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Developmental - Theory of Mind (Y1) - Coggle Diagram
Developmental - Theory of Mind (Y1)
Theory of mind
The attribution of mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs and desires) to others and the self - Premack and Woodruff (1978)
Understanding of mental states - mindreading - allows us to explain observable events (actions) by inferring unobservable entities (beliefs, desires etc)
Also involves understanding that others mental states may differ from one's own and from reality, such a false beliefs and unfulfilled attempts
We make sense of others behaviour by figuring out why they are behaving the way they are, and by figuring out what they're thinking, want and their intentions
It is a representational understanding of the mind - i m our own mind, we represent a situation that does not always reflect reality, even if we think it does
it is important to helping us understand that others have different perceptions and understanding, allowing us to interact with and understand others
Allows for role playing, narratives, explanations, descriptions, persuasion, pretend play, humour and sarcasm, jokes and riddles, predictions, lying, enriched conversations, making inferences, discussing emotions and opinions, guessing and empathy
Two key questions in understanding children's theory of mind:
-> What changes take place in the child's social cognition?
-> How do these changes come about?
Gopnik - Children as young as 18 months old cannot understand conceptual perspective taking and beliefs about the world - broccoli and crackers test, in which they gave the food they preferred to the researcher, expecting them to have the same desires
Children at about 4 years old pass false belief tests - they understand that their interpretation of the world does not always match the world they interact with
Children at this age do not have full understanding of how one object can have multiple representations in different perspectives (goose and rabbit image) and have trouble switching between the two - this develops around 5-6 years old
At age of 7, children understand long lasting personality characteristics, and thus they understand emotional perspective taking - understand underlying traits
Sally-Anne dolls playing on diving board and bicycle - 4 year olds state the dolls going on bikes or diving boards more or less due to age, whereas 6 years olds attribute it to bravery - they have the same response even if task is changed to going on diving boards and not going on bikes for both dolls
They start with a basic theory, and experience builds on this with ideas such as perceptions, beliefs, traits, goals etc - children have a theoretical framework, and they create different theories of states of mind to understand others
They make sense of mental states as they get older, as they are only born with the understanding that differentness exist - they will gradually discover morals, deception and other things
Development of theory of mind
Gopnik, Slaughter and Meltzoff (1994) - Conceptual changes in development of ToM:
Before 18 months - cannot understand people have different perspectives to then
18 months - 2 years - development of a form of understanding of perception and desire; can understand people have a range of desires that do not always match theirs
Can talk about past events and things out of sight (Gopnik, 1993)
Engage in pretend play (Leslie, 1988) - shoe can be a boat, banana can be a phone
Can distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions (Gopnik, 1982)
Know the difference between what they want and what other people want
Children understand desires before they understand beliefs
Three years - development of more complex understanding of desires and perspectives - understand that what someone thinks can predict what they do and what they like etc
Can distinguish between real and mental entities (Wellman and Estes, 1986)
Can predict a person's actions based on what a person thinks (as long as this does not conflict with what the child knows to be the case)
More explicit understanding of the link between perception and knowledge (Pillow, 1989 and Wellman, 1990)
Understanding of others beliefs:
Beliefs - children begin to explain other's behaviours in terms of their beliefs from the age of 3 onwards
however, 3 year olds do badly on false belief tests - if they are told something is somewhere, they do not understand how someone who thinks it is elsewhere will look where they think it is
4+ years - can understand that someone can have a different belief to them and thatthis can be a misrepresentation of reality - false belief
Children come to be able to hold multiple representations and to understand ambiguous figures, and that individuals develop their own theories of minds and perspectives on situations
Can understand that 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
Different people may represent the world differently - they may have different beliefs to you
Theory of mind research - false belief tasks
The unexpected transfer test - Maxi task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983; Cowie, Read Smith and Blades, 2011) - chocolate moved from green to blue cupboard by Maxi's mum, do not understand Maxi will still look in green cupboard as they do not understand false beliefs
Sally-Anne task is a more standardised example - Frith, 1989
3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass - 4 year olds mediate the belief of Maxi and Sally by understanding the knowledge they have
Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985) - Autistic children lack theory of mind, and thus are unable to compute beliefs and pass them onto others in order to predict behaviour
Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm, using normal children and a group with Down Syndrome as controls
Although mental age of autistic children was higher than controls, only they failed to compute beliefs of others, a dysfunction unique to autism
Failure on Sally-Anne test compared to all controls who answered correctly - over pruned medial prefrontal cortex
Autistic children who do not fail this task engage in pretend play to understand perspective - they show a different pattern of social impairment
Conceptual perspective taking is what requires theory of mind and therefore is what autistic children struggle with - however, they do succeed at traditional perspective taking tasks which only have visuo-spatial skills employed
Perceptual issues are distinct from attributed higher order mental states (Hobson, 1984)
The Deceptive Box Test - Perner, Leekham and Wimmer, 1987; Gopnik and Astington, 1988, 2000)
3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass
Crayon box filled with candles - believe new person will expect candles, not crayons
Appearance-Reality Test - The rock/sponge experiment (Flavell, 1986, 1999; Flavell, Flavell and Green 1983)
3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass
Children discover that what looked like a rock is actually a sponge - 3 year olds say it looks like a sponge after realising it is, whereas 4 year olds state it is still appearing as a rock despite being a sponge
Age-related conceptual difficulties
They understand that it looks like a rock but is a sponge, whereas 3 year olds cannot hold both ideas and so think it looks like a sponge because it is one
False belief test - the Smarties test - deceptive box paradigm - Perner, Leekham and Wimmer (1987)
Tests self and other - self and other answers are related (Gopni and Astington (1988)
Control questions of what is really in the box - is it smarties or pencils
3 year olds fail by answering pencils, as they do not understand holding false beliefs
4 year olds pass by saying smarties
Theory of mind test success increases with age
Evidence to support ToM
Cross cultural studies - Avis and Harris (1991) - Baka tribe of pygmies in an unexpected transfer test, where those below the age of 5 fail and those over 5 pass - age could be due to scientific understanding in these cultures (confounding variable)
Meta-analysis on over 100 studies using the standard verbal tests (Wellman, Cross and Watson, 2001) - those younger than 3 1/2 years choose incorrectly, 31/2 - 4 years had mixed results (critical period for false belief?) and 4 year olds passed
False belief theory is the crux of theory of the mind - appears to be a universal part of development
Children age 3 tend to fail false belief tasks, with 4 year olds passing - once an individual can acknowledge false belief, they do not regress and start failing tasks
Children who pass on false belief tasks often pass others
Autistic children have problems passing false belief tasks
Achievement of theory of mind
There may be implicit understanding false beliefs in 2-3 year olds, Clements and Perner (1994) found that unexpected transfer test that despite stating the incorrect box, they still actually searched the correct box
Shows implicit appropriate understanding of false belief, but not conscious explanation of it from as young as 1 year
The theory of mind is linked to language development, and so explicit understanding of theory of mind could be directly linked to this (Milligan et al, 2007)
-> This is also supported by children with hearing impairments and therefore delayed language development struggling on false belief tests at age of 4 (Schick et al, 2007)
-> Meins et al, 2006 - mothers who discussed mental states when interacting with children as early as 6 months performed better on false belief tasks at the age of 4 years
-> Children are more likely to talk about thoughts and beliefs with siblings and friends - increases in peer interaction between 2-4 years old and interacting with older children improves theory of mind (Dunn, 1999)
Wang and Su (2009) - 4 year olds who were taught in classes with mixed ages had a better understanding of false belief
Lewis et al, 2006 - those who were raised in extended families in the Mediterranean performed better on false belief tasks by the age of 4
Theory of mind after the age of 4
Children develop emotional understanding - Harris (1989) - 5 year olds able to correctly predict emotions, 4 year olds can only understand the false belief, but not that the expectation of the object can bring join - expected sadness at milk instead of coke, 5 year olds correctly predicted that seeing the coke can would cause happiness
Adults able to detect surprise at realising coke was milk - surprise reactions only achieved after false belief at 5 year olds
Also aware of deception after false belief realised - Peskin (1992) - 5 year olds could deceive
As children age, they can develop second and third order theories of mind about beliefs - a false belief task like the Sally-Anne task involves a first order belief
Second order belief - someone else can have beliefs about a third person
4 year olds able to identify second order beliefs - Sullivan et al, 1994
Carpendale and Chandler, 1996
-> 5-8 year olds presented with a false belief task based on Maxi task, and then a second task with an ambigious drawing (duck or rabbit)
-> Children could recognise both - introduced puppet Ann, and were asked what Ann would see if she was shown the image
-> Most 5 year olds unable to identify what Ann would see; this improved with age, but even some 8 year olds still struggled with identifying what Ann would see
It is a while before they can interpret all complex social scenarios
Autism Spectrum disorders and theory of the mind
Social difficulties, communication difficulties and narrow/restricted interests:
Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Smith - Sally-Anne task
DSM-V conceptual framework
Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985) - Does the autistic child have a theory of mind?
Compared to typically developing and Down Syndrome controls, they perform significantly worse on theory of mind tests
Do children with autism lack understanding of other's minds?
Kanner (1943) - autistic aloneness; child's inability to relate to others and desire for sameness
Also struggle with language - good vocabulary but may use meaningless language or demonstrate echolalia
Lack spontaneous activity, have repetitive behaviours, restricted interests and sometimes have an obsessive interest in an obscure activity
Over sensitive to particular stimuli
Frith, 2003 - autistic children show islets of ability - in contrast to generally poor performance in some areas, in others they have better than typical performance (Grandin's autistic minds)
Changing the way we label autism can impact the amount of people diagnosed, the comparability of samples in studies before and after a change and the reliability of diagnostic criteria - the expansion to an idea of a spectrum has changed diagnostic criteria and impacted availability of treatments and resources
Leslie and Thaiss (1992) - domain specificity in the representations autistic children understand; mental representation socially is impaired, but non mental representations are not
Baron-Cohen et al, 1986 - ASD children also struggle with other false belief stories - mechanical (no people), behavioural (people but do not need to understand their thinking) and mentalistic (people whose beliefs have to be understood)
Children with ASD could correctly order events in the mechanical and behavioural conditions, but not the mentalistic
Sodian and Frith, 1992 - those with ASD struggle with deception as they do not understand false belief
Sweet in a box, told about a robber- told that robber was lazy so that he would not steal it if the box was locked
In one condition, they were given a key - sabotage condition impacting behaviour - all of the children sabotaged
In another condition, they were given no key, but the robber asked if the box was locked or not - ASD children failed this task, showing that they cannot manipulate the beliefs of others
Leslie and Thaiss (1992) - deficit in understanding mental representations, particularly thoughts and beliefs of others, but can understand other representations
Leslie and Thaiss (1992) - Children with autism pass the false photograph task (out of date) - same structure and cognitive demands on working memory and the ability to inhibit reality oriented responses, such as pointing to the place where the object really is, but does not examine mental states
Asked child to take a picture of a bedroom with cat on a chair, experimenter then moves the cat from chair to bed and asks where the cat is in the photograph- autistic children correctly identify it to be on the chair
They fail on false belief, but pass on a reality perception task of visual-spatial capacity
Typicals show opposite trend - they understand they held a false belief but cannot examine the perspective taking
Does autism impact the order of Piaget's cognitive development? -
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01531710
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23083739
How do changes in social understanding happen - traditional theories
Representational / cognitive deficit theories - Perner 1991, 1992, Gopnik and Astington (1988), Baron-Cohen, 1997 and Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985)
Dominated ToM research for many years
ToM is not acquired until there is a radical shift in our thought processes - metarepresentation
ToM illustrates a stage like qualitative change in thought processes
Children below 4 years of age do not have Theory of Mind
Two influential cognitive deficit theories - Theory theory (TToM) and Modularity thesis (ToMM)
Theory theory - TToM; a young child uses their general intellectual capacities to develop a common sense theory of mental states, as the scientist does by examining evidence and testing hypotheses (Perner, 1991, Wellman, 1990, Gopnik and Wellman, 1991) - similarity to Piaget
Development of theory of mind requires - innate starting theory, innate general theory forming capacity and data from the environment
Autism may involve an impairment in either or both innate mechanisms
Modularity thesis - ToMM; evolution has equipped the brain with a theory of mind mechanism that helps the child to attend to the invisible states of other people (Leslie, 1989, Baron-Cohen, 1995)
Baron-Cohen - mind reading system, cognitive mechanisms involved in understanding
-> Stimuli with self propulsion and direction (ID) leads to dyadic representations of desires and goals - intentionality detector
-> Eye-like stimuli (EDD) creates dyadic representations of sight - eye direction detector
EDD and ID lead to SAM of triadic representations (understanding people are looking at the same thing as you, but interpreting it differently - shared representations)
SAM (shared attention mechanisms)
-> ToMM - knowledge of the mental, stored and used as a theory and full range of mental state concepts, expressed in M-Representations -> meta-representational/propositional
Dyadic are intact, triadic and modulatiry are not
Theories about the development of understanding the mind - Wellman, 1990
2 year olds have desire psychology - assume desire influences behaviour
3 year olds have belief-desire psychology
4 year olds adopt a theory that includes the crucial realisation that beliefs are interpretations which becomes theory of mind
Follow a scientific method of finding new situations which falsify a previous theory and thus create a new theory of mind
Leslie (1987) - metarepresentations are secondary representations of objects - a banana being a food is a primary representation, but it's metarepresentation is a telephone
With these, they can read each other's mind and behaviour
Harris (1989) - simulation - know about own emotions and have ability to pretend, and with this they can project emotions onto others and so they can then project these onto others to figure out their emotions, beliefs, desires and behaviours
Simulation can happen as young as 3
Extreme male brain theory - Baron-Cohen - male brains, genes and cultures
Girls develop language faster than boys, and the areas of the brain involved in language is larger than in girls
Amygdala - larger in boys, but girls develop faster in their understanding of others with better empathy and this could relate to amygdala size
Do adults and children with autism have a male brain - is the structure of the autistic brain an extreme of the typical male brain, explaining higher prevalence in men
Autistic children have faster brain development in early years, or overgrowth, with some structures such as amygdala size matching the male brain
Corpus callosum, which is larger in females, is even smaller in autistic children
Autistic children match an extreme male profile - if boys develop slower in terms of social interaction and language, then autistic children as an extreme of this have less emotional control, and develop even slower
Evolution - the different niches occupied by men and women in our ancestry has led to genes leading to differing brain development, as typical solitary male role leads to social underdevelopment in comparison to girls, making autism a mutation of this adaptation (brain tissue better spent elsewhere)
Biology and culture create sex differences by interacting with one another
Autistic brain is not intended to function as a social brain in society
Neurodiversity paradigm
Pellicano & den Houting (2022) - review of field of autism science, framing of concept of autism within prevailing medical paradigm has led to an over focus on deficits, narrow perspectives that exclude autistic priorities and perspectives and neglect of the systems and contexts within which autistic people develop and function
Growing call from autistic community and non-autistic researchers for an alternative neurodiversity paradigm that addresses three key needs
Need to transcend autism framing from a set of symptoms to be fixed in favour of capability approaches acknowledging autistic people as individuals who have meaningful and purposeful lives
Need to shift focus to individuals to embrace relational paradigms recognising contexxtual, environmental and intersectional factors that shape autistic identities and experience
Need to engage autistic people themselves in co producing meaningful research that identifies community priorities and brings about real-world change
External v internal manifestations - autism is typically characterised by external manifestations i.e. symptoms in diagnostic category rather than by experienced phenomenology
This has profound consequences for research and practice
Recent calls for more phenomenological work with rise of self-advocacy (Pellicano and den Houting, 2022) in the context of the neurodiversity paradigm
more modern conceptualisations of the 'spectrum' - three dimensional box of autistic space - inclusion of all autistic people throughout the lifetime in terms of the presence of observable and unobservable symptoms
Green et al, 2022 - phenomenological experience of being autistic - the human spectrum:
The idea that all experiences are individual differences on one human spectrum
Sociality (autistic) participant at neurotypical end converges intuitively and effortlessly with social norms and conventions, but for autistic participants this was associated with something requiring expenditure of intentional energy to create occasions of togetherness - pre-empt an action to be involved socially, rather than doing it naturally
Murray et al, 2022 - expansion of the human spectrum -
the sensory experience for autistic participants is much more acute, difficult to integrate and often associated with abrupt loss of self-environment flow, but this is not always a negative experience
Themes of commonality - states of mind, emotionality and trust (same between A and NT)
Themes of differences - sensorium and social joining (distinguished autistic and NT experiences)
Themes of overlap - interest and attention - different experiences
Conclusion - the human spectrum - a phenomenological enquiry within neurodiversity, Murray et al, 2022
Need to consider experience as individual difference within a common human spectrum
Importance of considering qualitative reports of lived experience in context, as on quantitative data derived from normatively framed settings
Way we conceptualise and research autism has profound theoretical and therapeutic consequences
Temple Grandin - importance of diverse brains in society provided by autistic individuals
Normal brain ignores the details, autistic brains do not
Spectrum - non verbal at severe end, they communication non-verbally
Grandin - thinks in pictures, but only specific memories of visual thinking
Used to design livestock facilities - was able to test run facilities in her mind, and this visual thinking was helpful to her career
Some autistic children adopt visual thinking, being able to produce perspective drawings innately - this is a different perspective on thinking, and thus is very useful in a world of typical abstract thinkers to create different ideas that can contribute massively to discoveries
Grandin had a huge ‘internet’ trunk line for graphic information going deep into her visual cortex - it was twice as big as controls, explaining her visual thinking
A lot of autistic individuals think with their visual cortex, with the areas being more heavily connected that typicals - therefore, they are able to produce specific visual tasks and stimuli Autistic mind is specialised - good at one thing, bad at another thing
Other autistic minds - pattern thinking mind
Types of minds:
Photo-realistic visual thinkers - poor at algebra (graphic designers)
Pattern thinkers - music and maths (engineers, mathematicians, scientists)
Verbal mind - poor at drawing (more abstract thinkers) - journalists and actors
Visual thinking - great insight into animal mind Categorisation of information - horses abused by rider are fine on ground but not with being ridden, horses abused by horseshoer will not be fine with vets but fine with riding
They categorise and habituate to both stimuli - animals have specific fears
Same way autistic people who are visual thinkers - they categorise information better than those who have typical brains enhancing problem solving
The world needs different kinds of minds to work together In autism, there is extra wiring in thinking and visual areas, leading to loss of social or language circuits - education should be focused on developing autistic children’s interests in careers that are not hindered by this loss
The language centres in our brains cover up the visual thinking we share with animals, and so autistic children who are non-verbal can share this characteristic with animals
Have to expand the autistic mind outside of their fixations - use the fixation to motivate learning elsewhere
We need to help students who have unique minds to be successful - mentors are essential to autistic minds being expanded
Autistic minds are an evolutionary path to advancement
How far can a deficit in understanding mental representations contribue to an explanatin of ASD
This failure to understand beliefs is not universal to those with ASD (Charman, 2000), and so any explanation based on this is weakened - they typically fail but it is not guaranteed
However, although some succeed on first order false belief tasks they rarely succeed on second order belief tasks - insecure understanding of people’s minds, and their success on first order tasks could be due to using strategies that do not include understanding mental representations (Happe, 1994)
Given that they struggle to understand independent beliefs, the beliefs of others and social interaction as lacking representations of beliefs impacts social understanding, it makes communication difficult and can lead to a confusing world, explaining the need for routine as some consistency and predictability can be maintained
Helps us to understand social impairments and has stimulated much more research into previously unrecognised aspects of the disorder, but it does not explain specific language developments such as echolalia or islets of ability
Poor performance does not indicate a deficit in the understanding of mind, but it is not a core impairment - it is a fundamental one; SAM allows understanding two people are looking at the same object, prompting understanding of perceptual mental states and desires
Children with ASD lack this
Baron-Cohen (1996) - screened 16,000 infants at the age of 18 months with 5 tests, including a shared attention test - only 12 children failed all five; when followed up at 42 months, nearly all of them had been diagnosed with ASD
Lack of SAM could explain the later deficit in their understanding of mind
Critiques of cognitive deficit theories and of theory of the mind in autism
Rely too much on false belief tasks - children misunderstand questions (Lewis and Osborne, 1990) and have difficulty understanding and integrating key elements of a story (Lewis et al, 1994) and that there is only a right or wrong in false belief tasks
Naturalistic studies suggest young children are good at ToM type tasks - ToM develops slowly over a number of years, young children do lie, tease and manipulate intentions well before age of 4
Dunn -1988 - disputes, jokes, pro-social behaviour, cooperation pretend play and conversations
Critical assessment - understanding other people does not involve theory - emerges through effectively charged engagement with other people from the beginning of life and adults and children might not need theory of mind to get on with people
Problems with autism conceptualisation - Farahar and Foster (2011)
Skewed female-male ratio within autism research, diagnosis and public understanding
Driven by myth that autism is an extreme male brain and continued gendering with the extreme female brain - misguided concentration on biological sex
Binaries used as subtypes - male v female; severe v mild, Asperger's v Autism, high v low subtypes = this is unhelpful
Misunderstanding of the spectrum as binary continuum and of Autistic development and growth
Solutions -
De-gender autism conceptualisation
More accurately represent the diversity of the autistic experience - in the past has been outsider looking in
Represent the reality of autistic development and growth across time - 1/2 of cases a subtype in childhood does not continue until later adulthood (Wodka, Mathy and Kalb, 2013)
Typical misrepresentation of the spectrum by lay persons, medical professionals and researchers
Children's knowledge of mind before about 4 years of age
Mental states in language - from about 2 years old, children start to use words that refer to internal states of mind such as perception or emotion
By the age of 3, they use cognitive terms
Shatz et al (1983) - 3 year old's use of spontaneous mental terms; to aovid instances of causal use, they focused on utterances that included a contrasting use of terms
-> Children spontaneously contrast reality and belief - 3 year olds can distinguish mental states and external reality
Wellman and Estes (1986) - 3 year olds shown two story characters and the children were told character A had a biscuit and that character B was thinking about a biscuit
-> Children asked which one of the biscuits could be touched or seen, and different stories used contrasts between physical objects and the same one being dreamed about
-> 3/4 of children's judgements accurately reflected the distinction between physical and mental entities
Relationship between seeing and knowing - from the age of 2 this is understood
Lempers et al (1977) - 2 year old effectively angle a box with a picture glued to the base of it so others could see, and moved hands from eyes so that they could see
-> By age of 3, children understood that hiding an object meant removing it from vision of another person
Masangkay et al, 1974 - used a card with a cat drawn on one side and a dog on the other, with one side facing the child and the other the experimenter - children asked what each person could see, and they could identify the experimenter saw a different animal at 3 years old
-> age of 4 - understand that views of an object are equally and completely visible to both - Masangkay et al, 1974 - turtle on shell and turtle upright; all could describe own view, but only 1/3 of three year olds could identify experimenter's view whereas all 4 year olds could
Predicting behaviour - 2 year olds predict behaviour based on desires - Wellman 1990
3 year olds predict on beliefs as well as desires - Wellman 1990 - understanding beliefs about the location of books
However, 3 year olds cannot predict a behaviour if it is based on false beliefs, only real beliefs e.g. they knew books were on the shelf, so correctly predicted when the story had the same belief which was correct
At about 4 years old, children can interpret and predict the behaviour of the people around them with a fair degree of accuracy, and during the following years they can develop more profound insights in social behaviour
Autism and sleep-impulsive behaviours - lack of inhibition and poor sleep as a result contribute to the presence of self harm behaviours