Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?

Cognition 21 (1):37-46 (1985)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a ‘ theory of mind ’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘ theory ’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner’s puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down’s syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 98,353

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Autism as mindblindness: An elaboration and partial defence.Peter Carruthers - 1996 - In Peter Carruthers & Peter K. Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 257.
Autonomic responses of autistic children to people and objects.William Hirstein, Portia Iversen & V. S. Ramachandran - 2001 - Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 268:1883-1888.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-10-30

Downloads
341 (#72,494)

6 months
26 (#119,566)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Alan M. Leslie
Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Citations of this work

How the Body Shapes the Mind.Shaun Gallagher - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Folk psychology as simulation.Robert M. Gordon - 1986 - Mind and Language 1 (2):158-71.
Imagination.Shen-yi Liao & Tamar Gendler - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Extended cognition and the space of social interaction.Joel Krueger - 2011 - Consciousness and Cognition 20 (3):643-657.

View all 600 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?David Premack & Guy Woodruff - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4):515-526.
Beliefs about beliefs [P&W, SR&B].Daniel C. Dennett - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4):568-570.
When is attribution of beliefs justified? [P&W].Zenon W. Pylyshyn - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4):592-593.

Add more references