theory of mind

• theory of mind - our ability to personally understand what others are thinking and feeling

  • develops around age 4
• researching theory of mind

  theory of mind is researched differently at different ages

  • toddlers - intentional reasoning tasks (meltzoff)
  • children - false belief tasks - sally-anne study (baron-cohen and wimmer + perner)
  • teenagers - the eyes task (baron-cohen)
• intentional reasoning tasks

  meltzoff - toddlers observed adults attempting to put beads in a jar and were then asked to replicate the action

  • experimental - adults struggled and some beads fell out of the jar
  • control - adults successfully put beads in the jar

  meltzoff found there was no significant difference between the two conditions and all toddlers replicated the task by successfully putting beads in the jar, which led to the conclusion that toddler's copied adults intentions rather than their actions so had a simple theory of mind
• false belief tasks

  wimmer + perner - measures children's ability to understand that others will believe something incorrect when the child knows the correct answer

  • maxi left chocolate in the blue cupboard and while he was playing his mum moved it to the green cupboard. where would maxi look for the chocolate when he came back?

  3 year olds answer the green cupboard as they assume maxi knows it has been moved because they have that knowledge, whereas 4 year olds answer blue cupboard which shows they have theory of mind
• autism - umbrella term for a spectrum of disorders with general impairments in empathy, social communication and socia imagination
• autism and false belief tasks

  baron-cohen -investigated autism and theory of mind using the sally-anne task

  • 20 autistic children and 14 children with down's matched for verbal mental age
  • sally puts a marble in a basket and then while sally is away anne moves the marble to a box. where will sally look for the marble?

  only 4 autistic children gave the correct answer vs most children with down's and the findings were independent of general intelligence which shows autistic people have deficits in theory of mind
• explaining autism

  baron-cohen believed theory of mind offered a complete explanation for autism as they were unable to understand other people's states of mind - the mind-blindness hypothesis
• issues with false belief tasks

  • bloom + german - false belief tasks rely on other cognitive skills eg. memory
  • when given memory cues autistic people performed better in the sally-anne task
  • bloom + german - autistic people still engage in pretend play which requires theory of mind but still do poorly on false belief tasks
  • may measure perspective-taking rather than theory of mind so other explanations can't be ruled out
• real life application

  • sally-anne method is commonly used to diagnose children with autism and baron-cohen's research greatly increased the understanding of autistic people, especially considering the stigma at the time
  • HOWEVER it isn't a complete explanation as not every autistic person has theory of mind deficits and it is unable to explain positive parts of diagnosis eg. savant syndrome or special interests
• issues with the eyes task

  the eyes task is artificial and reductionist as in real life we make conclusions based on the whole face rather than just the eyes

  • lacks ecological validity