Theory of Mind
24 important questions on Theory of Mind
Who introduced the Theory of Mind?
- studying chimpanzees
---> can a chimp take a human actor’s desires and intentions into account in order to predict his behaviour?
What is meant by belief-desire reasoning?
- Wrong belief can lead to misguided action
- If we know a person’s belief and desire, we can predict how they will act
(helpful diagram on slide 1, p. 2 lecture slides)
What is the theory of mind hypothesis for autism?
(Baron-Cohen et al, 1985;
Baron-Cohen, 1995, Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind)
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What are the 2 false belief tasks?
---> 4 year old children can pass this (more complicated tasks = age 6-7 years can pass)
2. “Sally-Anne task” - Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith (1985) (designed to investigate autistic children i.e. does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'?)
---> they hypothesised that autistic children couldn't pass this ToM task
---> results: 20% of autistic passed, 85% of normal children passed
What are the results for Maxi, Sally-Anne and related tasks in typically developing children?
EXAMPLE - Wellman et al, 2001
Results = 20% correct at 30 months, 50% correct at 44 months
(Several factors to do with how the task is presented make a difference to age of passing, as do country of origin)
What are the results for Maxi, Sally-Anne and related tasks in children with developmental disorders?
Compared typically developing children with those with autism and Down’s Syndrome
Results:
85% of typical group
86% of Down’s Syndrome group
pass
only 20% of autism group pass (despite higher mental age) - shows ToM is a core deficit in autism ---> however, are there subgroups of autism where ToM isn't an issue?
(Meta-analysis of 40 studies comparing typical, autism, and other mental retardation (MR) (don't use MR term in essays!) (Yirmiya et al, 1998) supports that typical > MR > autism)
What is an interpretation of typical 4 year olds ability to pass ToM tests?
- Children recognise that the character’s belief is what guides his actions
---> So recognise that people’s relationship to the world is mediated by their mental representations – they act not based on how things are, but on how they think they are (Perner, 1991)
What are 3 theories that explain how children acquire ToM?
AKA “the child (as little) scientist theory”. Acquiring a TOM is analogous to a theory development in science – children collect evidence and refine their hypotheses based on this.
2. Simulation theory. e.g. Harris, 1992.
TOM depends on being able to imagine the other’s point of view – i.e. to simulate the other person’s mental states.
3. Modularity theory. e.g. Baron-Cohen, 1995.
TOM is an innate human cognitive capacity (though one that needs to mature). The “theory of mind module” can be impaired in developmental disorders
At the transitional age of around 4 years, what predicts which children will pass? (i.e. individual differences in false belief task performance)
---> Better executive function predicts passing theory of mind – in line with the requirements to select correct / inhibit incorrect response. The task is not JUST about understanding another’s mental state.
Home environment and parenting styles
E.g.
- Parents who explain and discuss vs just punish, Ruffman et al, Social Dev 1999
- Securely attached infants, Fonagy et al, Brit J Dev Psychol 1999
- Maternal “mind-mindedness”, Meins et al, Child Dev 2002
What experiment demonstrates that the presence of older siblings in the home environment can speed up children's progression from success to failure on the false belief task?
2-6 year old English and Japanese children
- those over age 3 who grew up with older siblings performed better on the false belief task than children who grew up alone or with younger siblings
(Note, children under age 3 performed poorly regardless of how many older siblings they had - the task was simply beyond their cognitive ability)
p. 269 developmental textbook
What 2 experiments demonstrates the awareness of others' perceptions, desires, and intentions?
- demonstrate a motive for infants' early pointing gestures = to inform another person of the location of an object that person is searching for
= ability to recognise the goals underlying others’ actions
(4th slide on p. 4 of notes)
2. Tomasello & Haberl (2003)
(6th slide p. 4 of notes)
What are 2 criticisms of studies that use looking time methods to measure implicit understanding of false belief tasks at 9 months to 3 years?
2. The infants may not represent false beliefs, but may just represent that the actor is ignorant of the true location*. Although given two locations an ignorant actor could be correct half the time by chance, young children expect the ignorant person to be wrong rather than at chance. This argument is made in Southgate et al, 2007 - development of an alternative measure
What experiment demonstrated an alternative looking based measure to investigate the implicit understanding of false belief at 9 months to 3 years?
Used eye tracking to record where on the screen infants looked as they watched different “false belief” (and “true belief”) scenarios
---> measuring anticipation = shows that the infant is thinking about where the actor is going to search
Results
Result: 25-month-olds’ eye movements anticipate where the actor will search, in line with understanding the actor’s false (and true) beliefs.
Good evidence that at least by 2 years, there is understanding of false beliefs.
What about role of inhibition?
What is Asperger Syndrome (AS)?
Includes impairment in social interaction, but good cognitive abilities in individuals with AS often allow them to learn and follow social norms in a deliberate manner.
e.g. Bowler, Child Dev 1995 showed AS individuals solving “theory of mind” tasks
Who used the looking method measuring anticipation in order to understand false belief in adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS)?
Results
- Adults with AS do not anticipate where the actor will search
- Unlike healthy adults and 2-year olds, adults with AS do not show “spontaneous” attribution of mental states – even though they tend (in other studies) to pass explicit tests
--> Evidence for a dissociation between implicit and explicit understanding of TOM. Explicit can be learnt / can use strategies to solve.
What is the summary of this lecture regarding the awareness of others' mental states, and implicit understanding of false belief at 2 years and below?
- Good evidence for understanding of other’s mental states (e.g. desires, intentions) below 18 months
- Evidence of knowing about what others know (eye tracking FB tasks) also below 18 months
- Evidence about predicting how others will act based on a false belief at 2 years
- This intuitive understanding of FB absent in adults with Asperger Syndrome, even though individuals with AS can do explicit FB tasks ---> dissociation between these
What are the two types of ToM? (this is just a suggestion)
2. Reflective/ explicit abilities: develop later, increase in sophistication
Who investigated ToM ability in school children aged 4 and above?
---> at around 7 to 8 years, children are able to represent and reason from 2nd order mental states e.g. X believes that Y believes that Z (look at 1st slide, 7th page)
Increasingly sophisticated reasoning about mental states requires what kind of understanding?
- Speech in which the listener is not intended to take the meaning literally – irony and metaphor (e.g. Filippova & Astington, Child Dev 2008)
- “white lies” told to protect a character’s feelings (e.g. Talwar et al, Int J Beh Dev 2007)
- Social “faux pas” (unintentionally creating hurt feelings) – e.g. Baron-Cohen et al, 1999
All these developing in the school years
Show deficits in individuals in Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism who otherwise pass the more basic 4-year-old false belief tasks (Baron-Cohen et al)
Are there cultural differences regarding ToM?
EXP: - in Baka community (hunter gatherers who live in central Africa)
---> found that by 5 years of age, most children were able to predict what an adult would find in a container that they left for a moment and that, while they were gone, had been emptied.
(these findings link with other findings that show successful performance by preschool age children in non-western communities on ToM tasks (Harris, 2006))
= cultural experiences support the ToM process
(info from p. 269 developmental textbook)
What study investigated ToM and the brain?
---> “Mirror neurons” found in monkey ventral premotor cortex
---> These neurons are active both when the monkey makes an action, and when the monkey sees someone else perform the same action.
“mirror neuron system” also mapped in humans via TMS and fMRI
An observation-execution matching mechanism by which others’ actions and intentions can be automatically understood?
(Limitation: mirror neuron tasks tend to be too simplistic)
Impaired in autism?
“broken mirrors” theory of autism, Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006
What 2 other experiments used the mirror neuron method?
Reduced activity in an area thought to be part of human “mirror neuron” system, and correlation of activity with symptom severity
2. Cattaneo et al, 2007 - Action processing (EMG measure)
What are 2 problems with the broken mirrors hypothesis?
- i.e. atypical face processing or attention to faces may contribute to different activation in MRI study
- atypical low and mid-level visual processing such as biological motion processing
2. Autistic children are not unable to imitate
- Rather, the problem is knowing when to imitate
See Southgate & Hamilton (2008). Unbroken mirrors: challenging a theory
of Autism.
What is the summary of this ToM lecture?
- “Theory of mind” concerns predicting others’ behaviour based on their mental states
- “false belief” tasks form a classic test of theory of mind – normally solved after 4 years, impaired in autism
- Important “implicit” precursors to these explicit tasks at younger ages
- TOM continues to develop in later childhood
- Outstanding questions: how do early developing / “intuitive” abilities relate to later developing “explicit”?
- More outstanding questions: is TOM processing carried out by specific brain networks, and are these atypical in autism?
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