links between ASD impairments and ToM

Question 1

Baron-Cohen et al (1985)

Answer 1

Healthy children and children with Down Syndrome with matched verbal age passed the ToM task 85% of the time
80% autistic children with verbl age of 5 1/2 still failed the FBT showing that inability to understand language is not the reason why autistic children do worse on FBTs
20% autistic children still passed - this could be because they guessed or because they were high functioning
Autistic children likely have a developmental delay in ToM

Question 2

Happe (1995)

Answer 2

Normally developing children are 4 when theres a 50% chance they’ll pass a FBT
Autistic children are 9 when theres a 50% chance they’ll pass a FBT
ToM delay is likely to occur alongside a language delay

Question 3

Cheng et al (2015)

Answer 3

Decreased cortical functional connectivity in the medial temporal gyrus is related to poorer abilities to produce and understand facial expressions and social behaviour in individuals with ASD
Neuropsychological evidence for ToM impairment in social functioning in individuals with ASD

Question 4

Mazza et al (2017)

Answer 4

Conducted a mediation analysis
Found individuals with autism often had deficiencies in both ToM and social competancies
ToM is required to build social competancies and the ToM defecit in autistic individuals explains the lack of social behaviour in autistic children

Question 5

Surian et al (1996)

Answer 5

Autistic children couldnt distinguish a silly from a serious phrase but could tell an impolite form a polite phrase
Children with ASD may find some pragmatics harder to understnd than others
However, children with autism may still be taught how to be polite but not taught how to recgnise jokes

Question 6

Iao and Leekam (2014)

Answer 6

Autistic children do worse on non-verbal reality-unknown FBTs than verbal reality-known FBTs
Children with ASD most likely don’t do well on FBTs, not because of their linguistic or social deffecits but becasue they have not experienced the situation for themselves

Question 7

Schuwerk, Vuori and Sodian (2015)

Answer 7

Support for Iao and Leekam (2014)
Adults with ASD did not differ compared to neurotypicals in explicit ToM tasks - a Strange Stories Task but they were worse at the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (decreased functional connectivity - Cheng et al (2015)?)
Adults with ASD were worse at a false belief-congruent anticipatory looking task initially but were better at the task a second time around - suggests that they had to experience the situation for themselves first
Implicit ToM deficit exists to some degree in adulthood

Question 8

Peterson et al (2016)

Answer 8

No direct link between ToM and social competance but the link was mediated by language ability
Correlational evidence

Question 9

Spanoudis (2016)

Answer 9

Found that children with a specific language ipairment did worse than typically developing children on ToM tasks
Syntactic and pragmatic language defecits significantly predicted poor ToM performance
(side note from me x) - autistic children have problems with pragmatics which could explain to some degree why they struggle with FBTs

Question 10

Levis and Boucher (1988)

Answer 10

Children will engage in play if given the opportunity
They may be less likely to engage in spontaneous pretent play becasue they have smaller peer groups
Children with ASD may not engage in play so much becasue they have such narrow interests

Question 11

Chan et al (2016)

Answer 11

Support for Levis and Boucherr (1988) that children with ASD don’t engage in pretend play due to narrow interests
Children with ASD but better ToM capabilities may be more able to engage in spontaneous pretend play but having better ToM abilities does not influence levels of playfulness
Playfulness is more likely related to autistic severity

Question 12

Kang et al (2016)

Answer 12

Low ToM capabilities and high verbal abilities in autism worsened the childs ability to egage in spontaneous pretend play