More Thoughts on ToM
An Insider’s Suggestions
Lawson, W. (2001). Understanding and Working With the Spectrum of Autism. London: Jessica Kingsley
1. Mutual human interaction tends to demand emotional and cognitive understanding as a matter of ‘right’. It views intolerance and indifference towards others as undesirable and ‘bad’.
2. When we view someone as being eccentric and egocentric, we tend to think ‘artist, savant, genius, musician, mathematician, professor…’. We see ‘focus’ in such people and even forgive their inability to be sensitive to the needs or opinions of others. So, how about we change our thinking from ‘selfish’ to ‘focussed’?
3. Being taught the social skills of sharing, listening, being polite, being considerate and affordable to others the right to be different, are abilities that enable individuals with ASD to partake in corporate life.
4. Has the child any concepts to build an understanding that his hurting the baby is uncomfortable for her, is undesirable and not appropriate?
Gopnik, A., Capps, L. & Meltzoff, A.N. (2000). Early theories of mind: what the theory theory can tell us about autism? Understanding Other Minds : Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience New York : Oxford University Press
New born babies respond in distinctive ways to human faces and voices. They think that they own internal feelings and the actions of others can be represented in the same way.
In a way, they prefer people and feel that they themselves are connected to them. However autistic people lack this theory initially and the lack leads to developmental consequences or may be there is a deficit in the developmental process of theory-formation.
Results of some studies showed that autistic children’s knowledge of generic happy and sad situations and responses are scripted. Their explanations or theories are same as definitions and observable manifestations of these emotions.
Swettenham, J. (2000). Teaching theory of mind to individuals with autism. Understanding Other Minds : Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience New York : Oxford University Press
Through the use of a number of devices such as
1. Prompts (using computer as medium)
2. Enhanced action and emotional cues
3. Real people acting out
4. Inserting photos in the doll’s head
5. Pairing belief with emotion and desire
it was found that false belief tasks performance can be improved. But is it only because they have learned to apply a non-mental state rule or just respond to the surface structure of the trials? One promising new approach for older individuals with autism has been to provide an analogy that ‘thoughts are like pictures’. (Gomez et al. 1996; McGregor et al. 1998; Swettenham et al. 1996)
De Villiers, J. (2000) language and theory of mind : what are the developmental relationship? Understanding Other Minds : Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience New York : Oxford University Press
Concept and language, what comes first?
l Some categories of objects and human actions form coherence classes which form ‘the stock of concepts’ prior to labeling.
l As for others, labeling provides the mechanism by which coherence classes get formed.
l Language bring concepts together economically by means of symbolizing.
l For certain forms of languages, say sentences embedded with complements where beliefs and knowledge states are captured, natural language is necessary to express the representation of this class of events.
How is ToM
development connected to language?
There are 3 different schools of thought :
1. Developing ToM is relativist determined by cultural context. (Dunn et al. 1991) Still some think that by means of more talk, the right ToM will be developed.
2. Human behavior universally belies hidden states of emotion, desire and belief.
3. Representationalist view – language changes representations to a higher order one by providing the child with a metalanguage. It serves a cognitive function in that it enables children to understand other people’s behavior.
There are stages in developing false belief reasoning. There are different views on how false belief reasoning is reached and it is not clear how long the gap is between the utterance of false belief complements and its use in false belief reasoning. Empirical studies on oral deaf children suggested that linguistic problems caused the delay in developing false belief reasoning. But the language of complementation is only a tool for false belief reasoning. They are different from children with autism, whose lack of ToM ability is seen in failure in following eye gaze, reading its meaning, joint attention, understanding teasing, trickery or emotional empathy, reading intentions.
False belief reasoning is language-dependent. So high-functioning individuals with adequate language skills may in fact use them as a tool to understand other people’s belief, desires and states of mind.
Syntactical and lexical aspects of
language & ToM
Tager-Flusberg, H. Language and understanding minds : connections in autism Understanding Other Minds : Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience New York : Oxford University Press
In children with autism, not just the pragmatic aspect of language is delayed but so are syntactic and lexical aspects. How do these affect ToM?
1. Children/adolescents with autism are weak in narrative discourse.
2. Children/adolescents with autism need a higher level of lexical knowledge to pass ToM tasks (Happé 1995). It is also noted that cognition verbs are important in passing false-belief tasks. There is a more integral developmental connection between cognition verbs and cognitive (false belief tasks) achievements. Results of studies showed that children with autism solved false belief tasks by means of communication verbs like ‘say’, ‘tell’, rather than cognitive verbs.
3. There is a strong relationship between the pragmatic, semantic/lexical and syntactical aspects of language and development of overall ToM ability. The pragmatic aspect is more deep-rooted and has its origin in neuro-cognitive mechanisms whereas semantic/lexical and syntactical aspects are more related to development , whereas in mental retardation, the relationship is more specific to measures of a [representational understanding of mind.