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Theory of Mind (Y1) - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 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
  - - - 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
- - - - 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)
  - - - 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