11.5 social cognition: theory of mind

Key terms

Theory of mind — our personal understanding of what other people are thinking and feeling

Autism — a broad term for a wide spectrum of features. Face challenges with social interaction/ communication and repetitive/ restricted behaviours

Sally-Anne study — used to assess theory of mind. To understand the participants have to identify that sally will look for a marble in the wrong place because she does not know that Anne has moved it. Autistic children and very young autistic children find this challenging

Theory of mind

  • psychological theory that refers to the ability that each of us have to ‘mind read’ or have a theory of what others are feeling or thinking

  • Different methods are used to study ToM at different points in development

  • In toddlers - emergence of ToM can be seen by intentional reasoning research

  • 3-4 yr old - more sophisticated level of ToM, assessed using false belief tasks

  • Older children and adults - advanced ToM has been tested with the eyes task, judging complex emotions by facial expressions

Intentional reasoning in toddlers

  • Meltzoff provided evidence to show that toddlers around 18 months have an understanding of adult intentions

  • They observed adults placing beads into a jar, in the experimental condition the adults appeared to struggle and some beads fell outside of the jar. In the control condition they did it successfully

  • Found children all successfully placed the beads in the jar, this suggests they were imitating what the adult intended to do rather than what they actually did

  • Shows they have a simple theory of mind

False belief tasks

  • developed in order to test whether children can understand that people can believe something that’s not true

  • Wimmer and Perner told 3-4 year olds a story in which Maxi left his chocolate in a blue cupboard and then went to the playground

  • Then maxis mother used some of the chocolate in her cooking and placed the remainder in the green cupboard

  • Children asked where Maxi would look for his chocolate, most 3 year olds said the green cupboard. Assuming he knows what they know

  • However most 4 year olds said the blue cupboard, suggests that theory of mind becomes more advanced around age 4

Sally-Anne study

  • Aim - to explore the links between ToM and autism

  • Procedure - sally-Anne task was given individually to 20 autistic children, 27 non-autistic children and 14 children with Down syndrome (as control groups)

  • Children were told a story involving two dolls. Sally places a marble in her basket but when sally is not looking Anne moves the marble to her box. They are asked where sally will look for her marble

  • Findings - 85% of children in the central groups correctly identified where sally would look for her marble. Only 20% of the autistic children could answer correctly. Those under 4 also struggled. Shows that autism involves a ToM deficit.

Evaluation

False belief tasks

  • one limitation is the reliance of false belief tasks, such as the sally anne task

  • However false belief tasks have serous problems of validity

  • This is because it requires other cognitive abilities such as visual memory. Also some children can pretend play (which requires theory of mind) but can’t complete false belief tasks

  • So it may not be really be measuring theory of mind

Theory of mind vs perspective taking

  • fail to distinguish them

  • So we may be measuring perspective taking rather than theory of mind. E.g the sally Anne study, the child might be switching perspective between sally and Anne

  • So lacks validity

Real world application

  • application to understanding autism

  • Tests to assess theory of mind are challenging for autistic people because they may not fully understand what others are thinking

  • This explains why some autistic people may find social interaction difficult

Counterpoint — not every autistic person experiences theory of mind issues so it may not be applicable to everyone. Theory of mind problems aren’t limited to autistic people and doesnt explain the cognitive strengths of autistic people. So there are other factors and the association isnt very strong

Nature and nurture

  • Perner suggests that theory of mind is an innate ability which develops alongside other cognitive abilities (nature)

  • Liu has found a similar pattern of development of theory of mind in different cultures, so its cross cultural

  • However Astington suggests a more vygotskian explanation, suggests theory of mind develops due to our interactions with others and gradually the concept is internalised (nurture)