Week 8 - Theory of mind

Theory of Mind (ToM)

The attribution of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions) to oneself and others (Premack & Woodruff, 1978).

Mindreading

The understanding of mental states to explain observable events (actions) by inferring unobservable entities (e.g., beliefs, desires).

Understanding Others’ Mental States

Involves recognizing that others’ mental states may differ from one’s own and may not align with reality (e.g., false beliefs, unfulfilled attempts).

Interpreting Behaviour

The ability to make sense of others' behaviour by determining their thoughts, desires, and intentions.

Representational Understanding of Mind

The capacity to comprehend that the mind can hold representations of reality.

Importance of ToM

Enables social behaviours like lying by manipulating representational understanding, and contributes to guessing, empathy, role-playing, pretend play, humour & sarcasm, making predictions, jokes & riddles.

Child Social Cognition Questions

Involves understanding the development stages of ToM and the underlying mechanisms.

Developmental Stages of ToM (Gopnik, Slaughter & Meltzoff, 1994)

1. Before 18 months: No understanding that others have different perspectives, 2. 18 months–2 years: Basic understanding of perception and desire, 3. 3 years: Recognition that others’ thoughts predict actions, 4. 4+ years: Understanding of false beliefs and ability to hold multiple mental representations.

Mind Understanding in Infancy (18 months–2 years)

Talk about past/out-of-sight events (Gopnik, 1993), engage in pretend play (Leslie, 1988), distinguish intentional and unintentional actions (Gopnik, 1982), know the difference between personal desires and others’ desires.

Mind Understanding in Children (3 years+)

Differentiate real vs. mental entities (Wellman & Estes, 1986), predict actions based on beliefs, unless conflicting with their knowledge (Pillow, 1989; Wellman, 1990).

Understanding of Others’ Beliefs

Begins at 3 years with explanations of others’ behaviour based on beliefs (Wellman & Bartsch, 1988). Pass puppy test but not false belief tests.

Development of mind understanding in typical children (4 years+)

Can understand knowledge is mediated by belief, someone can believe something that isn’t true due to holding a false belief, can hold two representations in the mind at once, can understand that there can be a difference between what something looks like and what it actually is, and that different people may represent the world differently, they may have different beliefs to you.

False Belief Tasks

Unexpected Transfer Test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) (can pass at 4 if language is more simple), Sally-Anne Task (Frith, 1989) (3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass), Deceptive Box Test (Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987; Gopnik & Astington, 1988) (3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass), Appearance-Reality Tasks (Flavell, 1986) (3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass).

Evidence Supporting ToM

Cross-cultural studies (Avis & Harris, 1991) those under 5 failed, those over passed, Meta-analysis (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) younger than 3 ½ below chose incorrectly, 3 ½ to 4 at chance, and above 4 above chance so chose correctly.

Autism and ToM Challenges

Autistic children struggle with false belief tasks but succeed in non-mental state-dependent tasks (Leslie & Thaiss, 1992).

Traditional Theories of ToM Development

Representational/Cognitive Deficit Theory: Radical shift in thought processes is required for ToM (Perner, 1991, 1992), Theory Theory (TToM): ToM develops through hypothesis testing using their general intellectual capacities to develop a common sense theory of mental states (Wellman, 1990; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992), Modularity Thesis (ToMM): An innate mechanism aids in understanding mental states (Leslie, 1989; Baron-Cohen, 1995).

Theory-theory of mind (TToM)

Development of a Theory of Mind requires: Innate starting theory, Innate general theory-forming capacity, Data from the environment. Autism may involve an impairment in either or both of the innate mechanisms. Born with intentionality detector (ID) (not affected in autism) and eye direction detector (EDD), They share a shared attention mechanism (SAM) which may be where there are issues in people with autism as it requires the ability to triangulate different representations, may have a problem with ToMM – SAM may feed into this.

Critique of Cognitive Deficit Theories

Over-reliance on false belief tasks, which are flawed and simplistic (Lewis & Osborne, 1990), naturalistic studies show ToM development starts earlier (Dunn, 1988).

Neurodiversity Paradigm (Pellicano & Den Houting, 2022)

Moves away from framing autism as deficits to embracing capabilities and relational paradigms, highlights contextual and intersectional factors shaping autistic identities, promotes autistic involvement in research for meaningful change.

External vs. Internal Manifestations of Autism

Calls for more focus on phenomenology over external symptoms.

Gender and Autism (Farahar & Foster, 2021)

Skewed male bias in research and diagnosis due to myths like "extreme male brain", challenges in using binaries like male/female and high/low functioning.