Theory of Mind in Autism

Theory of mind is the ability to reflect on own and others mind (Baron-Cohen, 2001). The capacity to attribute mental states to one self and some other is important in making sense and predicting someone's behavior (Colle et al., 2006).

Deficits in theory of mind are one of the most important cognitive deficits in autism. In this post I will look at research on theory of mind in autism and will discuss the findings.

Moran et al. (2011) studied adult patients with asperger disorder and adult control subject on a moral judgment task in which intentions and outcomes of an action by a person were considered. Intentions for moral judgments is dependend on theory of mind. A standard false belief task was also applied in which both groups did not differ. However, on the moral judgment task for intentions, adults with asperger disorder were impaired (Moran et al. 2011). patiens with asperger disorder are not impaired at explicit theory of mind tasks, rather they are impaired on implicit tasks.

In the study by Chevallier et al. (2011) prosody was used to study theory of mind in autism. Patiens with autism were impaired in these tasks.