Representing Inner Worlds: Theory of Mind in Autistic, Deaf, and Normal Hearing Children

Abstract

The purpose of the study reported here was to examine the degree to which delays or deficits in developing a theory of mind are specific to children with autism or extend to other groups of atypical children with varying conversational experience and awareness. The performance of deaf children from a variety of conversational backgrounds was compared with that of autistic and normal hearing children on a range of tasks requiring representation of others' mental states. Native signers, oral deaf children, and normal hearing children scored similarly, and their performance exceeded that shown by signing deaf children from hearing families and children with autism. The latter two groups did not differ significantly from each other. These results point to an interplay among biology, conversation, and culture in the development of a theory of mind.

Theory of Mind: An Overview and Behavioral Perspective

“…Another study compared children with varying conversational backgrounds, including native signing deaf children, oral (speaking and listening) deaf children, signing deaf children from hearing families, children with autism, and typical preschoolers, and found that a child's conversational experience was directly correlated with success on a variety of ToM tasks, including the false belief task. In particular, as already noted, typical preschoolers and fluent-signing and oral deaf children performed much better than children diagnosed with autism and signing deaf children from hearing families (Peterson & Siegal, 1999; see also Woolfe, Want, & Siegal, 2002). These results suggest not only that the amount of conversational experience is correlated with success on ToM tasks but also, in particular, that teaching children to explain others' behavior in terms of their mental states may account for the children's ability to predict the behavior of others.…”

The cognitive functions of language

“…For there is evidence from aphasic adults, at least, that people who have lost their capacity for mentalistic vocabulary can nevertheless pass false-belief tasks of various sorts (Varley 1998). So I think that the full, four-year-old, ToM system is a language-independent theory which comes on line at a certain stage in normal development (albeit with that development being especially accelerated by the demands of interpreting linguistic input - Harris 1996;Peterson & Siegal 1998), which nevertheless has to access the resources of other systems (including the language faculty) in order to go about its work of deducing what to expect of someone who has a given belief, and so on. But of course the question is an empirical one, and the stronger hypothesis may well turn out to be right.…”

“…If children's language is advanced, then so will be their abilities across a range of tasks; and if children's language is delayed, then so will be their cognitive capacities. To cite just one item from a wealth of empirical evidence: Astington (1996) and Peterson and Siegal (1998) report finding a high correlation between language-ability and children's capacity to pass false-belief tasks, whose solution requires them to attribute, and reason from, the false belief of another person. Does this and similar data show that language is actually involved in children's thinking?…”

“…First, there is no question but that mind reading is vitally implicated in the processing and interpretation of speech, especially in its pragmatic aspects, including such phenomena as metaphor and irony (Sperber & Wilson 1986. Second, there is good reason to think that the evolution of the two faculties will have been intertwined in a kind of evolutionary "arms race" (Gómez 1998), and that language is one of the crucial inputs for normal mind reading development in young children (Harris 1996;Peterson & Siegal 1998). Finally, our mind reading faculty -specifically our capacity for higher-order or meta-representational thought -will be crucial to the operations of the sort of serial, conscious, language-using level of mentality discussed in sections 4 and 6.2 above (Perner 1998; Sperber 1996).…”

Social Ecology and Theory of Mind

“…Parents, typically the most proximal environments, have obvious effects on a child's theory of mind development. Following Dunn's longitudinal study (Dunn et al, 1991), abundant subsequent evidence suggests a link between mother-child daily conversations and theory of mind development (e.g., Ensor, Devine, Marks, & Hughes, 2013;Ensor & Hughes, 2008;Peterson & Siegal, 1999, 2000Peterson & Slaughter, 2003;Ruffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999;Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002). For example, children with mothers who encourage them to reflect on the victim's perspective in the children's transgression situations performed better on a theory of mind task (Ruffman et al, 1999).…”