Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 21, Issue 1, October 1985, Pages 37-46
Cognition

Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind” ?

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8Get rights and content

Abstract

We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a ‘theory of mind’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘theory’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down's syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.

Résumé

Les auteurs présentent un nouveau mod`éle de développement méta-cognitif pour prédire le déficit cognitif qui rendrait compte d'un composant essentiel du handicap social de l'enfant autiste. Une des manifestations d'une capacité de base méta-cognitive est une ‘theorie de l'esprit'. Nous avons des raisons de croire que cette théorie fait defaut chez l'enfant autiste. Celui-ci serait done incapable d'attribuer des croyances aux autres ou de prédire leur comportement. Cette hypothèse a été testée avec le paradigme de jeu des marionettes utilisé par Wimmer et Perner. Des enfants normaux et des enfants avec trisomie 21 ont servi de groupe contrôle. Bien que Page mental des enfants autistes ait été plus élevé que deux du groupe contrôle, seuls les enfants autistes Wont pu attribuer aux autres des croyances. Ainsi le dysfonctionnement prévu a pu être démontre, il s'avère indépendant du retard mental et spécifique a l'autiste.

References (41)

  • J.A. Ungerer et al.

    Symbolic play and language comprehension in autistic children

    Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry

    (1981)
  • H. Wimmer et al.

    Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception

    Cognition

    (1983)
  • American Psychiatric Association

    Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders

    (1980)
  • A.J. Attwood

    Gestures of autistic children

    (1984)
  • L. Bretherton et al.

    Early person knowledge as expressed in gestural and verbal communication: When do infants acquire a ‘theory of mind’?

  • P. Clark et al.

    Compliance and resistance in the conditioning of autistic children: an exploratory study

    Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia

    (1977)
  • P. Clark et al.

    Task difficulty and task performance in autistic children

    Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

    (1979)
  • T.E. Coggins et al.

    Examining early intentional communication in Down's Syndrome and nonretarded children

    British Journal of Disorders in Communication

    (1983)
  • M.V. Cox

    Visual perspective-taking in children

  • M.K. DeMyer et al.

    The measured intelligence of autistic children

    Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia

    (1974)
  • D. Dennett

    Beliefs about beliefs

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences

    (1978)
  • U. Frith

    Psychological abnormalities in early childhood psychoses

  • U. Frith

    A new perspective in research on autism

  • D. Gibson

    Down's Syndrome: The psychology of mongolism

    (1978)
  • B. Hermelin et al.

    Psychological experiments with autistic children

    (1970)
  • P.M. Hill et al.

    Pretend play and patterns of cognition in Down's Syndrome children

    Child Development

    (1981)
  • R.P. Hobson

    The question of childhood egocentrism: the coordination of perspectives in relation to operational thinking

    Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

    (1982)
  • R.P. Hobson

    Early childhood autism and the question of egocentrism

    Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders

    (1984)
  • M. Hughes et al.

    The use of hiding games for studying the coordination of viewpoints

    Educational Review

    (1979)
  • J. Huttenlocher et al.

    The coding and transformation of spatial information

    Cognitive Psychology

    (1979)
  • Cited by (0)

    We are grateful to John Morton for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank staff and children of the various schools which participated in the study. The experiment was carried out by Simon Baron-Cohen as part of his Ph.D thesis (Dept. Psychology, University of London).

    View full text