Implicit and Spontaneous Theory of Mind Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Sodian, Beate; Schuwerk, Tobias; Kristen, Susanne

doi:10.5772/59393

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…In particular, future studies may probe whether children with congenital blindness, who often display substantial delays in false belief understanding (Peterson, Peterson, & Webb, 2000), fail to pass a given task because they lack the ability to reason about the mental state construct or because the existing tasks emphasize visual experiences. Similarly, the new auditory tasks might provide fuller insight into the ToM deficits that young children with ASD often display (Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005; Sodian, Schuwerk, & Kristen, 2015). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms

Hasni

Adamson

Williamson

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Theory-of-mind (ToM) gradually develops during the preschool years. Measures of ToM usually target visual experience, but auditory experiences also provide valuable social information. Given differences between the visual and auditory modalities (e.g., sights persist, sounds fade) and the important role environmental input plays in social-cognitive development, we asked whether modality might influence the progression of ToM development. The current study expands Wellman and Liu's (2004) ToM scale by testing 66 preschoolers using five standard visual ToM tasks and five newly-crafted auditory ToM tasks. Age and gender effects were found, with 4- and 5-year-old children demonstrating greater ToM abilities than 3-year-olds, and girls passing more tasks than boys; there was no significant effect of modality. Both visual and auditory tasks formed a scalable set. These results indicate that there is considerable consistency in when children are able to use visual and auditory inputs to reason about various aspects of others' mental states.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms

Hasni

Adamson

Williamson

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…Another key finding is that individuals with autism spectrum condition (ASC) have an implicit mentalizing deficit (Senju et al, 2009; Schneider et al, 2013; Sodian et al, 2015). This deficit is thought to contribute to social interaction deficits in ASC (Frith, 2012; Senju, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

et al. 2016

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Implicit mentalizing, a fast, unconscious and rigid way of processing other’s mental states has recently received much interest in typical social cognitive development in early childhood and in adults with autism spectrum condition (ASC). This research suggests that already infants implicitly mentalize, and that adults with ASC have a sustained implicit mentalizing deficit. Yet, we have only sparse empirical evidence on implicit mentalizing beyond early childhood, and deviations thereof in children with ASC. Here, we administered an implicit mentalizing eye tracking task to assess the sensitivity to false beliefs to a group of 8-year-old children with and without ASC, matched for chronological age, verbal and non-verbal IQ. As previous research suggested that presenting outcomes of belief-based actions leads to fast learning from experience and false belief-congruent looking behavior in adults with ASC, we were also interested in whether already children with ASC learn from such information. Our results provide support for a persistent implicit mentalizing ability in neurotypical development beyond early childhood. Further, they confirmed an implicit mentalizing deficit in children with ASC, even when they are closely matched to controls for explicit mentalizing skills. In contrast to previous findings with adults, no experience-based modulation of anticipatory looking was observed. It seems that children with ASC have not yet developed compensatory general purpose learning mechanisms. The observed intact explicit, but impaired implicit mentalizing in ASC, and correlation patterns between mentalizing tasks and executive function tasks, are in line with theories on two dissociable mentalizing systems.

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“…For one, this indicates that during some conventional actions the TD group may have been engaging the MZN, though the level of activation did not pass our threshold when examining within subjects. That said, the ASD group had significantly less activation in these areas compared to the TD group, possibly reflecting that individuals with ASD may not spontaneously attribute mental states to social stimuli (Senju, 2012; Sodian, Schuwerk, & Kristen, 2015). This also may provide partial support for other studies that have found differential functioning of the MZN in individuals with autism (Castelli et al, 2002; Kana et al, 2015, 2009; Libero et al, 2014)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

What Are You Doing With That Object? Comparing the Neural Responses of Action Understanding in Adolescents With and Without Autism

Pokorny

Hatt

Rogers

et al. 2017

J Autism Dev Disord

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Understanding another's actions, including what they are doing and why they are doing it, can be difficult for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This understanding is supported by the action observation (AON) and mentalizing (MZN) networks, as well as the superior temporal sulcus. We examined these areas in children with ASD and typically developing controls by having participants view eating and placing actions performed in conventional and unconventional ways while functional magnetic resonance images were collected. We found an effect of action-type, but not conventionality, in both groups, and a between groups difference only when viewing conventional eating actions. Findings suggest there are not global AON/MZN deficits in ASD, and observing unconventional actions may not spontaneously activate the MZN.

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Implicit and Spontaneous Theory of Mind Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Cited by 14 publications

References 90 publications

Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms

Adding sound to theory of mind: Comparing children’s development of mental-state understanding in the auditory and visual realms

Implicit Mentalizing Persists beyond Early Childhood and Is Profoundly Impaired in Children with Autism Spectrum Condition

What Are You Doing With That Object? Comparing the Neural Responses of Action Understanding in Adolescents With and Without Autism

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