Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind
 Humans are not born with the understanding that people have unique
beliefs and thoughts. This is learnt.
 This stage is arrived at through various developmental ladders that children
go through
 This includes the notion of attention and intention of others as well as
imitation of other’s mental states
 First stage is that of attention
 Children learn very early that looking is not just seeing but also a tool to be
selectively used to gather more information
 In fact infants have been found to be using this mechanism in their parents
to getting attention to themselves
 Infants as early as 7-9 months of age are capable of understanding

attention in others; the development of this social skill is an important
predecessor to developing ToM [Simon Barron Cohen].
 This stage is followed by acting
 And knowing that people act on hat catches their attention: goal directed
behavior
 This behavior is dependent upon intention
 People can have varying intentions and, therefore, different behavior

 Imitation is often understood to be another important component of
developing Theory of Mind. It has however, been contested.
 Children use pretend play. This shows that they have developed the
understand the different mental states attributable to different characters
So,
 ToM refers to the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. The
idea that others have intents, beliefs, pretension, knowledge etc. and that
these can be different from one’s own. In normal population this grows in us
by the time humans are about 5 year old. However, atypical population,
like ADHD, autism spectrum disorder etc. are shown to have delayed
development of this attribute.
It entails,
 Others have beliefs, thoughts, intents etc…in short, a mind that may be
different from our own
 Mental states cause behavior. This difference may result into different
behavioral outcome hence having a theory of mind helps us predict other
people’s behavior
 This is an innate and potential ability that also requires social and other
experiences to fully develop.
 This is not only a human behavior but also found in other primates, even
birds and rodents
 Research on children in this domain typically concerns children’s understanding
of false belief. The tasks used are different variations of Sally-Anne stories,
requiring answers on changed location and changed content questions. [refer
to Rebecca Saxe videos available online].
 Performance of children aged show that irrespective of language and cultural

background, children aged 4 can perform correctly on false belief tasks whereas
3 year old cannot
Two assumptions:
 ToM undergoes a conceptual change in the pre school years-------- a

change dependent upon the child’s language development. Mastery of
the grammatical rules of embedding tensed complement clauses enables
ToM reasoning.
 However, recent findings do not support the link between
understanding sentence complements and ToM reasoning. Young
children who do well on syntax and semantics tasks are still found
unable to pass false belief tasks.
 improvement of performance on ToM task at a particular age may be
attributed to the development of strengthening of inhibitory processes and
pragmatic skills or general purpose executive functions
 Irrespective of the theoretical account, it seems that the child’s
performance on story based ToM reasoning depends on the child’s early
exposure to conversations that teaches them that people have beliefs that
can differ from their own
 A strong data source for this assumption is work on deaf children from
different backgrounds: sign language environment Vs verbal language
environment.
 Deaf children from sign language environment have early exposure to others’
conversations about people’s beliefs etc. and hence perform on par with
hearing children.
 In contrast, deaf children of hearing parents are commonly not exposed to

conversations early and get the exposure only after they go to school. These
children have difficulties in ToM tasks.
ToM and language
 Mental states cannot be observed directly.
 Nor is there any simple correlation between mental states and observable
behavior.
 Hence one valuable way to learn about the elusive content of mind is to
listen how people talk about the mind
 Research in developmental psychology suggests the importance of verbal
communication for developing a theory of mind. Language ability seems to
predict success in false belief task, independent of age [Dunn and Brophy
2005].
 A similar correlation was also found in samples of both healthy children and
children with autism and other developmental disorders

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Theory of Mind

 Infants as early as 7-9 months of age are capable of understanding

 This behavior is dependent upon intention

 People can have varying intentions and, therefore, different behavior

 Performance of children aged show that irrespective of language and cultural

 ToM undergoes a conceptual change in the pre school years-------- a

 In contrast, deaf children of hearing parents are commonly not exposed to

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