Research Paper – Cognitive Psychology

Research Paper – Cognitive Psychology

Research Paper – Cognitive Psychology

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

SIMON BARON-COHEN ALAN M. LESLIE UTA FRITH

MRC Cognitive Development Unit, London

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 ca- pacity 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 postula- ted and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.

Research Paper – Cognitive Psychology

1. Introduction

Childhood autism is a severe developmental disorder. It is a rare condition, affecting about 4 in every 10,000 children. The diagnostic criteria at present are behavioural (American Psychiatric Association, 1980; Kanner, 1943; Ritvo & Freeman, 1978; Rutter, 1978) and the main symptom, which can be reliably identified, is impairment in verbal and nonverbal communication. This impairment is part of the core feature of childhood autism, namely a profound disorder in understanding and coping with the social environment, regardless

*We are grateful to John Morton for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank staff and children of the various schools which participated in the study. The experiment was carried out by Simon Baron-Cohen as part of his Ph.D thesis (Dept. Psychology, University of London). Reprint requests should be addressed to: Uta Frith, MRC Cognitive Development Unit, 17 Gordon Street, London WC1H OAH, United Kingdom.

of IQ. Additional symptoms can occur, in particular, mental retardation, islets of ability, and ‘insistence on sameness’. Nevertheless, the pathognomonic symptom is failure to develop normal social relationships.

Autistic children find even the immediate social environment unpredictable and incomprehensible. They are often said in some sense to ‘treat people and objects alike’. Wing and Gould (1979) in their epidemiological study of severely retarded autistic children bring out the range of socially impaired behaviour: from total withdrawal through passivity to repetitive pestering. Lord’s (1984) review of work on peer interaction in autistic children highlights the low level of social competence even in able autistic children, despite improvements due to intervention. A picture of apparently intractable social impairment emerges in the clinical follow-up studies of autism (e.g. Kanner, 1971; Kanner, Rodriguez, & Ashenden, 1972) and in the as yet rare experi- mental investigations (e.g. Attwood, 1984; Martini, 1980).

Although the majority of autistic children are mentally retarded (DeMyer et al., 1974; Wing, Yeates, Brierley, & Gould 1976), and although a number of their symptoms may be attributable to this fact (Hermelin & O’Connor, 1970) this in itself cannot be a sufficient explanation for their social impair- ments. First, there are autistic children with IQ’s in the normal range, and second, mentally retarded non-autistic children, such as Down’s syndrome, are socially competent relative to their mental age (Coggins, Carpenter, & Owings, 1983; Gibson, 1978).

In order to explain the specific impairments of childhood autism it is necessary, then, to consider the underlying cognitive mechanisms independent of IQ (Frith, 1982; Hermelin & O’Connor, 1970; Rutter, 1983). So far, nobody has had any idea of how to characterise such mechanisms in even quasi-com- putational terms. In this paper we put forward a suggestion which has been derived from a new model of metarepresentational development (Leslie, 1984, to appear). This model specifies a mechanism which underlies a crucial aspect of social skills, namely being able to conceive of mental states: that is, knowing that other people know, want, feel, or believe things; in short, having what Premack and Woodruff (1978) termed a ‘theory of mind’.

A theory of mind is impossible without the capacity to form ‘second-order representations’ (Dennett, 1978; Pylyshyn, 1978). According to Leslie’s model this capacity does not appear until the second year of life. While this capacity manifests itself eventually in a theory of mind, Leslie shows that it also accounts for the emergence of pretend play. An absence of the capacity to form second-order representations, then, would lead not only to a lack of theory of mind, with the concomitant aspects of social ineptness, but also to a lack of pretend play.

Now, it is well known that autistic children, in addition to their social hand- icaps, also show a striking poverty of pretend play (Sigman & Ungerer, 1981; Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? 39

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Ungerer & Sigman, 1981; Wing, Gould, Yeates, & Brierley, 1977; Wing & Gould, 1979). An explanation for the lack of pretend play and its curious as- sociation with the social impairments typical of autism is not obvious, and again the notion of mental age is not helpful for this purpose. On the one hand, even high IQ autistic children lack pretend play, and on the other hand, severely retarded Down’s syndrome children don’t (Hill & McCune-Nicolich, 1981). However, if we suppose that autistic children lack second-order rep- resentations, then we can make sense of the association of impairments. In order to test this hypothesis we can make the prediction that autistic children will lack a theory of mind. It is of course possible for autistic children to have a theory of mind and still exhibit incompetence, since social competence must depend on a large number of factors.

However, if our prediction was proved wrong and autistic children did show evidence of employing a theory of mind, then we could rule out a deficiency in second-order representations. Even if our prediction was confirmed, that is, if autistic children lacked a theory of mind, we would still have to establish that this was a specific deficit, that is, largely independent of general mental retardation. Thus we would have to demonstrate (a) that even those rare autistic children whose IQ’s are in the average range should lack this ability and (b) that non-autistic but severely re- tarded children, such as Down’s syndrome, should possess it.

In a seminal paper, Premack and Woodruff (1978) defined theory of mind as the ability to impute mental states to oneself and to others. The ability to make inferences about what other people believe to be the case in a given situ- ation allows one to predict what they will do. This is clearly a crucial compo- nent of social skills. There is growing evidence for the ability to attribute mental states to others, and its development from the second year of life onwards (Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; MacNamara, Baker, & Olson, 1976; Shantz, 1983; Shultz, Wells, & Sarda, 1980; Shultz & Cloghesy, 1981).

A convincing demonstration that an explicit theory of mind is well within the capacity of the normal four-year-old has been given by Wimmer and Perner (1983). These authors developed an ingenious paradigm that can be used with very young children based on the case where the child’s own belief is different from someone else’s belief. In order to succeed on the task the child has to be aware that different people can have different beliefs about a situation. Hence this case provides the strongest evidence for the capacity to conceive of men- tal states (Dennett, 1978). It is this paradigm that we used in the present study.

Research Paper – Cognitive Psychology

40 S. Baron-Cohen et al.

2. Method

2.1 Subjects Details of the subjects are shown in Table 1. The 20 autistic children had been diagnosed according to established criteria (Rutter, 1978). In addition there were 14 Down’s Syndrome and 27 clinically normal preschool children. The autistic group’s mean mental age (MA) was not only higher than that of the Down’s Syndrome group on a non-verbal scale, but also on the more conservative measure of a verbal scale. We assumed that for the normal group MA would roughly correspond to chronological age (CA). Therefore, their MA was, if anything, lower than that of the handicapped groups. We selected a high functioning subgroup of autistic children in order to enable a stringent test of the specific deficit hypothesis to be made. Thus, the autistic group was of a relatively high mean IQ of 82 (derived from non-verbal MA), mostly in the average and borderline range, i.e. 70 to 108, with only one subject scoring less than 70. The IQ’s of the Down’s Syndrome group were rather lower with a range from 42 to 89, and an average of 64.

Table 1. Means, SDs and ranges of Chronological Age (CA) and Mental Age (MA) in years; months