Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind."

Leslie, Alan M.

doi:10.1037/0033-295x.94.4.412

Cited by 2,993 publications

(2,084 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…The skill to simulate another individual's mental states is peculiar to the human species and, possibly, to a few other anthropomorphic Primates such as chimpanzee (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). At least in our species, it seems to require a specialized, modular machinery dubbed Theory of Mind Mechanism, or ToMM (Leslie, 1987(Leslie, , 1994. A disorder in the development of ToMM is associated with childhood autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen, Les-lie & Frith, 1985;Leslie & Thaiss, 1992), while its later disruption might be associated with schizophrenia (Frith, 1992).…”

Section: Theory Of Mind Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Neuropragmatics: Neuropsychological Constraints on Formal Theories of Dialogue

Bara¹,

Tirassa²,

Zettin

1997

Brain and Language

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We are interested in the validation of a cognitive theory of human communication, grounded in a speech acts perspective. The theory we refer to is outlined, and a number of predictions are drawn from it. We report a series of protocols administered to 13 brain-injured subjects and to a comparable control group. The tasks included direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceits, failures of communication, and theory of mind inferences. All the predicted trends of difficulty are consistently verified; in particular, difficulty increases from direct/indirect speech acts to irony, from irony to deceits, and from deceits to failure recovery. This trend symmetrically shows both in the successful situation and in the failure situation. Further, failure situations prove more difficult to handle than the relevant successful situation. In sharp contrast with previous literature, there is no difference between the subjects' comprehension of direct and indirect speech acts. The results are discussed in the light of our theoretical approach.

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Section: Theory Of Mind Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Neuropragmatics: Neuropsychological Constraints on Formal Theories of Dialogue

Bara¹,

Tirassa²,

Zettin

1997

Brain and Language

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“…That these incorrect details pertained to Persons and Actions is not surprising given that ASD is characterised by interpersonal difficulties coupled with difficulties with agent-centred second order representations which are fundamental to understanding actions and actors' intentions over time (e.g. BaronCohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985;Leslie, 1987). The lower accuracy scores for Person details reported by the ASD group are also not surprising considering the social impairments that characterise ASDs, in addition to difficulties in domains such as face processing (Blair et al, 2002) and gaze perception (e.g.…”

Section: Insert Tablementioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive Interview for Eyewitnesses with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Maras

Bowler

2010

J Autism Dev Disord

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. The cognitive interview for witnesses with autism spectrum disorder Eyewitness evidence is central to the criminal justice system. In 2007, 1.78 million UK offenders were found guilty or cautioned (UK Ministry of Justice, UK, 2008) and 87% of police officers indicated that eyewitnesses usually or always provided major investigative leads (Kebbell & Milne, 1998). Inaccurate or incomplete testimony can lead to wrongful conviction or acquittal (Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1996) and so reliable interviewing techniques are imperative in eliciting the most detailed yet accurate reports from witnesses. The Cognitive Interview (CI) is now one of the most widely used and accepted forms of interviewing in both the US and the UK (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992;Geiselman, 1984), and is currently taught to all police recruits in the UK (Dando & Milne, 2009). The CI has been shown to elicit detailed, yet accurate, reports from adult witnesses (Davis, McMahon & Greenwood, 2005;Kohnken, Milne, Memon & Bull, 1999), children (Geiselman & Padilla, 1988;Memon, Wark, Bull & Koehnken, 1997), older witnesses (Wright & Holliday, 2007b) and witnesses with learning disabilities (referred to in the US as mental retardation) (Milne, Clare & Bull, 1999 The Cognitive Interview (CI) is based on two basic principles of how memory typically operates; that retrieval of an event will be enhanced if the context experienced at recall matches that experienced during encoding (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992;Roediger, Weldon, Challis, & Craik, 1989; Tulving & Thompson, 1973), and that memories are stored as interconnected nodes that provide multiple retrieval routes (Tulving, 1974). On the basis of these principles the CI was the external (physical) and internal (subjective) states that they experienced during the witnessed event before freely reporting as many details of the event as possible. Permanent repository link:Recall of trivial or incomplete details is encouraged ('report all' instruction) since important facts may be elicited that co-occurred with seemingly unimportant events (Geiselman, Fisher, Mackinnon, & Holland, 1986). CR is followed by QU in whichwitnesses are asked open-ended questions based on what they said during their first free-recall attempt. Further details are elicited by asking witnesses to summon and describe mental images of the event, for example focusing on the best image they have of the victim in order to describe their clothing. During CO witnesses are then asked to recall the events in a different order, for example starting with the last thing they witnessed and working backwards in detail until they report the first thing they witnessed. Finally, the witness is asked to recall the event from a different perspective (CP), for example from the perspective of another person or imagining they were positioned in a different location (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). All four of these mnemonic strategies elicit more detai...

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“…Difficulties with ToM tasks are largely documented in individuals with ASDs ( Baron-Cohen, 1989BaronCohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985, 1986Leslie, 1987). In false belief tasks, the attribution of the agent's intentions relies on a more competent belief-desire reasoning ability since the default true-belief attribution has to be inhibited to select the appropriate mental content (Friedman & Leslie, 2004;Wimmer & Perner, 1983).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders

et al. 2011

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a b s t r a c tThe ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent's intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning.

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Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind."

Cited by 2,993 publications

References 85 publications

Neuropragmatics: Neuropsychological Constraints on Formal Theories of Dialogue

Neuropragmatics: Neuropsychological Constraints on Formal Theories of Dialogue

The Cognitive Interview for Eyewitnesses with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders

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