM.
• Children were told a story involving two dolls, Sally and Anne.

  • Sally places a marble in her basket.
  • Sally leaves the room.
  • Anne moves the marble to her box.
  • Sally returns.
  • Where does Sally look for her marble?

  In order to understand that Sally does not know that Anne has moved the marble, a child needs an understanding of Sally's false belief about where it is.
• Cohen used the Sally-Anne task to test 20 high-functioning children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and control groups of 27 children without a diagnosis and 14 with Down syndrome. 85% of children in the control group correctly identified where Sally would look for her marble but only 20% of the children with ASD did, suggesting that ASD involves a TOM deficit.
• Older children with ASD can succeed on false belief tasks, despite problems with empathy, social communication, etc. This questions whether ASD can be explained by TOM deficit. Cohen developed the Eyes Task as a more challenging test of TOM and found that adults with high functioning ASD struggled. This supports the idea that TOM deficits might be the cause of ASD.