Theory of mind C&D Flashcards
Theory of mind
Our personal understanding of what other people are thinking and feeling
Autism
broad term for a wide range of features. Autistic people face challenges with social interaction/communication and repetitive/restrictive behaviours
Meltzoff → toddlers aged around 18 months have an understanding of adult intentions when carrying out simple actions
Intentional reasoning in toddlers
- Observed adults place beads into a jar
- Experimental condition: adults appeared to struggle and some beads fell out of the jar
- Control condition: adults placed beads successfully in the jar
- In both conditions, toddlers successfully placed beads into jar, not dropping any more beads in the experimental condition
- Thus showing that children imitate what the adults intended to do rather than what they actually did
why are false beliefs developed?
Developed in order to test whether children can understand that people believe in something that is not true.
Wimmer and Perner - false belief tasks
- Told 3-4 year olds a story where Maxi left his chocolate in a blue cupboard in the kitchen then went to the playground
- Later his mother used some of the chocolate in her cooking and left it in the green cupboard
- Children were asked where maxi would look for his chocolate when he came back
- 3 year olds incorrectly said the green cupboard
- 4 year olds correctly said the blue cupboard
What can be concluded from Wimmer and Perner’s study?
ToM becomes more advanced at 4 years old
Baren-Cohen et al - Sally-Anne study
- Children told story using Sally and Anne dolls
- Sally placed a marble in her basket
- When sally is not looking Anne moved the marble into her box
- Children must identify where sally will look for her marble
- Understanding that sally will not know that anne has moved the marble with show understanding
How did Baren-Cohen et al explore the link between false belief systems and autism?
- Sally-Anne given to 20 autistic children
- 27 non-autistic children
- 14 children with down syndrome
What did did Baren-Cohen et al find about the link between false belief systems and autism?
- 85% of children in control group correctly identified where Sally would look for her marble
- Only 4 autistic children
- Shows that autism involves a ToM deficit and this may be a complete explanation for autism
Testing older autistic children and adults
Many autistic people with no learning disabilities have problems with empathy, social communication and imagination but their language development is largely unaffected. This group could succeed on false belief tasks, so the idea that autism can be explained by ToM deficits was thrown out.
Baren-Cohen et al’s Eyes task for older children and adults
- Reading complex emotions in pictures of faces just showing a small area around the eye
- Many autistic adults without a learning disability struggled with this task
- Once again supporting that ToM deficits may be a cause of autism
false belief tasks
limitation
- Serious problems with validity (Bloom and German)
- Require other cognitive abilities like visual memory
- So failure of this task could be a memory deficit
- Some children who engage successfully in pretend play find the false beliefs task difficult
May not really measure ToM and so it lacks key evidence
Theory of mind versus perspective-taking
limitation
- Related but different cognitive abilities
- Difficult to tell which one is being measured
- Eg the beads task, the child may be imagining the task from the adult’s perspective and not actually understanding their intention
- In Sally-Anne task, children may be switching perspective between Sally and Anne
Some tasks may actually measure perspective-taking
RWA -
Understanding autism
strength
- Tests used to assess ToM are challenging for some autistic people
- Offers an explanation for why some autistic people find social interaction difficult
- It is hard to interact with someone if you dot get a sense for how they’re feeling
ToM has real-world relevance
counterpoin to RWA
limitation
- ToM does not provide a complete explanation for autism
- Not every autistic person experiences these issues
- ToM problems are not limited to autistic people (Tager-Flusberg)
- Lack of ToM cannot explain cognitive strengths of autistic people
Must be other factors involved in autism
