Theory of mind as an explanation for autism
- Theory of mind (TOM - also popularly known as ‘mind-reading’) is the ability to understand that other people may have different thoughts, feelings, ideas, attitudes or knowledge to one’s own
- Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder which is genetic and has a prevalence rate of 1 in 59 children (Rylaarsdam & Guemez-Gamboa, 2019)
- Although ASD is highly heritable there are environmental risk factors which can increase the likelihood of giving birth to a child with ASD e.g. older parents, a difficult birth, or infections during pregnancy (Modabbernia et al. 2017)
- People with ASD are affected by what is known as the triad of impairments which entails difficulty understanding social relationships, reading facial expressions, lack of imagination, problems with communication and difficulty adjusting to new, unfamiliar situations
- Younger children and people with ASD (both adults and children) are thought to lack TOM; young children due to their age and people with ASD due to the triad of impairments
- One aspect of TOM is understanding intentionality in terms of another person’s behaviour e.g. I can predict that James is going to take his dog for a walk because he has come out of his house wearing his green ‘dog-walking’ coat’
- The ability to understand the intentions of other people shows an appreciation that people are motivated by their beliefs and attitudes, which is a precursor to the development of TOM (Dennett, 1987)
- TOM is thought to be fully developed by the age of 3 or 4 years old, depending on the child, although some researchers claim that infants as young as 7-9 months old understand intentionality to some extent (Baron-Cohen, 1991)
- TOM may be a specific skill which is processed in a specific brain region rather than a generalised cognitive disorder as people with ASD do not experience difficulty with other cognitive abilities such as language, memory and attention (Baron-Cohen, 1993)
Exam Tip
If you are writing about ASD in the exam make sure to emphasise the fact that autism is a spectrum disorder i.e. there is no ‘one’ way to be autistic, there are many different varieties of experience, skills and abilities involved in ASD. This spectrum means that autism cannot be explained simply and neatly plus it means that testing ASD is not straightforward e.g. someone with ASD may pass a false belief task (see below) while a ‘normal’ person may fail the same task - there are individual differences within ASD as there are in other populations.