THEORY OF MIND: Cognition and Development

THEORY OF MIND (SOCIAL COGNITION)

Theory of Mind (TOM) is our personal understanding of what other people are thinking or feeling. It is our ‘theory’ of what is going on in the mind of another person (empathy).

Sally-Anne studies are a technique for assessing TOM. Sally places a marble in her basket, but Anne moves the marble to her box when Sally’s not looking. To understand the story and demonstrate TOM, children have to identify that Sally will look for the marble in the wrong place (her basket) because she doesn’t know it’s been moved.

A lack of TOM has been used as an explanation for Autism.

Autism is characterised by difficulty in communicating, forming relationships with other people and using language/abstract concepts. It results from a very specific form of cognitive functioning or ‘mind-blindness’.

Baron-Cahen et al (1985) explored links between TOM deficits and autistic-spectrum-disorder (ASD) using false belief tasks (eg. Sally-Anne study). They used 20 high-functioning children with ASD and compared these to 14 children with Down’s Syndrome and 27 children without a diagnosis, and found that 85% of children in the control groups could identify where Sally would look for her marble – compared to only 20% in the ASD group; this suggests that ASD involves a TOM deficit.

EVALUATION OF THEORY OF MIND:

Strength/Weakness:
P: Adults with Asperger Syndrome (a form of ASD) were tested with the Sally-Anne task and they succeeded easily.
E: This therefore questioned whether ASD can actually be explained by TOM deficits – so they developed a more challenging task to assess TOM in adults. ‘The Eyes Task’ involves reading complex emotions in pictures of faces that just show a small area around the eyes
E: The adults with Asperger Syndrome struggled with this, supporting the idea that TOM deficits might, in fact, cause ASD.

Weakness:
P: False belief tasks (such as Sally-Anne Studies) may lack validity
E: For example, success of such tasks requires other cognitive abilities, eg. memory, and not just TOM.
E: Therefore, children may struggle for reasons other than having a TOM deficit – maybe weakened memory could explain Autism rather than TOM; this challenges the validity of this research.

Weakness:
P: It is hard to distinguish TOM from perspective-taking
E: Perspective-taking (viewing social situations from another person’s POV) and TOM (our personal understanding of what other people are thinking or feeling) appear to be closely linked.
E: The tasks used to measure TOM could, in fact, simply just be measures of perspective-taking which therefore questions the validity of TOM research.

Weakness:
P: The Eyes-Task may also lack validity
E: The experience of looking at a static pair of eyes in isolation is so different from real life where we have access to so much more information.
E: Therefore, both the Eyes Task and the Sally-Anne task may lack validity and shouldn’t be used to generalise to real life abilities.