Development Of Theory Of Mind Throughout Life Flashcards
Adults difficulty with false belief
Mitchell et al 1996
No additional info = lower believe message higher disbelief message
Additional info = slightly lower believe message to disbelieve message
Scene 1 Kevin sees juice in the jug
Scene 2 later Rebeca states otherwise “milk in the jug”
Apperly et al 2006
Psychological science
Belief probe
Reality probe
Condition 1 - Incidental false belief task
Condition 2 - explicit belief and reality tracking
Condition 3 - explicit belief tracking
Problems with these approaches
●Failure to satisfy the ‘truth condition’ (West & Kenny, 2011)
●Inappropriate stimuli: posed, static, not caused by anything
Baron-Cohen et al 1997
Reading behind the eyes
Pillai et al (2012). PLoS One Pillai et al (2014) JADD
Natural reactions of targets Can perceivers (with and without autism) guess what happened to the targets?
Can people read the minds of those who have autism?
Edey et al (2016) used a Heider and Simmel (1944) task
Except that instead of observing these figures, people with autism were asked to manipulate the geometric figures to portray coaxing, mocking, seducing and surprising.
Edey et al (2016) method
A) Participants generated animations by manually directing triangles on a table top with magnets to represent the mental state words (coaxing, mocking, seducing and surprising). B) Edited example stimulus that was displayed to participants
as a ~30 second animation.
Edey et al 2016 results
Autism generator
Typical generator
Reading the mind that is signalled in behaviour: Facial expressions
Canweinfermentalstatesfromthefacial expressions of people with autism?
Fasoetal(2015):Participants were instructed to pose facial expressions. Those with autism were just as expressive as typically developing people, though the quality and form of their expressions might be different (Brewer et al, 2016).
Shepard et al 2016
Can typical people guess what happened to those with autism from their reactions?
Results
Joke
Waiting
Story
Compliments
Teoh et al 2017
Cognition
Do perceivers infer the target’s social context from their signalled mental state?
Targets looked at photographs that caused them to feel a positive or a negative emotion
Targets’ expressions were video recorded as they looked at the photos
These videos of target expressions were shown to perceivers
Perceivers were asked to judge whether the target was alone or accompanied
1=Notlikely…6=Verylikely
Perceivers were also asked to estimate how expressive the targets were
1 = Non-expressive … 6 = Very expressive
Teoh et al 2017
Cognition
Results
Valanides et al 2017
Are Mediterraneans better at reading minds than British people?
Targets (14 Meds, 14 Brits) thought for 30 seconds about an event in their life that caused them to feel the named emotion intensely.
Positive thoughts: Pride and Excitement
Negative thoughts: shame and guilt
Valanides et al 2017 results
Mediterraneans are better at reading minds than British people
There was no difference between Mediterranean and British targets in their level of readability
There was no own race / own group effect
Adults make systematic errors in their
Judgements of others beliefs, suggesting that the kind of bias that affects children’s judgements does not disappear at 4 years of age
