theory of mind

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intro Theory of mind: according to (Baron and Cohen 2001) theory of mind, refers to the ability to infer a full range of metal states such as beliefs, desires and intentions to one self and to others.It is e believed that as children mature they are able to acknowledge that what they think,believe and know may be different to what others do. As well as gaining the abilities to recognise that this mental states can be manifested in our behaviour.

A conventional way, in which theory of mind is studied is with the use of false belief tasks.This is argued to be a clear test of a representational theory of mind because in order to pass ,children must be able to reason about other's beliefs as separate and distinct in content from reality and acknowledge that people's differing mental states can lead to false beliefs about the world.

A commonly used false belief task is the sally-Anne test developed by Wimmer and Perner (1983) This is used to evaluate whether a child has already Acquired ( ToM) . For this task, the child is presented with a fictitious scenario in which two dolls are introduced; sally and Anne. The child is explained that as sally leaves the room, Anne moves sally's marbles from sally's basket in to her own basket. The child ,is then asked where sally will look for her marbles upon her return?

In order to pass the test , The child must take sally's mindset and choose sally's basket, Therefore implying that he/she is aware that sally mental representations of reality can vary from reality and from his own.

It has been found that 3 years old and below typically fail this task, that is, they have not yet acquired theory of mind so predict that the first character will look where the object truly .Then sometime

between 3 and 5 years of age, children gradually come to show false belief understanding by

correctly predicting that the first character will look where she left the object originally.(Perner 1983)

why do kids fail (disadvantage)

Evidence based on observations,have found that the behavioural patters of kids as young as three years old are able to able to reflect a representational understanding of others’ minds. This behaviours include lying and teasing (Moses & Chandler, 1992) .Therefore it is argued that Theory of mind emerges at a very early stage of a child's development yet it is not until they acquire expertise in other cognitive domains that hey are able to express it in a way that can be empirically tested.To test this argument, Replications of the false belief test have been conducted and modified so that the complexity of the language used cannot become an extraneous variable .Lewis and Doherty 1991 modified the false belief task

so as to make it simpler for instance, by making the questions simpler, more

specific, and more pragmatically natural . for example by changing the wording to where would sally look first , With this modifications kids at often passed at 3 years old.

On one hand some argue that the false belief task is not an accurate way of testing ToM .On the premise that children often fail the false belief tasks, not because they lack a conceptual

understanding of representational mental states, but rather because false belief tasks are too

complex, unnatural, and rely on cognitive capacities such as language, working memory, and executive control).This is because the child not only has to understand the verbal instructions bust also remember names and the sequence of the event. (Moses & Chandler, 1992)

:( Slaughter, 1998 , Evidence against the false belief task actually measuring beliefs because kids also failed the false photograph task where there is no false belief employed. 7

http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5302&context=etd

n. This

appreciation of alternate perspectives is crucial for successful social interaction and

communication. It underlies the ability to comprehend and predict the behavior of other

people, and to interpret the actions of others as meaningful and intentional. Wellman and Wolley .

mind impairment has been

implicated as a core deficit in autism, and the social-communicative difficulties indicative

of autism have generally been ascribed to theory of mind impairment. These include

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poor social judgment, general paucity of social interaction, emotional indifference, poor

conversational pragmatic skills, and difficulty comprehending abstract, non-literal

language (Baron-Cohen & Ring, 1994).

The false belief task has been widely used to study autism Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985 conducted the false belief task and demonstrated that autistic individuals show a

special impairment on this task, more so than normal and retarded children of the

same mental age.Researchers who study the relationship between autism and theory of mind attempt to explain the connection in a variety of ways. One account assumes that theory of mind plays a role in the attribution of mental states to others and in childhood pretend play.This might explain why individuals with autism show extreme deficits in both theory of mind and pretend play. an alternative explanation for this link is social-affective justification by Hobson which suggests that a person with autism deficits in theory of mind result from a distortion in understanding and responding to emotions. He suggests that typically developing human beings, unlike individuals with autism, are born with a set of skills (such as social referencing ability) that later lets them comprehend and react to other people’s feelings. Finally an explanation is Other scholars emphasize that autism involves a specific developmental delay, so that children with the impairment vary in their deficiencies, because they experience difficulty in different stages of growth. Very early setbacks can alter proper advancement of joint-attention behaviours, which may lead to a failure to form a full theory of mind.

Before they had acquired the language of mental states, did participants really fail to understand and interpret thoughts and beliefs in other people? To address this question, other kinds of studies that use implicit methods for testing false-belief understanding are needed.

One example of such a task uses eye tracking to see if children who do not pass classic false belief-tasks anticipate with their eyes where the person should look for the object. The first study to use this method found that toddlers look at the correct location while still failing to give the right verbal answer More recently, researchers have adapted these methods to probe implicit understanding of belief in even younger toddlers.