Introduction: Theory of mind is one of the most important aspects of cognitive faculty. The theory of mind is impaired in individuals who suffer from mental disorders like autistic children. The 'autistic-like' behaviors also have been reported in the congenitally blind children. This study was conducted to examine the presence or absence of theory of mind and its function in congenitally blind children.
Materials and methods:A number of 20 individuals containing 10 bilingual congenitally blind children from Baghcheban elementary school of Ilam city as a case group and 10 sighted ones as a control group were selected. Three kinds of false belief cognitive tests appropriate for the congenitally blind children were designed. The collected data were analyzed using one sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, independent t-test along with Levenn test and one-way and two-way Analysis of Variance. Results: Considering the performance of congenitally blind children in false belief tasks, the blindness just had effect on the story narration task (P<0.05(, while it did not have any effect on the two other tasks. The same performance of the male and female subjects indicated that gender did not have any impact on the development of the theory of mind (P>0.05).
Conclusion:The findings showed only the story narration task was affected by blindness, because this task was more dependent on visual sense. Therefore, blindness results in delay in evolution of theory of mind. To fix this delay, the congenitally blind children should be exposed to further tactile and olfactory inputs.
Neologism is found in some psychiatric and neurological patients and some normal children but with different features. To identify the nature and find the function of neologism, this study has examined the nonwords in the speech of 3 Persian speaking groups: 2 schizophrenic individuals with positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions and thought disorder), 2 conduction aphasic patients affected by stroke and 5 normal children, both from a linguistic and psycho-neurolinguistic perspectives. The results along with the issues of previous literature showed there are substantive linguistic, neurological and psychological differences in the neologism of the three mentioned groups. The obtained features of the neologism in the three groups have been classified and briefly defined for the objectives. Classifying the features of neologism in order to identify its nature may help to recognize it, in the case of patients as a symptom of some disorders, and in normal children as a phase of language and cognition development process.
Abstract-The form of the words and concepts in mind is the subject of this paper. So, bodily communication has been used to show it in the mind of people with individual differences. 200 students participated in the first phase of the study, while 95 of them participated in the second phase of it. In the first phase, a set of tests was given successively to determine the levels of certain personality variables. In the experimental setting, the participants were instructed to communicate certain words one by one nonverbally. The image schemata used by them and then the association between using different schemata and psychological variables were investigated. The results showed that the association between them is significant in some words. This significance was seen more in more stable and innate psychological characteristics.
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